 Merdw i'n hyd, so, y tympag o rhai eisiau bod yn cael ei ddweud y gallu'n hynny eisiau ar y dyfodol. Jacky wedi mynd i bach ar y mynd i'r cyfnol gymhredu i mwynhau'n ymwyhau relacionol, i ran ymgyrchu gyda'r rawanas sy'n cyfeisio ar gyfer blaenau lleddol ffôrodol yma. Ydych yn ei bod y chyfr numbereda, yr amgylch yn fan i'r ffordd ar hyn. Rydych i'n haml am four panellistol arall. I'n gallu bod fod yn dweud ein bod yn enwedig yn ddod, Children will come up and talk for two or three minutes to state their position, what they think about, where power belongs in the future of the organisation. We'll have good old arguments, a dialogue. Dialogue. That's what we're looking for. Please could you have my first panelist please, which is Jack Hubbard, from one of Brighton's best loved, well-known businesses, Propellanet. Please give a large round of applause for Jack. Good morning everyone. Can I say how chuffed I am to be atoning today, dwy'n gwahodd o'r team o'r prifod yng Nghymru, o'r gwahodd i'r ffag ar ychydig, lle o'r gwahodd o'r hyn o'r ymddiad yma i ddweud yma, ac yn gweithio i'r gennaeth a'r ddaeth eich gennaeth, a'r ysgrifennu Brytoni yn ffasil o'r gennaeth, i'n dod i'r gweithio i gael, ac yn gweithio i'r gweithio i gael yma, ac mae'n gweithio i gael gweithio i gael eich gennaeth, ac mae'n gweithio i'r gweithio i'n gweithio i gael. Dwi'n dweud o ymddangos cyflawn yn ymddangos, a dwi'n dweud o fynd i gael am y dyma, ac mae'n ymddangos o mynd i gael i'r cyffredinol. A dyna'n dweud o'r fwyaf, a maen nhw'n gwybod fydd yn cael ei ddweud. Dwi'n dweud i'n gael, mae'n ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud, mae'n ddweud i'r fifedd o'r ysgol, o'r ddweud o'r llwyll, o'r ddweud i'r gwybod yr oedd ymddangos whitha i'r meddlach a'r meddlach. Rhiannodd, ymweldol, y peth, ymweldol, ac yn dryf ymddiannau sectau ac yn self wahanol, ond wrth i'r meddlach ymddiannau cyntaf y byddai'n meddliadau i'r meddlach. Rwy'r meddlach a'r meddlach sydd ymweldol maen nhw'n meddwl iawn ond yr meddlach yn meddliadau. Ychydigodd yn meddwl gen i ac yn meddliadau wrth iddwyr,차f yn hyn sydd i'r meddlach sy'n meddlach i'r meddlach distracted to make a difference and make life better for these people to bring happiness and help their moving the directions of their dreams, they're more power to the organisation and everyone within its ecosystem. We started preparing that in 2003 with two founders, we now have 13 shareholders and that number grows every year. I'm very much in favour of employee ownership and very much against publicly traded company stocks but I think there is much more to power than employee ownership. A angharwch iawn ac gweld ar y blaen i chi i gael ymu gweldio gwahanol ac i ni'n ei ffordd ac yna'r brosieis ac os yw i'ch gweithio ar hyn i'n gwladlowio'r gweithio. Mae arbennwys imbryd i'r bwysig yr hoffa i'r dwylo yn gweld ei wneud mewn mynd i gwell單ol i'r cychwyn ffilm eu cyfrifol o bach yn ei gweithio'r gweithio a llewch ar hynol i gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gwroad. I don't pitch clients, I don't manage the finances or the league or I leave the products and service development to other people and trust them, other people more capable. And I focus 100% on my time of dreaming up ways to make life better and move my people in the direction of their dreams. So it's a free world right and everyone has a choice. The customers and the employees of a company have the power to leave and go elsewhere at any time if they're not feeling the love for what they do and they will do that regardless of whether or not they own shares or not. So the real power for me lies in how much love everyone is feeling for the company. The challenge is therefore how can you design an organisation so that the company feels as much love for its people as possible because that's reciprocated. So enabling dreams in my experience is way more powerful than employee ownership as an idea to bring positive energy into a company. I can also imagine how attractive the idea of an employee-owned co-operative must look to employers who work in a toxic money-led culture, but it's less important if the majority shareholders of a company are more like Willy Wonka than Alan Sugar. So people are not machines, we're not to be motivated by blanket policy incentives, we are unique human beings, we each have a unique set of beliefs, experiences, hopes and dreams. So I think it's about paying attention to the individual creative potential in every person and bringing as much of that into the business as possible because this will give a true sense of ownership and that's where the true power comes from. Thank you. So it sounds like we should probably hear from an employee-ownership expert, what do you think? So it just so happens that we have one of the UK's leading experts in employee ownership. So would you please give a warm round of applause for Carol Leslie? I can't believe this is my first meeting conference and I'll definitely be back. Tom, you're going to get your wish, you're going to have the first argument of the day. I do think that power and control is inextricably linked up with ownership. I would say that inequality in our society really comes from the fact that ownership is concentrated in the hands of too few. And we're talking about ownership. That's not just employee ownership. That's employee ownership of our land, of our public services, of our education, of our banks, of our housing. To me ownership is fundamentally what's at the bedrock of our society and the way that we work. In organisations where it's very much about shareholder value with these shareholders being external to the organisation, what is their driver? It tends to be financial and its external shareholder model that's