Participatory Management, Great Game of Business, & More session from the 2021 Union Co-op Symposium

much for being here so i'm chris klamp i teach at southern new hampshire university and i have a relationship with mondergon going back to 1982 when i went there as a 28 year old grad student collecting data for my dissertation looking at the management of the cooperatives and was fortunate enough to be welcomed in by the head of the bank who was one of the three founders and his public relations department which was headed up by the son of first basque president and i was able to interview three managers in each of about a fourth of the cooperatives cooperatives for my dissertation and have had the good fortune that over the years i've been able to go back multiple times and in fact my older daughter lived in undergone for much of a year as a cervantes fellow working with the machine tool institute in elgoy bar and living with my good friends in mundergan so it's a relationship that's taken on multiple facets for me over time rebecca thanks chris i'm rebecca moyks i have a background in accounting and finance in various industries and have spent the past 11 years at intrust it where about five years ago we implemented open book management to help us transition uh to employee ownership through an esop and that was a couple years ago so now i teach financial and business literacy training to all of our employees and also administer our esop and a few years ago i met the co-op cincy um team christian ellen and was really inspired um and excited about the work they're doing here in cincinnati and i help coach a couple of the co-ops in open book management and how they can work to get all of their employees educated and engaged in the financial management um of the of the organization so i'm really passionate about employee ownership coming at it from a slightly different angle but i'm super excited to be here and be part of this great event so paloma you want to pull up the slides thank you so if you could go to the the slide the first um slide on the on the principles which is the third slide in right so let me just give you a quick overview there's 10 cooperative principles that are incorporated into mondragon's corporate management model and just briefly the first is open and free participation in the cooperative meaning that there's not discrimination against people on the basis of religion ethnic identity or political beliefs and that this is something they felt is important to the cooperatives over their history second principle is democratic organization which is the commitment to one person one vote system for elections and i'll take a deeper dive on that in a minute third is the sovereignty of labor which is that profit is allocated on the basis of the work contributed by each member to achieve profit fourth is instrumental and subordinated nature of capital meaning that capital is a necessary resource but it does not take precedent over the labor fifth is the participation in management this is another principle that i'll give you a deeper exploration of uh in terms of people's responsibility in the administration and management of the business uh wage solidarity is the sixth principle and this is about establishing um fair and equitable levels of compensation both internally and externally and has translated into a ratio historically that was one to three between the lowest and highest earnings and in many cases it's been extended to one to six to make it a system that was sustainable for them intercooperation is the seventh principle and this is the the uh commitment between the cooperatives and the um secondary support cooperatives to uh align themselves and be able to support each other in terms of efficiencies and having a shared messaging and and branding uh social transformation is the eighth principle and this is looking at supportive business development and an environment that returns typically about 10 of the profits back to the foundation in support of local community and also cooperatives in need the ninth principle is on universality and this is the commitment of the cooperatives to be involved and fully embracing the goals of the international cooperative movement and lastly education which i will also talk about here in terms of promoting people and the cooperative culture and how that is realized next slide please so the first principle i wanted to talk about is principle number two which is democratic organization and how this is uh embedded in the structure of the cooperatives so with the principle of one person one vote the system for election in the cooperatives ensures that workers have voice and that voice has meaning in terms of the operation of the cooperative next slide please um if you could just pull them a click through to get yeah there's probably two more thank you that's it um so when you look at this the general assembly is at the top of the hierarchy here and you see it on this second column and the general assembly elects the governing council in each cooperative the governing council in turn elects the executive board which coordinates functions between the management council and the governing council the management council is comprised of the general manager and the management team so each year there's an annual general assembly these are typically in the spring and before the general assemblies the um cooperative usually runs pre-meetings that are in smaller gatherings to prepare people to be able to fully participate in the general assembly i know firsthand because a good friend of mine heads up the iroski consumer cooperative and unfortunately when i go to visit uh montergon in in the spring he's often very tied up with pre-general assembly meetings working with the consumer and worker members so this is something that i know they take very seriously in their operation and ensuring that the governance model is effective many cooperatives have been challenged