Speaker 1:

From the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, welcome Inside the ICE House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange is your go-to for the latest on markets, leadership, vision, and business. For over 230 years the NYSE has been the beating heart of global growth. Each week we bring you inspiring stories of innovators, job creators, and the movers and shakers of capitalism here at the NYSE and ICE's exchanges around the world. Now, let's go Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Lance Glinn.

Lance Glinn:

Welcome in to another episode of the Inside the ICE House podcast. Our guest today, Pete Stavros is partner and co-head of Global Private Equity for NYSE listed KKR and the founder and chairman of Ownership Works. Three years ago he joined us here at the New York Stock Exchange on the Inside the ICE House Podcast to discuss the beginning of the nonprofit and now returns to provide an update on its successes and its impact in building a worker ownership movement. Pete, thanks so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.

Pete Stavros:

Thank you for having me.

Lance Glinn:

So, we last had you inside the ICE House in July of 2022, not long after you launched Ownership Works in 2021. Now since it's just been over three years since we last spoke to you, as we begin our conversation, before we look at the here and now, can you just remind us of the original mission and what problems you were hoping to solve in the corporate and worker landscape?

Pete Stavros:

So, some things we were trying to help, I couldn't say we were trying to solve them, but some problems we were trying to address in part was number one, the lack of wealth among workers in the country. So, the biggest divider between people who have wealth and people who don't is stock ownership. The top 10% own something like 40 trillion of assets and the bottom half own something like 250 billion. These numbers might be out of date now, but that's the last I recall them. And that really dwarfs the importance of housing or any other asset. That is the biggest driver of the lack of wealth among a majority of the country is they don't own in stock. And then from a company perspective, a majority of the workforce in America is not engaged on the job. If you look at Gallup surveys, something around 70% of American workers are not engaged.

About 20% are defined as actively disengaged, meaning they're actively working against their employer. So, they're so unhappy, they're throwing the proverbial wrenches in the machines. There's a very high quit rate in the American economy. It bounces around quite a bit, but it recently peaked at around 40%. So, 4 in 10 Americans quitting their job every year, which means an average company rehiring, basically its whole workforce every two and a half years. A lack of financial literacy in the country. The government estimates about 60 to 65% of Americans are financially illiterate. They measure that based on a person's ability to correctly answer five basic questions about personal finance. So, there were all these things that we were thinking if we could deploy worker ownership in a way that was effective, we'd be helping workers and helping companies.

Lance Glinn:

So, as you just reflect now on the last four years of Ownership Works, the last three since we've had you on the podcast, as I mentioned before, what have you seen both in terms of companies adopting this Ownership Works model and just what stands out to you so far over these last few years that this approach that you've taken starting in 2021 is now working and you're seeing more of this employee-based ownership and this greater closing of the gap of wealth, so to speak?

Pete Stavros:

So, what this looks like is we're announcing a sale of another company. I think it's Monday. And as long as you've been at the company for, I think it's a few years, you will have made 100% of your income in stock as a free benefit. And the quit rate of the company dropped by half. So, massive benefit to the company, massive benefit to employees, and I think what's attracted people to the idea and Ownership Works now has about 100 members. We're approaching maybe 50 investment firms, but we also partner with banks, non-profit foundations, worker advocates, etc. What's I think attracting people to the model is this duality of you can, again, you can help workers and you can build stronger companies. So, it's one of these very hard to find very rare opportunities to create a win-win. Now, it doesn't always work. It's not magic. It's not like you give workers stock and suddenly they're happy and they stop quitting.

