Bret Keisling discusses the newly relaunched CLEO, from Rutgers' Institute for the Study of EO and Profit Sharing, which features a variety of great EO resources for the classroom, researchers, business leaders and the public.
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Mini-cast 100 Transcript
Bret Keisling: 00:03 Hello, my friends and welcome to the ESOP Mini-cast. Thank you so much for listening. My name is Bret Keisling and as it says on my business cards, I'm a passionate advocate for employee ownership. Before I get to today's topic, which is the Curriculum Library for Employee Ownership. I want to take a moment to acknowledge that this is Episode 100 of the ESOP Mini-cast.
Bret Keisling: 00:26 We just started Season Four of our primary EO/ESOP podcast, which comes out on Tuesdays. Between the two podcasts we have over 215 episodes and you can find them all at www.theESOPpodcast.com. As I've said on previous podcasts, although my voice is heard in just about all of them, in many respects I'm so much less important than the guests who've been on the show, the team that helps get the podcasts out to the public, most important of all are you and all of our listeners as we quickly approach 60,000 total listens.
Bret Keisling: 01:06 So thanks to everyone who's made the podcast, what it is today. As we kick off our fourth season, we look forward to keep doing what we do: amplifying and celebrating all forms of employee ownership.
Bret Keisling: 01:19 With that let's turn our attention to the Curriculum Library for Employee Ownership. CLEO was recently launched in a redesigned format by the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations. If you follow employee ownership at all, then you know that these are the folks responsible for some of the most important research and analysis about employee ownership, Joseph Blasi, Doug Kruse, and all of their amazing colleagues do such important work that we all rely on. Data that shows employee ownership, addresses racial and gender income issues comes from there. Most of the data that shows how employee ownership fared so much better during the 2008 recession came from there.
Bret Keisling: 02:06 That's just two examples. There's so much more. So now comes CLEO, which is the world's only online library dedicated to employee share ownership. CLEO's project director is Adria Scharf and among other roles, she's also a Beyster fellow.
Bret Keisling: 02:22 CLEO features more than 600 resources designed to help college professors teach about employee share ownership in their classes. It's also a valuable resource for company leaders, researchers, and the public. And I want to stress that last part once again and the public.
Bret Keisling: 02:39 I'll talk more about that in a moment, but first let me tell you a little bit more about what's inside CLEO. It's got links to more than 100 case studies of employee owned companies. There are 14 downloadable full text company case studies ready for classroom use. There are links to more than 100 academic journal articles, 54 policy and issue reports, and there are links to films and videos and 15 sample syllabi for use by business school and grad school professors.
Bret Keisling: 03:10 Many of these resources have been previously available and indeed, if you check out our website, we've talked about several of the studies, including most recently, Hilary Abell of Project Equity wrote a white paper, which we discussed with her on Episode 113 of our primary EO/ESOP podcast.
Bret Keisling: 03:28 The fact that CLEO is housed at Rutgers University explains the appropriate focus on a curriculum and use of the data in the classroom. After all, "curriculum" is CLEO's first name. But I think it's so important that the entire catalog is open to the public. It's laid out in a very intuitive, easy interface, and the collections are divided into four categories: free case studies, recent videos, new policy reports, and syllabi. From there, you can just do a deep dive wherever you'd like.
Bret Keisling: 04:02 Some of the data may be dry for employee owners in terms of their day to day jobs, although it certainly buttresses how great employee ownership is for our communities and our country. But if you're an advocate or EO practitioner, you have all of the resources, the hard data, right at your fingertips - and we all know potential selling shareholders love hard data.
Bret Keisling: 04:25 I hope when you have a chance, you'll visit CLEO and take a dive into their many resources. If you're an advocate or practitioner and you come up with a presentation or flyer based on the data you got from CLEO, bring it to my attention. We'd love to share it on social media.
Bret Keisling: 04:41 With that, we're going to wrap up today's episode of the ESOP Mini-cast. Thank you so much for listening. Take care of yourself and those around you. We're going through some tough times together and that's how we'll get through them together. This is Bret. Keisling. Have a great day.
Bitsy McCann: 05:00 We'd love to hear from you! To contact us, find us on Facebook at KEISOP, LLC and on Twitter @ESOPPodcast. To reach Bret, with one "T", email Bret@KEISOP.com, on LinkedIn at Bret Keisling, and most actively on Twitter at @EO_Bret. Again, that's one "T". This podcast has been produced by The KEISOP Group, technical assistance provided by Third Circle, Inc. and BitsyPlus Design. Original music composed by Max Keisling, archival podcast material edited and produced by Brian Keisling, and I'm Bitsy McCann.
Standard Disclaimer: The views expressed herein are my own and don't represent those of my own firms or the organizations to which I belong. Nothing in the podcast should be construed as guidance or advice of any kind in any field and the fact that I mentioned an organizational website or an advocate or a company on a podcast does not reflect an endorsement, but if you've heard your name or your group's name mentioned on this podcast, I'd love to have you come on and talk about it yourself.
A note on the transcript: This transcript was produced by Temi, an automated transcription service. While it has been reviewed by The ESOP Podcast, we can not guarantee the accuracy of the transcription. Please refer to the original audio when citing sources.