eroding the rights of employees. Employees now have got far fewer rights than what they had even 20 years ago. What if we can turn all this in our head and rather than being a society where capital controls labour, what if we could turn it round so that labour really controls capital? What if the people that work inside organisations actually own these organisations? As Tom said, that's my area. It's about employee ownership. I help organisations. I help organisations generally owner-managed or family businesses become owned by their employees. Once they are employee owned, I then work with them to get that ownership culture. So you're quite right. It's not just about the ownership. It's about how you do things as well. But what I would say is a sense of ownership is like a sense of lunch. You can't have a sense of lunch unless you actually eat it. You can't have a sense of ownership unless you actually own the business. So it's a tremendously powerful model. Tremendously powerful model. It should be no surprise that employees... And this is research that goes back the last 10 years as studies come out every year. Employee owned businesses in comparison were traditionally structured organisations are more productive. Different studies will put that figure at 4.5% to 19% huge when productivity in the UK is falling. Employee owned companies tend to be more profitable. They have done better during times of recession. They tend to be much more innovative and traditionally structured businesses. Employees and employee owned companies are happier. They are healthier. They live longer. And there was a study just released by the Chartered Management Institute. So it's not an employee owned. It's a complete mainstream organisation that found that the value system of employee owned companies, people scored higher for the values of fairness, trust, excellence, humility and courage. 90% of people who work in employee owned companies describe their leaders as visionary, democratic, coaching leadership style. And 42% of employees in non employee owned companies describe their leaders as poor or with a command and control management style. Now I can't say that an employee owned company is a panacea. It's perfect. It's an ideal world. Of course it's not. There's lots of issues dealing with people there always is. But what we do need to look at is how can we get more plural models of organisations and employee ownership very much is a force that improves the situation for individuals, for business, for society and for the community and the economy. So I do think it's a bit ownership. So let's hear from somebody else who is a co-founder of a fairly large privately owned business. But they've also won huge numbers of awards and have some incredibly interesting progressive business practices. So here to tell you a little bit more about that we have Kevin McCoy from Next Jump. Thank you Kevin. Round of applause please. So first off a big thank you for inviting me. This is a great opportunity. I'll give you 20 seconds about Next Jump and then I'll give you my opinion on the matter at hand. So Next Jump has been around for 21 years. We aggregate the buying power of over 100,000 corporations worldwide including 70% of the Fortune 1000. And really traditionally we've had a product that helps employees save money and really relational to today's topic we now have a platform that helps companies build a stronger corporate culture. So where does power lie? I would have to agree that empower lies with employees but I feel like the ecosystem goes far beyond just employees and a focus on ownership is the wrong way to go. If you focus on the ecosystem it's employees first who are then the predominant creators of value going to customers and then going to ultimately shareholders. But then overall the fourth piece of that is the community and the suppliers and the partners that any company works with and I feel like any company doesn't work in a vacuum. And so looking at all four of those key stakeholders is absolutely critical so two major points underneath that. First of all I feel like if we look historically at the lens of where assets lie in a company you had the agriculture economy where land was the primary asset. You had the 19th and 20th century where machines were the primary asset but 21st century employees are the primary asset for a company but I feel like most companies are operating still in that machine era. And that's really where the problem is and that's where this tension is that we feel today and hopefully the debate will bring some of that out. And really from my perspective it's all about bringing those stakeholders together and delivering value across all four of them so thank you. And so our fourth and final panelist today we have another expert in all kinds of alternative ownership models from football clubs that are owned by their fans to community owned pubs and public facilities. So would you please welcome to the stage Dave Boyle. I thought I'd do this as a piece of performance poetry. Now actually Pollock's I'm completely useless at poetry. It's just my notes folks. So for some of you that will be a great relief. So my first story about me is I'm very oversensitive about power and this comes from working in a place where the sharp end of power and ownership the savage interface betwixt them. Miss Tom mentioned about football clubs. I used to spend a lot of time helping football fans try and get involved in the ownership management governance of their football clubs. And these are basically the last of the rubber barons. They've bought these things because they want to have fun and they don't want to share the fun with anybody. And there was one group we were working with in