by low turnout for the general assembly so one of the things that they strategize around is how to entice people to take their responsibility to participate in the general assembly seriously so they may use in incentives like uh swag and um raffles to bring people into the general assembly meetings the membership can also call extraordinary sessions at the request of 20 of the members and the governing council has responsibilities for oversight of the economic performance of the cooperative its social functions and legislative and institutional policies finally it's comprised of 12 members who serve four-year terms and the seats are renewed every two years so half of the board seats are up for re-election every two years so that's the basic structure a couple of other things i want to mention is that the manager cannot be eligible for serving on the board and the watchdog committee which you see cited here in in the slide this is something that's mandated through co-op law and the members of the watchdog committee also cannot serve at the same time on the governing council you also see here the social council and if you were in the first session the plenary session you heard um kristen mentioned the social council in that discussion and for those of us familiar with the union co-op model we we would see the social council in many ways serving some of the functions that ideally uh worker trade union representatives serve it's really about ensuring that the internal operation of the cooperative is accountable and responsive to issues raised by the workers the first development of the social council came out of a labor strike in um what was then ulgor and the the they realized that they needed another body besides the general assembly's participation through the governing council to ensure that members could address internal matters and the difference with the social council is the elections are held by the work unit whereas the general assembly is more like what we would know in the united states as um general elections where you have your candidates and they run their campaigns so the the the social council meets monthly and it has a responsibility to carry back information to their the workers that they represent to provide them up-to-date information about issues that are surfacing around the operation of the cooperative so it plays a very important role also in the development of worker owners for leadership in the cooperative because typically you serve on the social council before you would be considered a candidate for the governing council so that's the basic structure that you find in what they refer to as the primary societies or the worker cooperatives next slide please um in this uh diagram what you see here is what i refer to as the superstructure this is the overarching structure that we would refer to as mondragon cooperative corporation and here you have um a congress that has 650 congressional representatives or delegates that are from the primary cooperatives the standing commission that you see under the congress box excuse me operates on behalf of the cooperatives during the periods between meetings of the congress so that the cooperative group is able to maximize business efficiency and it operates similar to a governing board it's comprised of elected representatives designated by the cooperative groups they must be a member of a cooperative the industrial group has 12 votes with 14 representatives distribution which you can see is now the largest in terms of worker members has four representatives and four votes finance has two representatives and two votes the knowledge sector has one representative with one vote and in the industrial sector no single division and you see the divisions represented in the listing uh to the right of the circle with the industrial uh sign on it members um from the industrial group no single division can have more than two representatives and two votes so this is the basic model and and it gives you an idea of how things shape up just in terms of where people are in these the financial group includes which was originally started as kahala popular which is the social insurance program seguros lago and auto are leasing and fisa which is the fundo internal cooperative of the solidarity the knowledge sector is comprised of mandarin university which has three schools engineering business faculty and the school of humanities and education in it next slide please so the fifth principle is talking about participation in the management and as you saw reflected in in the other two slides that i shared this is important to the group because worker members have obligations and these are written into the um internal arrangements regarding the the rights and responsibilities of workers so number one is that worker members have an obligation to participate economically by contributing to capital stock and this happens both in terms of voluntary as well as required contributions the required contributions are what constitutes the essentially opening the door as a member the voluntary country part participation is um opportunities that come up from time to time to add to the cat the working capital of the cooperative workers diligently and for this are expected to work diligently excuse me for the social goals of the cooperative and to advance the purposes of the firm uh they're supposed to participate in the governance of the cooperative through the general assemblies and other membership bodies such as the social council there to keep informed about the activities of the cooperative and to ask questions of the administrators about how the cooperative is running and about the finances of the co-op and this is typically supposed to be done within 15 days of this information being shared with them by way of the social council the social councils as i said meet monthly and their representatives are expected to report back to the members on their discussions so next slide