It has to be a part ... Stock ownership has to be a part of a much broader program where you're driving employee engagement, you're soliciting input from the workforce, you're actually acting on it, you're teaching about the business, you're teaching financial literacy. It's the totality of that program. That is what drives culture change. And again, we will probably talk about this, it doesn't always work. And I'll give you KKR data. We've done this with I think almost 80 companies over the last 15 years and a majority of the time, but far from all of the time we get an improvement in engagement and quit rates. The median drop in the quit rate when it does "work" is 30%, which is a lot. It's a big deal. But a lot of the time it doesn't work. And again, I'm sure we'll get into it, but I don't want to leave anyone with the impression of this is easy or it's some kind of magic dust. This is basically a leadership tool.

Lance Glinn:

So, in our conversation in 2022, you were asked about convincing not only a company but employees to sign on to ownership work. You mentioned that the initial reaction from many is one of skepticism and it's on you and your team to really educate and build that trust. Do you still see now four years later, that same level of skepticism right off the bat? How has the, I guess, reaction of employees and employers changed when introducing this model?

Pete Stavros:

The skepticism is maybe a little bit less than it was, but by no means today do you roll out an employee ownership program and people ... Again, this takes time. My dad, who was ... A lot of this we may have talked about this last time. A lot of this came from my father. So, my dad was a construction worker, operated a road grader for over 40 years as a part of a union, and there was a lot of conflict between him and his colleagues and the company. And at the heart of it was, I'd say a lack of trust, which is deep embedded in corporate America and a lack of incentive alignment. So, the lack of trust is just this feeling that workers have been left behind. Companies are always finding ways to squeeze a little bit more, find ways not to pay bonuses, not to pay overtime, whatever. And certainly I saw a lot of that with my dad, and that has led to a real breakdown in trust.

And then incentive alignment, we look at countless companies. We buy, as I've said, hundreds and hundreds of companies. And the consistency with which ownership is concentrated in the hands of the top one to 5% of executives is very consistent. So, there's that lack of incentive alignment. And then half of Americans earn an hourly wage. That is the ultimate form of misalignment of incentives, which is what my dad lived, because you as the worker want more hours, ideally a little bit over time because you get pay and a half or double time and your employer wants just the opposite. How do I get the same productivity with as few paid hours as possible? But again, I think that's the opportunity with ownership is aligning incentives, giving people a reason to bring their best to work. And I think there's an opportunity to benefit everybody if we do it right.

Lance Glinn:

And when employees become these owners, what kind of mindset shifts have you seen or do you typically see? Do you see an evolution of thinking about roles, teams and the companies as a whole when these employees are now able to be owners of the companies that they work at?

Pete Stavros:

Over years, yes. So, I'll give you an anecdote or two and then I can give you some data. What it looks like over time is more the economic or the economist for it is more discretionary effort on the part of an employee. So, a salesperson at one of our companies, a customer left some samples at home, they were going to a trade show with that salesperson on the weekend on their own time, drove all the way to the trade show on a Saturday, four hours there, four hours back just to drop off the samples. But it could be someone in a procurement department who finds a smarter way of buying raw material, an engineer who finds a way to do a better job of value engineering a product.

I've given examples of truck drivers finding more efficient ways to deliver product to make their routes more efficient and more productive. So, those are some of the anecdotes. And then if you level up to the scale of a company, I'll give you a New York Stock Exchange company, Ingersoll Rand, which we took private, it was public, we took it private in 2013. It used to be called Gardner Denver. At the time there were 6,000 workers, 86 had stock ownership. So, it's about that. I think that is about one and a half percent. They had never measured employee engagement.

Quit rate was high, worker safety was poor, there were lots of issues. And then from a company standpoint, productivity lacked, quality, on-time delivery, the way the sales force was managed and there was a lot of opportunity there. And then over 10 years, it took 10 years, but the engagement scores went up something like from the 20th percentile to the 90th over a decade. So, I don't want to ever make it seem like this is a quick fix. And the quit rate dropped by 90% and the company had grown massively because Gardner Denver ended up doing a merger with Ingersoll Rand. I'm going to get the dates wrong, but something like 2018, 2019, 2020, something like that.