Scotland and they went to meet their chairman had a good discussion about quality of the tea quality of the toilets quality of the football. And eventually they say to the chairman. So we've had a really good meeting. It's the first time we've had one of these consultative meetings. What are the action points? What are the next steps? And the chairman says, look, I don't want to be rude, but it's like this. I on the club. Fuck off. And that's when it hits you ownership and power do have a bit of a relationship with each other. And I used to see this all the time, not just in Scotland and small clubs, but all over the place. So I think I'm a little bit oversensitive to it and that's sort of colours my remarks. So three quick things I want to throw out. Where should power lie in the 21st century or in the organisation of the future? It should lie in the open. I'm a massive influence by Joe Freeman's work on the tyranny of structuralistness. That those who think power has been innovated out or has been smoothed out through some kind of structure are basically being duped by power. Power inheres to our human relationships and some structures are better at bringing out a greater equality of access to that power and some arms. It's been a 3000, 6000-year-old story. The Celts used to kill their king after seven years because they knew what power did to them. Most of human history has been about dealing with the issue of how do we make decisions and deal with the fact that if we make one or two people allowed to make decisions, they have a tendency to go bonkers with that power. And, you know, civilisation has been riffing on this. And maybe we can innovate our way through these, but I kind of think we're standing on the shoulders of giants and there are only some ways to skin a cat. And one of those ways to skin it is that it is bloody messy. You either take power and responsibility, however time consuming, ball aching and frustrating that might be. Or you say, I'm going to be a bit of a child and there is a parent above me who's going to make these decisions. And mostly when it's things like making my tea, washing my clothes, taking me to football matches, great. I don't mind not having much power. When it's go to your bedroom, you're not allowed to go out wearing that kind of stuff. Then you kind of resent that kind of power. And there's really only one way that you can either be an adult or you can be a child in these kind of things. And the final thing I'll just say is that there's a, I think there is a dissonance between a sort of fluidity of networked understandings of power. That power does in here between us. We all have some power and some authority. But in the legal structures, which certainly in the UK we operate to, somebody's name is above the door. Somebody has the ability to make the biggest choice of all which to say, what's this organisation for? And how does that relate to my interests and our interests and society's interests? I could close the damn thing down because I own the shares. And there is a dissonance at some point between these two things. And anybody who thinks that ultimately this dissonance can be kept away from you and it won't ever be a problem. I think he's engaging in a bit of wishful thinking. It probably hopefully won't come around in this decade. But at some stage there will be a radical disjuncture between the sense of power people might feel and their lack of actual ability to exercise that power on a formal level, maybe when the company gets sold to somebody who promises to be dead nice, but probably won't be. And those kinds of decisions eventually always come to get you. So, I'm a skeptic. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dave. So, we've got a little bit of sorting out to do here. So, I'd first of all like to hear from you, Kevin. So, there's been a little bit of a challenge to the idea of ownership that's not wholly democratic. So, could you talk a little bit about how power can be manifested inside an organisation when the ownership isn't democratic? Yeah, absolutely. And really, I'll make three points around that. And I'm going to use next jump as an example. So, first and foremost, think of where the sort of policies, processes, procedures come from in terms of like how power is used in an organisation that's typically in a human resources department. So, with next jump, what we've done is we've actually eliminated our human resources department. There isn't one at the company, and it's really everyone's responsibility. So, this is your point about sort of coming home and who's, okay, I'm the breadwinner, my wife's the breadwinner, but the chores still need to get done. Everybody needs to contribute. So, if you eliminate HR as a function and you make everyone responsible for it, that sort of deepens the empowerment of employees. So, that's the first point. So, for example, our head of marketing is also our head of recruitment. That goes for recruitment, onboarding, our CSR initiatives, our performance evaluations. Those are all run by everyday business leaders who are within the company. The second example within next jump is we actually have a democratically elected leadership team. So, each year the company votes on who's in the leadership team. And it's 21 people. It's called the MB21. It's based on this island off the coast of Massachusetts called Martha's Vineyard. And the house that we have our leadership office, it just happens to sleep 21 people. So, that's how many people we have in the leadership team. And so, this group is elected every year. And as a founder of the organization, I've actually been voted off of that team once or twice and had to cycle back. But really, the criteria people have in terms of