please oops another slide thank you so the um i think you went yeah go the other yeah thank you principle number 10 is where i wanted to go so this is the last principle i wanted to touch on and this one's looking at the importance of education um mondragon got started by uh father aris mendi arietta who was a youth pastor in mondergan and education has been an important component to the way that they thought about themselves and their their role in the community so education happens in three ways that i just want to summarize for you here the first is that um through professional development and cooperative education they look to enhance the skills for leading the cooperatives and to effectively engage around the business of their firms so the professional development is to provide members knowledge of cooperative norms and statutes that govern the firm and the cooperatives commit resources for this recurrent education of their members the other important piece of this is that london cooperative corporation sees that it has a commitment to the development of youth as future cooperators and this is done through the ecostolos which we had a nice conversation about in the last session and just to summarize the um icostolas have 120 members in the basque regions of france and spain they employ 6 000 teachers who are worker members of their cooperatives educating 60 000 students with an impact on over 440 000 excuse me families um and the incus dollars have a pedagogy that's promoting vast curriculum based on social participation responsibility and competence development all of which as you can see are important for developing an appreciation for the cooperative model mondragon university also is involved in this work they recently enrolled a thousand new students into their lane program which is their team academy and they are those students are expected to develop a cooperative as their capstone and about half of the students successfully go on to be entrepreneur cooperative entrepreneurs education and cooperative promotion fund is the last piece in terms of the education principle here and that includes funds for purposes such as education promotion of basque culture promotion of the basque language research and development and consumer education so you can see that this is important to their success and the last thing i wanted to close with is just uh the story of what happened when they lost sight of the importance of worker members as worker owners so as some of you may know in a few years ago fagor the largest of the cooperatives um largely out of the 2008 recession ran into trouble they had acquired a plant in france called brant and so they were not able to have sufficient internal resources to deal with the downturn um a lot of their business activity was around new construction of of housing in spain and they lost their market because the housing market tanked part of what was conveyed to me by colleagues at mondergon is that when things soured financially for them management and workers continue to operate as if everything was in normal times and the sense in the group is that the worker members didn't step up to um challenge management about how things were going and management in that failure to be challenged by the owners um kept on as usual until they ran out of materials and had no choice but to close so i think with that i'd like to hand it off to um rebecca who can speak more about the important importance of building that ownership great thanks thanks chris i appreciate it yeah that's a great segue into talking about um creating uh an ownership mentality um so if you want to go ahead and go to the next slide there um ownership giving worker members um ownership or any other type of equity the company i work for isn't a newly created esops or an employee stock ownership program uh it does create ownership but one of the big questions or the lessons as chris just talked about from that example is how do we really create a mentality where all of the workers uh or employee owners are thinking and acting like owners rather than like workers or employees or employees so how do we empower and engage everyone to have that right kind of mindset and the answer to that is this last principle that we were talking about is education and educating everyone about the how the business works what the financial results mean and then specifically how every individual person regardless of what job or role that they may play in the organization how do they work towards the common goals of the organization to help make it successful so education is what i like to call the secret sauce to making that ownership mentality and really making um these principles real in in a way that can move the organization forward um so that ownership mentality is really created through education if you want to go to the next slide so what we did at interest is we went um we transitioned to employee ownership as i said through an esop but before that we prepared for that by adopting an open book management methodology which is called the great game of business when i started at the company it was a traditionally owned by one or a few people individual corporation and the owner had decided that he wanted to sell to the employees when he was ready to retire rather than to some other corporation where the jobs might not be there anymore it might go somewhere different so for the purpose of really supporting the employees and the community as well transitioning to employee ownership was what we wanted to do um so in 2016 i believe um i went to the conference for this organization the great game of business it's called the gathering of the games and it was so inspiring to hear all of these companies that were educating and empowering their employees they were being transparent with how the business was doing they were teaching people how to read the financial statements so every single person in the company regardless of their role