Lance Glinn:

So, late [inaudible 00:11:01]-

Pete Stavros:

But by the end of at least our journey with the company, the quit rate start to finish, dropped 90%. So, we were hiring thousands of fewer people every year. Imagine the impact of that on a company, not just productivity and cost, but culture.

Lance Glinn:

So, now as I mentioned in our conversation, it's Ownership Works, it's over four years old, has expanded, has reached more, has impacted more since its founding in 2021. Do you see sort of a natural ceiling for how widely Ownership Works can expand or is the vision truly to just make broad ownership or broad-based ownership, excuse me, a standard practice across corporate America across pretty much every industry or many industries I should say? I know you said it's not a quick fix. I know it's something that obviously takes time, but is there a ceiling to this?

Pete Stavros:

We're so far from the potential that I don't even think about a ceiling. I mean, we've got at Ownership Works, I don't know, maybe there's 300,000 workers who are on these programs. It's something in that range, and I can see a path to a couple million. But we have 135 million full-time working Americans. And keep in mind, these companies that are rolling out ownership programs are global. So, when you talk about a ceiling for Ownership Works, I'm thinking we need to be in Europe, we need to be in Asia. So, I think over time you will see international offices open for Ownership Works because we've got to be supporting these global businesses. And each country has its own cultural obstacles to overcome as it relates to really implementing ownership effectively. So, we have a long, long way to go.

Lance Glinn:

And like you said, greater than just here in North America or in the US with all of these companies being global or so many of these companies being global, the sky is really the limit, so to speak, with the number of people that can be impacted. Ownership Works has set an ambitious goal by 2030 creating or to create hundreds of thousands of new employers and generate 20 billion in wealth for working families. Now, numbers are obviously tangible goals or numbers and tangible goals, excuse me, can obviously dictate success or failure. But what are those intangibles that you track that sort of define success and show you and your team that meaningful impact is being made?

Pete Stavros:

The executive director at Ownership Works will probably not be happy with me, but I'll give you an update on those numbers. So, our current roll up is not 20 billion, but closer to 40 billion with 57% being for low and moderate income workers. So, I think we're going to blow away the targets. And the other metrics we're looking at beyond wealth for workers is what's happening to these cultures? What's happening with engagement scores and quit rates? And then you asked about intangibles. I think intangibly it's, are we making progress culturally in the country to normalize this idea that workers should own, that it makes sense to have workers be owners?

Because there's a lot of objections. We won't have time to go through them all, but lots of CEOs or boards of directors or investors will say, "Workers will never understand equity, so they'll never value it. They just want cash. They don't even want stock." I could go through a million of them. So, on the intangible side, are we making progress there? And I would say we are, again, this is going to take a long, long time, but we are making progress on, well actual measured wealth for workers on quantitative measures of culture change and then more qualitatively, which was your question, intangibly, is it getting easier each time when we're talking to CEOs and talking to boards and investors? And it is.

Lance Glinn:

Awesome. So, I want to dive into the role of really leadership and empathy. KKR has introduced something quite unique, these empathy gyms for CEOs and senior leaders across your portfolio. Can you dive into just what an empathy gym is and how it fits into your broader philosophy and KKR's broader philosophy around leadership and just culture overall?

Pete Stavros:

Let me start by telling you how this came about. I referenced earlier we were seeing companies that were similarly situated, same industry, same size, same geographic composition. And we were giving each of those, let's just say two companies, the same tools, employee ownership, how to drive employee engagement, et cetera. And in one company we'd see Ingersoll Rand type results, massive spike in engagement, drop in quit rates, and in a company, again, similarly situated, it wouldn't get worse, it's just engagement scores were flat, quit rates were flat. So, I started to notice just anecdotally personal traits of CEOs who were delivering these blowout culture shifts and they fell into certain categories like women seem to be doing a better job than men at driving these culture shifts. CEOs who in terms of their personal background grew up poor, CEOs who were immigrants, CEOs of deep religious faith. So, there were these categories of folks, and I think I was doing a fireside chat at some conference and somebody asked me this question of, "Why does it work sometimes, but not always. You've already acknowledged, Pete, this is hard, doesn't always work. Why doesn't it work?"