how they're voting, are you growing yourself personally? Are you contributing to the revenue of the organization? Are you contributing back to the culture of the organization? So, those are the three criteria people have. And then the third point around how to empower employees further. Something that we're doing at next jump is we have a no fire policy. So, it came into place in 2012. And really, the idea was that you would create a circle of safety for employees so that they can take risks, so that they can show vulnerability at work. And so, bringing people into the family of the organization becomes much more of a challenge because really, when someone wants to hire a new person, they're not thinking about, okay, if this person works out, or doesn't work out in the short run, it doesn't really matter. It actually matters deeply because, guess what, that person's coming to Christmas every year for the rest of your life. Thank you. Jack, is there anything that you'd like to add to that about how we can have a sense of power without the ownership being democratic? Yeah, absolutely. So, when we were growing our business, the story was you needed to get three years of consecutive growth and then you could sell your company to a large corporate and then take your money and go and do what you wanted after that. And it felt like it would be setting out on everything that we were all about. So, I think, I've found a different way of doing things. When you do that, you recruit a management team and you kind of make yourself redundant, so you need to find another job for yourself, otherwise you go mad, you just have to go and hide somewhere, pretend that that ten years never happened. So, what you need to do is find a different way. And I think it's really important that these different ways of working are... So, I think you don't sell. It's really important that independent companies do not sell to peace at PLCs and become public trading. We need to remain independent. What we do is we look for promise among our employers. We've got long-standing employers that have been with us for five or ten years and they've got ideas that are burning with inside them to follow their dreams and we invest in them and we invest in their dreams and there's a number of spin-off initiatives that are growing now outside of the main agency which we are investing in to get behind people's dreams. So, we're actually using the resources, not just the financial resources but the network and the connections and the skills within the company to incubate and invest in these new initiatives. So, I believe that in the future, and Brighton's a great place for this, that there can be a big group of independent companies that the aim is not to sell, the aim is to develop, to generate profit in order to remain independent and keep going on this journey. That, I think, is a powerful idea when it's all about advancing positive change and getting behind the dreams of people who want to do amazing things in the world as opposed to the mandate for the company being let's make as much profit as possible so that the shareholders can suck that value out of the company. That's not good, but just going into employee ownership doesn't necessarily mean you're going to accelerate on that journey more quickly. We're always exploring like a million things and employee ownership is always coming up and we're always moving along that journey. But I just think it's just one tool in the bag. Thank you, Jack. So, I'd like to ask you, Carol. It sounds like we've got some great independent businesses with leaders and owners who are driven to create positive change in the world and radically progressive practices like not firing anybody ever, which is just extraordinary and having an elected management team. Are you buying it? Is this good enough? I think that's fabulous. I'd ask the question, what happens next? What happens when the owner of that company wants to exit and realise the value and move on and do something else? That to me is the crunch point. Before I talk about that, can I just say what sums up to me is a very good friend of mine and one of the leading global thinkers on employee ownership, David Erdell, converted his family business to employee ownership back in the 80s, one of the first organisations to do this. He puts it really well. He went to Harvard and he just asked himself the question why am I here learning how to be a better manager so I can make the employees make my family richer and fatter? That's what it came down to. It's like, why are you doing it? That's why I think ownership is integral to this. For me, it's about succession. I'm quite surprised that Jack says that he thinks that employee ownership seems to put it to the side because what employee ownership would do, it gives him a vehicle for the company to go on for the long term. The sustainability comes on because this is not about individual employees holding the shares. This is mainly about collective ownership. Usually, in an employee-owned company, it's structured that more than 50% of the shares are held in a trust. That trust goes on forever. There's never a need to look at succession again and the company will go on and that protects the independence for the long term, not just while the current owner thinks it's a good thing. For that, that's tremendous security, tremendously liberating for the employees. For me, it's maybe unwind, but I just can't see how it doesn't work. Thank you. Dave, anything you'd like to add? There is a disconnect, I think, between essentially this audience, you're here because you're moving into post-materialism. You know there's more to life than money. There are shitloads of people in this world, in this country, in