understood how the company was doing whether that was great or not so great so that people could either be celebrating or helping to figure out solutions to issues that may be hurting the company in 2017 we implemented it we implemented if you're not an employee-owned company which we were not at the time you implement a profit sharing scenario of some sort of a bonus because the important part is as the organization or the company the better they're doing and the more profitable they are every single employee should be sharing in some way in that success transitioning to actual employee ownership as an esop obviously is the next step and really co-ops are even the next step of more equitable but this is a model the great game of business open book management methodology that can really work across any type of organization so two there's three principles but two of them are directly related to what we've been talking about the first one is know and teach the rules which is basically educating all of your members all of your employee owners about the business and the finances the second one is follow the action and keep score and that translates into open book management into being totally transparent with sharing we share almost all information and any question is on the table if employees want to know how decisions are made how the company's doing and that way everybody can know how we're doing and can help us work towards the right direction of what we need to focus on and what we need to improve and the big thing that we found in doing this over the past five years is that really opening up the books and saying here it is it's transparent and we did all types of scoreboards and showing the information that part wasn't the hard part the hard part was actually educating and teaching all of our employee owners what these number numbers mean and more importantly how do they translate that into what they do every day into decisions that they make and actions they take so that we're all moving towards the right common goals if you want to go to the next slide there a little bit more about this the great game of business um it's uh was started in springfield missouri in the 1980s uh an engine remanufacturing company was purchased um by a dozen guys that borrowed money from the bank because they wanted to save the hundred plus jobs rather than that being purchased by some other corporation and moving to another town so they did that successfully and then they realized that none of them knew how the business worked they didn't know how the finances worked they didn't know how they made money they just knew their specific jobs so they undertook this whole process to learn it together and to get everyone involved in it and that turned into a whole separate company they have now the great game of business so it's really transformed our company uh when i started i was one of like two or three people that knew how the company was doing really down to the details of our finances and our debt and how profitable we are and where we had issues and now every single person in our organization has access to that information and we work really hard to make sure that they understand it and that they know what it means the three principles as i discussed there before know and teach the rules is the education following the action and keep score is empowering people through transparently sharing all of that information and then the third principle is provide a stake in the outcome so for a traditional company that is owned by an individual or a couple people that's going to be some type of a profit sharing but for an esop or a co-op where you are giving actual shares of the company that's already built in so that's the last piece in this uh how the great game business was started but really it's set up perfectly for an employee-owned company because you already have that stake in the outcome and now you just need to educate and empower um if you want to go ahead and go to the next um slide there so how we did this and how we use some of this is the education piece i teach lemonade stand accounting it's a basic accounting course it's a one hour a week for about 10 weeks it takes us and it really goes through learning the basics of accounting and a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet through a lemonade stand so it tries really hard to be basic level and then we translate that into here's our profit and loss statement here's our balance sheet so everybody understands the results when we show them to them and then they're expected to participate in forecasting and budgeting with us we also use a lot of games where we will bring back that terminology bring back our results bring back our share price any of the information that we really want people to internalize and really know just to reinforce that we do a lot of games we give prizes away to people i put one of the examples here if anyone's looking for a tool like that it's called kahoot and it's an app um that we put we pre-populate a quiz in there with whatever information we want and then everyone has the app on their phone and can answer along they all get a free version of it and everybody in our company loves it and then we'll give away a little prize to whoever wins it um so we do a lot of things where they're ongoing they're constant um and you know a big deep big part of it is it has to become a part of ongoing part of the culture is that education that we're talking about when we get new employees it's not we educate them and then it's done it's an ongoing forever process we try to get some of the more experienced employee owners to um you know train the trainer program so that they can help me uh teach future employees but it's really part of our culture now that is baked in and when we do recruiting that's one of the first things we tell them is no matter what your job is you're going to be expected to learn a little bit of accounting so that you can help