And I said, "We think there's something about leadership. And more specifically when I look at these categories of leaders who are doing such a great job, maybe there's a through line around empathy." I have no idea. This is just something we're spitballing with. And luckily for us, I think Deal Book in the New York Times or somebody maybe it was Axios, wrote a little blurb, which was kind of like, "What a joke, KKR talking about empathy", some kind of catchy title. And a psychology professor at Stanford named Jamil Zaki, who is the preeminent researcher on empathy, reached out to me and he said, "Hey, I'm really interested to understand what you're doing, where you think you might take this." And I went through what I just shared with you and he said, "So, what's your plan? When I hear you talk, is your plan to go focus on CEOs who grew up poor? That seems like kind of a crazy plan."

And I said, "Well, we haven't really established a plan yet. We're just trying to figure this out." And he said, "Well, what if I were to tell you that empathy is a variable trait? It's not what you've just suggested, which is there's these categories of people who have naturally higher levels of empathy. I could show you 50 years of research that shows that's not true and that empathy is variable." I said, "God, it's hard to believe. I would've thought a 55-year-old CEO is a fully baked human being." And he said, "Well, if you think about it, empathy is based on lived experience. So, as long as you're continuing to have life experiences, your empathy will naturally change." And he gave me an example of which is logical. Someone who suffers greatly is going to become more empathic. Not that we want our CEOs to suffer greater, but that was an example.

Lance Glinn:

Of course, of course.

Pete Stavros:

But it makes sense what are he saying. So, then he said, and I'll give you something else you probably wouldn't believe, which is I can measure empathy. And this has again been studied for a very long time. And so let me come in, let me measure the empathy of your CEOs and then give me all the data you've got on how the employees are doing at these companies and let's see how correlated they are. So, we did that. We didn't force our CEOs to do it, but we asked who wanted to opt in. We got a huge amount of interest. And they took these empathy tests and they're really fascinating. You're asked about your own personality, your own leadership style, and then you're shown images of people's faces, but you only see their eyes and you're asked to assess their emotional state. Is somebody frustrated or angry or confused?

Lance Glinn:

Only off their eyes?

Pete Stavros:

Only off their eyes, yeah. And so anyway, this test gives you three different measures of empathy, cognitive empathy, how well I can take your perspective. Emotional empathy, if I see you get emotional or cry, do I get moved emotionally? And then the third one's compassion. So, we got all this data and then we gave Jamil all the data we had on things like quit rates and engagement scores. He went off, did all the statistical analysis, and he came back and he said, "There's a way higher correlation than I would've guessed between leader empathy and for example, people being less likely to quit." So, then this is a really long wind up to your question about empathy gyms. So, then what do you do with this? Okay, there's this correlation. We're trying to drive higher engagement, lower quit rates, leader empathy is a very good, it's at least correlated with that.

So, what do we do with it? And it goes back to Jamil saying, "Well, this can be moved. This is a variable trait." So, how do we do that? First part is our CEOs fly out to Stanford and they spend a couple days with Jamil. So, empathy gyms, and I just actually went through one two days ago. You learn active listening. There's this thing called looping that gets yourself out of your own head to actually listen to what someone else is saying to you. How do you give feedback with empathy? All of these different tools. And so that's part of it. Okay, that's the empathy gym. These really these skills that can make you more empathic. Then it's about how do we get people more life experience?

And so one of them is have senior people do frontline work. If you're a factory, if you're a manufacturing CEO, maybe you spend a week every quarter in the factory on Kaizen events working side by side with workers. We partner with a financial health network as another example. And that financial health network takes senior executives into their local community to just give them a glimpse of what it's like to be a frontline worker living on the edge financially. So, opening up payday loans, low dollar balance checking and savings accounts, what's that experience like? So, those are examples of how we are trying to move leader empathy. And then we're going to have to see does it work? And then does the employee experience follow?