this city, for whom the idea that they have a choice economically about where they work is just frankly bollocks. They have no choice. They have no freedom to tell the boss to fuck off because the boss will sack them. They're on a zero-hours contract and they will not get another job and their family will not have food. The power can belong in an organisation of mindful people in the future in interesting ways. But the power in most organisations is increasingly dictatorial, increasingly based on who cares what the ownership actually is. The single fact of the matter is that you don't have very much money and I need this and I'm desperate and desperate is you can never be powerful if you're desperate until you get so desperate that you don't give a shit anymore and at that point that's when the tinderboxes come out and the pitchforks. Pitchforks, wow. So perhaps part of the crux of this particular issue is that what happens if you change your mind? So it's all well and good while the leaders today believe in all of this stuff and they have a positive intent but what happens if they do sell it or if they change their minds or they go rogue and go a bit crazy and start to make different decisions? Can all of this good progressive stuff be protected without ownership? What do you think, Kevin? My feeling is I think in the questionnaire there was this question of charismatic leader versus not and it kind of comes down to what you're talking about is the founder and what happens when the founder wants to move on or what happens when the management isn't in sync with where the employees want to be and if I can answer that question as part of the answer to this is I think in the beginning stages of any company there is a necessity for a leader to cultivate and grow a culture, a mission and an objective for the company and to defend it quite frankly from all of the parts of the ecosystem that I talked about that's skeptical employees that's skeptical suppliers that's skeptical community that's skeptical shareholders I think in the beginning creating that vision and creating something is absolutely necessary it's almost like a force of will but in the long term to the point that was just made that's completely unsustainable and I think the only way to sustain that culture what I mean isn't sort of free games or paint on the walls or anything like that it needs to be a philosophy behind how you grow people and then they service the customers and the community so we call that at next jump better me plus better you equals better us so better me is investing in yourself so that you're unlocking yourself and growing to the next level is where the community and the customers and others benefit and then better us encapsulates all of it so my main point is that in the long run you need to create a sustainable system that self perpetuates so in our example yes our founder and CEO did found the company and he had radical ideas about investing in culture about providing healthcare gym membership to all employees about creating programs that like the no fire policy but he understands that that can't be sustained in the long run so now what he's doing similar to what you're doing is he doesn't lead the company at all anymore he and the chief of staff actually coach the team of people that are actually running the business and I think that's how you perpetuate it that's how it grows the original leaders aren't necessarily the ones carrying on with the mission continually they have to push that down into the other echelons of the company so I'm just going to ask you really specifically so the examples of the progressive practices that you gave like the leadership team and the no firing policy ultimately who has the power to change those policies well ultimately the employees have grown so into like it's become such a part of the culture that I think that there would be an employee rebellion if anything like that were to change but it takes time for that to see because those are, I mean five or ten years ago when we started those those were kind of semi radical ideas but now they've become such a part of the ingrained in everyone's life and every new person that comes into the company is sort of indoctrinated into this I don't think it could change, not at next job So Dave what do you think about this idea that yes in theory if the ownership isn't democratic then the policies can be changed but actually particularly in organisations where there's lots of creative people people who have a choice about where they work in practice they do hold a huge amount of informal power aside from anything that's written on paper Absolutely, I mean culture each structure for breakfast and if you've got a culture which is based on participation respect for the people and their talents that this is where the real value lies and we gave Newton sort of approach a valve he can't tell people how to make better computer games than the people he's already hired to make great computer games and why would he get in the way of them that would just be stupid and that kind of culture can work very well I think in sort of knowledge sectors where yes increasingly the economy is moving in that direction but I think there's a kind of there's a mobius strip between these two and they can't be escaped that you can't put off the evil day where things suddenly changed so there may well be a rebellion it's more likely that always star wars is coming out the rebellion didn't happen overnight Palpatine took years to move the republic towards the empire using terrible democratic structures and corruption and stuff and as Amidala said this is how democracy ends with a round of applause so these things can go backwards and there's two sort