with uh man the financial management of the company so the ultimate goal um there is that every single member of the organization knows how the company is doing are we doing well are we struggling and we need to folk refocus on something and then hopefully they know exactly what drivers that they're responsible for and what their actions can do to help move us forward toward the goals you want to go to the next slide please so what we found is communication and participation are really the keys there because obviously you know like i said educating someone something once um who's not you know financial numbers may not be their their strong suit it is ongoing constant communication that we have to do in order to get the participation there so more specifically you know the way to start it is determining what the key metrics are maybe it's one or two maybe it's just your net profit and one of your key metrics whatever it is that's very important and those are posted and they're visible whether it's in an actual physical space or on your intranet or somewhere else and it's just regularly discussed constant communication on it some examples there what we do daily huddles we've got posters there's a picture that picture there is actually pre pandemic uh what we did we had a huge white board there that's our profit and loss statement and individual people track those metrics and report on them so that everybody is following along and watching how we're doing in the company and we're doing great it's exciting and it's you know everybody can celebrate it and when we're not doing so well it turns just naturally into discussions of okay what do we need to do what can we fix where can we focus so that we can improve these metrics um so that's uh involving everyone there we do that like i said in that in that picture there we do a regular forecast the we do it a monthly forecast because that's our regular business cycle but different industries or different businesses would do it on a different basis and then there's also an annual budgeting process which is called high involvement planning and that also involves the entire organization and the idea there being we're not giving a budget to anyone every single person is involved in building it because if you helped create it then obviously we you have we have buy-in from all of the employees and you can really support it and help it move forward so we even have a survey that goes out to every single person that says do you think this is reasonable do you think we can achieve this do you think it's too aggressive not aggressive enough and get input on everything from everyone every year and the goal there is that all of the employees feel that they are helping build this and manage this and they always know where we are where our goals are that we're trying to go and how they can help move that forward and that's really the whole purpose here and as i said it really fits in well what traditional business model us as an aesop and awesome with co-ops to get everybody on the same page to actually um achieve what we're trying to achieve um go to the next slide or is that all that's it right there so i think um that was it on what i wanted to kind of give an overview of great game of business and how we used it we've been working i've been working with a couple uh co-op companies to help them determine what are their metrics that are most important and how they can engage and train all of their employees around following this i think there's one more slide that was uh nested somewhere else in the whole package which is worker members obligation oh i talked through that that was earlier okay i just i skipped over it because i just gave the information without having to slide up okay well i think we're okay paloma but i'd love to hear if people have questions for us and um rebecca i gotta say you guys sound like you could easily move to being a cooperative because you've got all the right energy and the right pieces around how you're thinking about what you're doing it's a great example it is there's it's very different financially for the owner honestly um and esop is a way to transition it to actually sell it to the employees yeah no i i i've seen that in my research king arthur flower is structured as an esop and they did a three-stage buyout but they have overlaid it with a very democratic structure being new englanders they understood new england town meeting and they just implemented that so that they do quarterly meetings of the owners and monthly meetings that are like the social council in the mondergon group and they look for ways to extend uh participation financially even to high school students working with them which i think is great that is great so that the kids are coming out with something that can help them to pay for college so awesome so um i don't think we have any questions that have um come in there is i didn't put any links to great game of business because it's really easy to google it they have a ton of resources out there if you want to go look at their website and get a better idea of what they do they have a whole community platform that we're on now so i didn't put any any links to that but just google it and you will find their website and all their resources paloma you're muted i'm muted sorry i have a question so how do you approach your company like how like when you discovered this and you brought it to your the team like how did she approach them like what was like the selling point for them to start getting interested in this like great game of business well i was really lucky that the owner was interested in it because he as an individual owner he wanted to um transition it to employees so he actually brought it and said um what to me what do you think we went to the conference to see and i got super excited about um the idea of kind of bringing all of the employees into profit sharing and eventually uh employee ownership and not being