Lance Glinn:

That makes a lot of sense. And I find it so interesting, the eye test, so to speak, or for lack of a better term, the eye test, just judging these people's emotions just based solely off their eyes. But it makes a lot of sense that empathy could be a variable trait, but not something you necessarily would think as you mentioned. But the fact that experiences grow, life experiences as people get older and as people do more, they change. And obviously that can, as we've seen and as you mentioned, impact people's empathy, impact how people feel, how people act. And obviously it could then translate into how leaders go about running their businesses, running their companies. Do you think this empathy-

Pete Stavros:

And by the way, what it does to cultures, I mean, one of the interesting things about empathy that I would not ... There's so much of this that has been surprising to me, but empathy is actually believed to be correlated with a greater ability to hold people accountable, which I would've thought the opposite. A very empathic CEO, it's going to be a very soft culture. No one's really going to be held accountable. And the reason that's not the case is because if I as a leader display a lot of empathy and you trust that I have your best intentions at heart, I can give you feedback more easily and you can actually accept it and work on it. So, I didn't mean to interrupt, but there's the more you peel the onion on this empathy thing, it's very encouraging and it seems like there's a lot there.

Lance Glinn:

No, I think that that is a great point. You would think that the stricter more, the harder type of leader [inaudible 00:23:33]-

Pete Stavros:

The hard charging CEO gets the results.

Lance Glinn:

... would be more result driven. And not that they're not, because there are still leaders today who are like that and they're very successful. But you would think that those types of leaders would, you would think that it would be the opposite from what you just said. But the fact that that trust is built through empathy I think makes a lot of sense and is a really interesting takeaway from all of this. I want to just ask about public policy changes, if there are any. What could change from that level that could help accelerated option of not just empathy, but of the Ownership Works concept too? Could there be help really from the top, from our country's lawmakers, from legislation that could help make this Ownership Works and this broad-based ownership model be sort of the norm across industries?

Pete Stavros:

Yeah, so as I mentioned earlier, at Ownership Works, if we do a great job, we will reach, let's say a couple million workers over time, which would be great for those couple million workers and their families. But in the context of 135 million full-time working Americans, it's a rounding error. So, really the vision is how do we get 70 million, 80 million workers owning? And that is going to take policy. Now, you might ask, "Well, you're saying it's so great, so why do we need policy?" And the issue is these ownership cultures take years and years and years to develop. It is an investment up front, and there's not always a payoff. And the government's got lots of examples.

R&D tax credit being one of many, where when a company is faced with that type of long-term payoff with risk, they do nudge companies in a direction that is good for the country, good for the economy. And I'm just suggesting maybe we need to do that with ownership, if our goal is to much more broadly spread ownership of corporate America. I think our best shot at doing that is to modernize and make more effective the old ESOP laws. So, I don't want to go too far down a rabbit hole, but in 1974, there was a retirement bill passed. It's called a ERISA, a small part of ERISA was establishing tax incentives for companies to share stock ownership with workers with all employees.

And there was a boom in these ESOP formations in the seventies and eighties, it has declined very substantially. We now only get about 250 new ESOPs a year. And while those new ESOPs are amazing, they're small companies in a couple of industries. So, the median size is fewer than 50 workers, and it's really concentrated in the industrial and services sector. So, we're missing media, software, so many other parts of the economy, many of which are really the growth vectors for the American economy. So, I think with some changes, and again, I don't want to go down a rabbit hole, but I think with some updating of this old law, I think we could see a resurgence of ESOP activity.