of flaws I think with this which is one is the kind of wig view of history that we're always getting better and before we used to be told what to do and now we tell ourselves what to do and work with it and cabaret things can get worse and so these things cannot be relied upon to be in here forever and I forgot my second point on somebody else so Carol I want to put it to you that is there room for both that it's great to have democratic ownership but also there are models and it can be successful if someone has an idea that they want to bring into the world to be able to retain ownership of that to make sure that it actually happens and voluntarily recruit people in to help them to do that so is there room for both to have everything under democratic ownership there's room for both but it's maybe more of a kind of stage use so you have your entrepreneur who has the idea who comes in and he sets up the company initially he isn't it and it grows from there to me it's about what happens when they want to move on and much of this kind of involvement and the engagement and employees have got the power of this and the power of that they haven't really got the power have they they're permitted to have the power in control allows them to have it it's not real in an employee owned company the leaders are accountable to the people that work for them there's no hiding place you can't fool people that can see that order book isn't full but they can see that the quality is not there they know the customers aren't happy and there seems to be a real fear that this thing that we had this conversation last night that people need lead and people need marriage and actually it's like what Yos was saying this morning that businesses do not go out to work thinking they're going to create harm and create havoc people want to do a good job and they will find different ways to do that so for me it is it does come back that ownership will become important at some stage because people shouldn't have to be going to work relying on being allowed to do a good job they should be able to do a good job because it's their job it's their company they benefit when it goes well thank you so Jack is it kind of like that you're a benevolent dictator who says you know trust me trust me I'm going to do the right thing I'm not going to sell out the company and you know and you've earned that trust through your behaviour but how can we guarantee that that trust will be maintained forever trust me it will so looking at the big picture right because we're all here because we want to improve the world in our lifetime we want to provide a better world for our children we all have this kind of spirit of stewardship within us and if you talk about going down an employee owned route companies like my company aren't the problem companies that are the problem are the people that have the money led culture those are the toxic cultures that are the real problem and there's more of those out there than there are of us and it's common knowledge because I've been told a number of times going down the employee owned route isn't the most lucrative way of doing it but there are all these other benefits that have been switched off so I don't think I don't think that's the solution the solution is not running with pitchforks at Tesco's because they'll just shut the doors called the police and it's all over the solution is to do what people like Ruth and Amy are doing and reinvent the next Tesco's and just disrupt those marketplaces I don't think we're going to overthrow these companies this is why I'm against PLCs this is why I'm so far independent ownership because then you have the control to go and take on these cultures and replace them and I'm confident that's going to happen over the next 20 years but pitching employee ownership to money led cultures is I think could be a huge waste of energy I think we should just go about usurping them and replacing them with better versions which are employee owned and driven by a positive change Thank you so I'm just going to change the tack a little bit away from who owns the organisation on paper and think about within the organisation how we can make sure that the representation of power amongst all groups so I'm thinking specifically about gender equality or inequality how can we make sure that everyone regardless of their background, their colour of skin their gender has an equal shot at power is that one that you'd like to take Kevin? Sure but can I just go back to the previous topic for I just want to point out one object example that we've been circling around this idea of what happens when 51% of the owners, the stockholders of a company want to change the way the company is run this is the underlying question that we were just debating and I have to point to an example of this happening just last year at a mid-sized supermarket called Market Basket in New England and the fight was between what was a concentrated amount of shareholders there were 12 shareholders in total for this $3 billion company and the majority of the shareholders wanted to change the way the corporation was run they fired the CEO, much beloved CEO of the company and what happened afterwards was absolutely revolutionary and radical and I feel like it's on the bleeding edge of where we're headed as a society where you said culture trump structure I'm saying that culture can also trump ownership and that's where the employee value and the employees sort of owning that culture and perpetuating it is really the example so long story short what happened with the Market Basket example was the employees basically got out the torches and the pitchforks and shut down the organization they didn't pay attention to what