the only person in the company that knew how we were doing financially um so it's i mean it takes a lot of work i'd say that's the other learning from it and while i didn't need to get it from the owner of the company getting that buy-in or how to approach the team from the rest of the company was definitely one of our early challenges and a lot of that was explaining the why um and it's i thought it would be easy an easy sell because there's a financial incentive at the end of it there's a profit sharing bonus but you're also asking people who didn't sign up to be accountants to learn some basic accounting to be involved in forecasting and budgeting and things that you know the majority of the rules did the roles in our company that's not what they normally would think they're signing up for now that we're in it we tell people that ahead of time but i would say that was kind of the challenge was explaining to people the why and the where we're going to end up to really convince them to put in the time and the energy to learn the these kind of things and without that financial um either profit sharing or ownership you know i don't think there would be a selling point to it honestly so i think the way you approach it is really the why it's the end point and study after study have shown it's also profitable it's not only good for all of your employees it is a competitive advantage yeah i think the other thing that's important with this that that i think i heard what you in what you were saying rebecca is that it's important to build this in as part of the work day for people rather than seeing it as as something they have to do outside the work day so that they they know that not only is it important that you think it's important as well yeah totally it has to be like a regular um that regular cadence that rhythm that it just becomes kind of a habit we have a real quick everyday meeting where we look at metrics every morning uh you know we have a once a week we look at the financials and at the beginning it was a struggle to get everyone there together because everybody's too busy with their their focus of what their main role is in the company but now that we've been doing it for years it's second nature everybody knows on tuesday morning that's what you have to do once a month we have our longer meeting so yeah that's definitely um it's really important and it's kind of hard and i think one of the big things it takes is time and repetition yeah so there's a couple questions one in the chat another one and other ones uh landed in the q a um so if you want me to read them and the q a one is this seems so great just like nonstop a lot of work to keep everyone on the same page and the question is where does the responsibility for doing this work lie is that some one full-time job oh it's someone's full-time job and then he also is asking who managed the work around engaging employees and there's more questions so for that so the great game of business has coaches and consultants that can help do this for you if you're a company that has money to you know get consultants and such which the majority of small companies or co-ops do not we self-implemented using um their books uh and such we gave out a copy of the book to all of our employees and asked everyone to read it so they could kind of get inspired by it but the real answer to the question is um as the vp of finance the accounting finance only person in a small company i have been doing that on top of my other things so if you have that key person that has the knowledge and um kind of the inspiration wants to do it that's great otherwise an outside resource you might need because it is hard to find that time and the first couple years it takes a lot more work of trying to get people involved now we've been doing it long enough that people get it and other people are asking questions initiating the conversations if i'm late when reporting things people will be asking me where it is um so the first couple years you know if you had an extra resource that it wasn't that didn't have another job it would be great um but in our case i was the one that took on the responsibility of that and the another another question is how important is the frequency of profit share feedback once a year such as with shares uh at tia worker co-op seems not um and he says it seems not frequently enough and i'll say there's more questions in the chat so that's one um yeah so we um had we started with a quarterly bonus which we consider um kind of the short-term reward and then we have our share price that we find out every year which is kind of more the long-term because you're not going to get that until it's basically a retirement plan so we have quarterly um bonuses so that's how often we do it we also do mini games sometimes if we need some a short period of time and something like right now we really need to reward people to change this specific metric or behavior and then we'll do that we would do that on like one month between one and three months long and then give a reward for that really quickly so the other question is is there a place where itt trust meets with other people on regular basis about the ggob or something similar you know we should start doing it again because i think i met the co-op cincy group at an open book management a cincinnati open book management networking group that we had started uh years ago that we stopped but um flecker i would love to get it started again maybe because otherwise there's not currently and then i would say flecker that corporation c offers a basic financial literacy education piece but not like deep dive into like open book management and it's part of our regular team meetings and then hannah asks it seems like ggob works best when other forms of participation and ownership thinking culture are developed in all aspects of the company not just financial management can you talk about some of the other ways your company has built