So, not only let's keep doing what we're doing among small business, but bigger companies, I think we got a shot if we could modernize it. And the big dream is I mentioned Ownership Works having global ambitions, maybe that's the first step. So, maybe there's two steps that happen. We modernize US policy to encourage more worker ownership, maybe Ownership Works does the spade work to get other countries interested. And you'll see some news on this in the next 12 months. I think you'll see multiple pieces of news on that. And then maybe that is the first step internationally to then follow with policy overseas. And what if we could have harmonized policy as long as it's not too complicated in some of the major developed countries of the world, because again, companies are global. In 1974, this is one of the challenges with ESOPs, there were a lot of domestic only or almost entirely domestic companies. Now you look at the S&P 500, half the revenue's overseas. So, having a domestic only tax incentive is necessarily going to limit what we could ever accomplish with ownership through policy.

Lance Glinn:

Absolutely. And we're excited for that news to come out in the next 12 months as you drop that little teaser there. Pete, so, you've seen exits now where employee ownership has played a central role, one of them being the exit of Geostabilization International last year in 2024. What have been some of just the key lessons from these exits, both in terms of financial outcomes and the impact that drives the evolution of really employee ownership and Ownership Works? What have been sort of your key takeaways from these that you've now been able to then bring to other companies?

Pete Stavros:

Well, I'm glad you didn't ask about C.H.I Overhead Doors because that example has gotten so much attention. And I worry people are like, "Well, if there's such an incredible outcome, sure workers can participate." And that was a unicorn of a company.

Lance Glinn:

Well, the 60 Minutes piece on it was great, I must say.

Pete Stavros:

But we've done this 80 times and we're not the only ones. There's lots of other firms doing this. So, I appreciate you asking about a different example. So, Geostabilization is a company that remediates landslide risk. So, think of these are, it's largely construction workers in the field using pretty sophisticated tools to hold the earth back. That's what they do. And the company was suffering from a very high quit rate. I mean to the point of we were having to rehire the front line pretty much every other year.

Lance Glinn:

Wow.

Pete Stavros:

And there was a good reason for it because these often emergency jobs, sometimes in a rural town, there might be one road that leads to the hospital, for example. And if there's a landslide that-

Lance Glinn:

Covers that road, then-

Pete Stavros:

That's a big problem. So, the workers would have to rush to a site and they would have to stay until it was done, be away from their families, hard job. And over the course of, again, years, the leadership team rolled out employee ownership. I think did a phenomenal job of driving employee engagement. The quit rate, I don't remember these statistics, so I'm hesitant to quote them, but I want to say dropped by if it was almost 50% when we ... And please take these as rough [inaudible 00:30:31] because I just don't remember.

Lance Glinn:

I think your team mentioned 60% drop.

Pete Stavros:

In the quit rate, that sounds right. Yeah. Well, if they said it, it's right.

Lance Glinn:

Yeah.

Pete Stavros:

They're very analytical.

Lance Glinn:

Which is a great, an unbelievable success.

Pete Stavros:

Yeah. And so you asked about what are the takeaways? So, when we sold the company to a separate investor group, there was massive payout to the workforce and the new investor replicated the program.

Lance Glinn:

So, they kept it going.

Pete Stavros:

That was a very powerful day. There's this lack of trust I mentioned, where workers are like, "Am I really going to get paid out on this? Is this really going to happen?" And then you saw long tenured employees at the company make multiples of their annual income. And again, even people who had only been there a few years make 100%, it was kind of similar to this announcement that we'll make next week with yet another company. And then the new owner says, "And now we're going to run it back. You can do it all over again." So, you can imagine where that quit rate is going to settle. I mean, whatever progress we made, now it's real-

Lance Glinn:

Progress is going to continue.

Pete Stavros:

Yeah, now it's real. And there's another payout coming assuming they continue to perform. So, I would say the takeaways there were, well, there and with many other cases, leadership's critical. The CEO there has done an amazing job with this program. I think replicating the program, again, is important. So, it's not just, "Hey, a one and done. It was ownership for five years and now it's over." And then I think a lot of the tactics that we use to drive engagement up and quit rates down, which we've applied, we're always learning, as I said, these are all experiments and applying elsewhere. We continue to develop those best practices and try and share them across our portfolio. And then again, at Ownership Works.