the two new CEOs the people with the sign at the top of the door were saying they shut down the warehouses and then something really radical happened the customers of the organization started to pick it with the owners excuse me with the employees and then the suppliers that got into the picture and the community got into the picture and it was just one example of how this could be what we look like 10 years from now if we continue to invest in company culture and employees first thank you so I'd just like to come back to the question again about how we can make sure that the power is manifested for everybody inside an organization regardless of being in minority groups regardless of gender color Dave would you like to take that one it's about being mindful of how power actually works just as people who are really wealthy and become successful survey after survey shows how utterly blind they are to the role of look and it's always about their heroic brilliant talent which has made them incredibly wealthy and I think people with power are very blind to how it feels to those who don't have it as much there is an asymmetry of perception so the first thing to do is to think about if you want to be mindful about how you create power structures within organizations is to recognize that they tend to be driven by the way they've been done before which is to say privilege people who are good at talking in meetings and being persuasive and this is not the only way in which meaning can be transferred conversations can happen and a company I think ultimately is a conversation between a lot of people and there are different styles of conversation and communication and most people who are in the democratic structures have been historically shite at coming up with interesting ways to have that conversation instead it's would you like to come to a meeting and listen to some white men who are older than you sit at the top and tell you how it's going to be and then you stick your hands up and then you fuck off and yeah democracy and that's crap and so being mindful of how different people relate to language how different people relate to being asked to make their case in front of other people and it's not one size fits all and if you're trying to genuinely going back to that comment which was made by about Simon Sinek if you've got genuine collaboration it shouldn't be possible to see who did it I think if you've got genuine open power structures it shouldn't be possible to say that's the place where power happened there is a proper network in that and everybody feels to find a place within that thank you so Carol I mean regardless of how an organisation is owned it's still possible structural institutional inequality unconscious biases that are making things more difficult for some groups than others how do you think we can tackle power inside organisations beyond ownership but making sure it stretches to everybody I think Dave said it really it's about education and awareness and it's about making sure that the organisation is as democratic and as open as possible and being conscious about it all the time I think it's very difficult to legislate for diversity legislate for equality you can create equality of opportunity through policies but actually people find ways to get around it so to me it's about the informal networks it's constantly education and awareness not an easy one and Jack anything you'd like to add we've got two minutes left um would any of Jack's employees in the audience like to like to speak they're all lovely I am a fan of employee ownership and I really do believe it's um we're on a we're on a course and we'll we're in it for the long term we're not looking to grow and get out and we want to have a whole lot of fun on that journey and there's just more fun we can have being together as a company than there ever could if we all took some money and went our separate way so we're really here for the ride for the long term and ultimately our destination that we want to get to is to be an employee owned company so I'm a massive advocate of that but that's a journey that we're going to go on practical experiences of running a company day to day is there's a myriad of things going on and um it's um sometimes we get sort of blinded by a one idea which we think is going to be our this is going to be the answer to all of our problems because we come to an event like this and we go home with that one idea and it's everyone stop what you're doing we're going to become an employee owned company and um and do that that's fine if it fits and it works but it's more nuanced than that it can be quite disruptive which is why it's just it has to come from within what feels right for you the people that are in power need to tune into what's really what they want to do where they want to take the company and then look at all these things and assess how and when you use them to continue continue on that journey because um running a company is a very dynamic thing there's customers, employees, partners um legal paperwork, pitches airplane theme parks all kind of all manner of crazy things going on and it's just um yeah it's just it's the right I think it's a much stronger way to go then it's the right way to go selling out to publicly traded companies is just perpetuating this issue um so it's um but it's a journey I think not a not a um uh an initiative that you do and it's done Thank you Jack and on that note we have run out of time um so it's down to you guys to make your make your minds up I'm certainly still pondering everything that I've that I've heard um it's a complex issue I think um so would you please give a massive round of applause to Jack, Carol, Kevin and Dave, thank you very much