that ownership culture into daily practices um yes we do try and you know it's kind of a balance because we do still have a traditional management structure so it's a little bit of a balance between getting people to understand we do still have a regular management structure but also empower them all to think like owners so we have things like we have a culture club team committee whatever you want to call it that anybody can volunteer to be on and that team meets once or twice a month and they're supposed to look at the culture and how people are doing and what can we what should we use resources for to further our ownership mentality and our connection with everyone because i think a lot of it hannah and that's a great question is about really empowering people to feel like they're not just here because it's a job and they want a paycheck it's that whole sense of there's something more here this is a bigger community i'm here for some bigger purpose um i think it's not just about feeling like an owner i think it's feeling more like you're part of something bigger and then uh christopher asked if you can talk more about mini games and he just asked uh i might miss this but how frequently throughout the work week are the open book sessions um all right so i'll answer the the short second one first there um we have once a week where we go over our entire profit and loss forecast for the current month so weekly but we have it available online anytime for people so people can look at the information anytime that they want but then once a week we go over it and then mini games um and you can look at the great new business website they probably talk about mini games on there but the idea is um if there's a specific metric or a specific behavior that you're wanting to improve or change within the company um that's setting up a mini game around it and we have a template that says we want to change this metric from its current number x to the number y we hope to do that in the next two months and here's how we're going to measure it and then we'll make some crazy big scoreboard where you can see it you know like a big thermometer or something we had a car going up a track whatever and it's but it's large and everybody can see it and they know what they're supposed to do to improve it and then there's a reward um usually a couple different levels of rewards and the idea is that once you have changed that behavior and prove that metric hopefully it's become a habit and you're going to stay there so we are at five minutes uh before closing our session uh i would like to invite christina and rebecca to have like a little closing statement and if anybody has any question this is your time uh now okay so one thing that came to mind as as rebecca was talking about these different elements to what they're doing at her company is you know at mondragon they so they they had the basic structure of governance being one member one vote representative democracy from the get-go they had labor problems in the 70s and they established the social councils to create better communication between the workers and management and that was good but they still were struggling with chronic problems around quality and how to how to improve that and with the baldrige award and the development of iso standards starting first with one of the cooperatives meyer which is a thermoplastics manufacturer for the auto industry they instituted total quality management teams throughout the cooperative first admire and then extended this to other cooperatives but on a participatory management model so that everybody was charged with not only thinking about the work as owners but also thinking about their ability to contribute to improving the quality of what they were doing in the production and that has really been i think an important piece to how do you create essentially a 360 model for uh effective participation and democracy in the workplace yeah and that's almost like an operational um equivalent the total quality management if that's like your operations to get the quality it's almost like a similar model this is we're talking about the finances and that's really talking about the quality of operations exactly yeah and you need both totally absolutely need both yeah that's a great point yeah so that's my final words of wisdom awesome well this has been great i'm super excited like i said once i um started working with co-op cincy i just thought it was such a great organization and i'm happy um anytime i can help their member co-ops um uh move move their goals forward in any way so i'm hoping to continue working with uh some of the co-ops on this so this has been great and i love this um event so thanks so much for uh everybody being part of i do too i'm sorry i'm not going to be there in person this time well we hope to see you next and two more years a few more years um so uh as we close our session i'm so grateful for you both to be here for taking the time to willing to be here um thank you everybody for participating and uh for the great questions um so right now we have again a little break you can uh you can go into the networking options and then we have our closing session um which is going to be called if you're looking for it i'm looking for it too so i can uh give you the right answer um oh i'm sorry i'm looking for a living experience yes concluding this is perfect that was a good cooperation right there right now so concluding experience so you can check on the session that should be great for those who are coming in person tomorrow we'll meet up uh at nine in the morning most of the sessions are in peace lee but a couple of them will be either in dayton remote or insist energy so make sure that you check your calendar and are sure where you're going um thank you so much everybody we are one minute to close this session thank you again christine and rebecca and i see you in the next session thank you guys awesome thank you bye you