Giving Away the Store

ESOPs are nothing new, but some corporations are taking the practice to extremes, giving away the entire company - to their employees. Ownership invests employees in the company, empowering them with pride and initiative they never had before. In the text, the disciples, coming off a three-year mentoring program, are suddenly given the store, the whole store! Fired up and empowered with this new authorization, the disciples produce dramatic results!

"My greatest revelation as a businessman was crystallized in two words," writes Bill Gross in the Harvard Business Review. Just two words: "Let go."

Not: "Buy low." Not: "Sell high." Not: "Hold tight." Not: "Cut losses." Just: "Let go."

This revelation blasted to bits everything he had come to believe as a businessman. When the California company he founded, Knowledge Adventure, gave birth to a new company called Worlds, Incorporated, Gross wanted to hold tight to this hot new property, and benefit from the potentially sizable revenue stream it promised. He battled with his colleagues over the size of their equity stake: He wanted to hold on to 80 percent, and felt defeated when they decided to keep only 19.9 percent of the new company's equity.

But what happened astonished Bill Gross and everyone around him. Within a year, Worlds grew almost as large as Knowledge Adventure. Its employees seemed to rise to entirely new heights of creativity and passion - putting in Herculean...