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The Mondragon worker cooperative federation has 85,000 employees. If you look at how it's structured, it's not hard to imagine how Google could operate similar

The Mondragon worker cooperative federation has 85,000 employees. If you look at how it's structured, it's not hard to imagine how Google could operate similarly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

kwis 16y ago
Mondragon has annual revenues of €174/employee. I have trouble viewing that as a proven model.
- michaelchisari 16y ago
  I'm pretty sure the revenues on Wikipedia are off, and I can't find what reference they're using to get that number. This study from around 2002/2003 puts their revenues at $8 billion annually with 60,000 employees. That puts their per-employee revenues at around $133k. http://www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/cst/conferences/bilbao/papers/Herrera.pdf http://www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/cst/conferences/bilbao/p... This puts their revenues at $24.2 billion in 2008, which is almost $300k per employee, if you use the ~85,000 employees figure. http://willblogforfood.typepad.com/will_blog_for_food/2011/01/the-mondragon-cooperative-a-blueprint-for-america.html http://willblogforfood.typepad.com/will_blog_for_food/2011/0...
  - kwis 16y ago
    It looks like I got confused because whoever edited the wikipedia article came from a country that uses '.' as a thousands separator. Looking more closely, they're a strange sort of conglomerate. At a glance, I see two banks, two insurance companies, roughly two hundred industrial companies, a dozen retail shops, a dozen food-related businesses, a dozen research firms, and ten education companies. In a way, it reminds me of Idealab, in that each new company is a new pool of equity (with the associated incentives that result from ownership), and that failures are not punished, but rather result in retraining or placement in a different firm. (for full co-op members). It's also interesting to see that the founder was a priest who started off with a co-operative polytechnic school and bootstrapped everything from that base.
- brianleb 16y ago
  174/employee was calculated by assuming that the period in the number of employees is a comma while the period in revenue is a period (e.g. 17M/85K employees instead of 17B/85K employees). So those figures would indicate 174,000 Euros per employee, which makes a lot more sense.
wtn 16y ago
Semco SA, the Brazilian conglomerate, would probably be a more relevant example of corporate re-engineering.
- michaelchisari 16y ago
  I mention Semco elsewhere in the thread, but Mondragon is 30x bigger than Semco, and yet still operates effectively as a horizontal organization.
vacri 16y ago
I fail to see how that will help keep a driven, ambitious person happy as a career frontline customer support staffer.

kwis 16y ago

Mondragon has annual revenues of €174/employee. I have trouble viewing that as a proven model.

michaelchisari 16y ago
I'm pretty sure the revenues on Wikipedia are off, and I can't find what reference they're using to get that number. This study from around 2002/2003 puts their revenues at $8 billion annually with 60,000 employees. That puts their per-employee revenues at around $133k. http://www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/cst/conferences/bilbao/papers/Herrera.pdf http://www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/cst/conferences/bilbao/p... This puts their revenues at $24.2 billion in 2008, which is almost $300k per employee, if you use the ~85,000 employees figure. http://willblogforfood.typepad.com/will_blog_for_food/2011/01/the-mondragon-cooperative-a-blueprint-for-america.html http://willblogforfood.typepad.com/will_blog_for_food/2011/0...
- kwis 16y ago
  It looks like I got confused because whoever edited the wikipedia article came from a country that uses '.' as a thousands separator. Looking more closely, they're a strange sort of conglomerate. At a glance, I see two banks, two insurance companies, roughly two hundred industrial companies, a dozen retail shops, a dozen food-related businesses, a dozen research firms, and ten education companies. In a way, it reminds me of Idealab, in that each new company is a new pool of equity (with the associated incentives that result from ownership), and that failures are not punished, but rather result in retraining or placement in a different firm. (for full co-op members). It's also interesting to see that the founder was a priest who started off with a co-operative polytechnic school and bootstrapped everything from that base.
brianleb 16y ago
174/employee was calculated by assuming that the period in the number of employees is a comma while the period in revenue is a period (e.g. 17M/85K employees instead of 17B/85K employees). So those figures would indicate 174,000 Euros per employee, which makes a lot more sense.

wtn 16y ago

Semco SA, the Brazilian conglomerate, would probably be a more relevant example of corporate re-engineering.

michaelchisari 16y ago
I mention Semco elsewhere in the thread, but Mondragon is 30x bigger than Semco, and yet still operates effectively as a horizontal organization.

vacri 16y ago

I fail to see how that will help keep a driven, ambitious person happy as a career frontline customer support staffer.