Business

Urban Stone

Mary Cunningham discovered that former prisoners are usually cut off from most jobs, housing and welfare. After some research, she created a new business model and founded Urban Stone in 2012.

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Boss free company Valve

The number of boss-free companies is growing rapidly. Valve is such a company without hierarchy. How does it work when teams decide for themselves? And what are the conditions for success?

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Peer-to-peer transportation for elderly

The Belgian peer-to-peer network Taxistop enables cheap transportation for people with reduced mobility, mainly elderly people. The service is carried out by voluntary drivers who are mainly elderly people too.

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New purpose for local prison

The Chief Police Commissioner of Granada, Nicaragua, Fatima Flores changed the purpose of the local prison, from guarding inmates to engaging them in building a new life, after they have served their sentence.

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Whole Foods Market

What binds Whole Foods Market ’ 30.000 associates into a community is a common cause-to reverse the industrialization of the world’s food supply and give people better things to eat.

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CEOs get paid too much

Most people, regardless of nationality or set of beliefs, share similar sentiments about ho much CEOs should be paid. And for the most part, these estimates are markedly lower than the amounts company leaders actually earn.

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Renaissance in Business Education needed

The educational institutions where future business leaders are being trained must be transformed dramatically, claims Danish researcher Johan Roos.

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Committing to sustainability

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Organising 2.0 : do it rigorously or not at all

Oticon, a Danish company in hearing aids, was experiencing heavy weather when CEO Lars Kolind came on board in 1987. The corporate culture was hierarchical, conservative and complacent. Kolind wanted an innovative, self-directing organisation, where the walls between departments would disappear and people would choose their own projects to dovetail with their passions and talents. […]

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Nine CEO’s with the worst reputations

In general, American employees approve of – or even like – their chief executive officers. Some CEO’s however, are very unpopular with employees. Many of the CEO’s with a poor reputation actually ran their companies poorly. Number one on the list is Sears CEO Edward Lampert, who allegedly pits divisions against one another.

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Doing is the best kind of thinking

We need to work differently, to give creativity a chance.

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Most managers are ineffective

Power is the ability to get things done. Management is the art of ensuring that things get done. What’s striking about most organizations is that so little management is effective. Most companies, far from being populated by busy, effective executives, could instead be seen as ‘a few isolated islands of action amid an ocean of inaction’, according to researchers Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal.

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FAVI

If you think that new ways of organising can be found only among small start-up companies and Internet firms, you probably have not heard the story of FAVI, a French copper foundry. In the early seventies, Jean-Francois Zobrist was put in control of this company by the family that had built it. Although it was […]

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Hoppenbrouwers

The Dutch Hoppenbrouwers firm was started in 1918 as a small shop in electric fittings. The business grew and expanded and when son Theo took over, the family firm had grown into an electrical engineering company with ten employees. Although he was reluctant to take on responsibility for the company at the age of 21, […]

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A mission liberates professionals

Many employees consider the formulation of a vision for their organisation as a time- and money-consuming process without apparent use. Why do managers need endless meetings to come up with a few pretty but hollow phrases, which the workers could have written down in ten minutes? The cynicism felt in many organisations with regard to […]

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