Lance Glinn:

And the fact that it was replicated, I would say, or I believe that to you, that's something that just shows that what you're doing is really working besides just the payouts, but the fact that it's being replicated by the new investor, because I feel like when turnover like that happens, going from one firm to another, that new firm is going to want to keep things that are going well and that are helping the company. And the fact that they wanted to replicate what Ownership Works is doing and what KKR was doing. I would imagine that that brings you a lot of pride and a lot of joy to see that those employees, it's not just the one and done, as you mentioned, it's now for the next however many years, this ownership employee-based model is going to continue. I got to imagine that that was, besides the payouts, these people finally seeing the payouts, that's got to be one of the really great things that you got to witness over this.

Pete Stavros:

Yeah. And we've, by the way, done this a number of times now where a new investor group has come in and replicated the program. This example I've mentioned, which we'll get announced next week, same situation, new investor group coming in, they're replicating the program. And a couple of comments I'd make on that are, first of all, of course, they're going to replicate it. Could you imagine coming in as the new owner-

Lance Glinn:

And not, yeah.

Pete Stavros:

And you're like, "That was great, I'm sure that was a lot of fun and the culture was awesome and you guys got rewarded, but-

Lance Glinn:

That's all-

Pete Stavros:

We're taking that away.

Lance Glinn:

That's all over.

Pete Stavros:

So, it's not practical. The second thing I would say is we have many strategies and ideas of how we can help build this movement. And this is one of them. The way things work today, and we can debate how good or bad this is, is companies are going public later. They're often being sold to multiple investor groups over a period of decades, and then they go public as a huge company. That's kind of relative to when I started in this industry in the nineties. That's more the norm. Well, these ownership programs are going to be like viruses infecting the market because they're going to be in all these companies and they're going to be continued and continued and continued.

And then ultimately, when they go public, like Ingersoll Rand did, Ingersoll Rand effectively crystallized that ownership program, and it'll live on forever. It's now, I think they have maybe not 20,000 employees in 80 countries. Everybody's an owner, and that'll never change. So, that is one of the things that make me optimistic is I'm seeing all of these companies now in the market that have these programs, are developing these cultures, and I think it's very difficult to pull that back.

Lance Glinn:

So, Pete, as we begin to wrap up our conversation, Ownership Works has already made a big impact in its first few years as we've been discussing over the course of our conversation. But as you look ahead and you said it's not a quick fix, it's something that takes time. But as you look ahead and as you've teased over the course of our conversation, some announcements over the next week, over the next couple months, over the next 12 months, so obviously a lot to look forward to, but as you look ahead for the next 5, 10, 15 years, the next phase of this movement, what is your vision with it? What's your dream? What do you foresee for this organization and all it really could achieve 5, 10, 15 years down the road?

Pete Stavros:

Well, I don't think it's going to be Ownership Works alone. The policy effort I mentioned is a separate organization called Expanding ESOPs. That's a coalition of, there're again, about 100 organizations. It's the vast majority of the existing ESOP community all saying, "Hey, ESOPs are awesome. How do we get many more of them?" And I think the big idea is, as I mentioned, change the business culture, normalize this, get the policy in place to support companies that want to go down this path. Ownership Works I view as a clearinghouse for best practices, as a real advocate for this idea, a convener. We sometimes get 100 CEOs together at a time, some of whom have already deployed ownership programs, many of whom are curious about whether it could make sense for their company. And all of this taken together. You asked about the dream. The dream is like 80 million workers to own and for it to become a different economy over time.

Not that this is a cure all, not that what we're doing is going to on its own, fix all of the many problems we have in the economy, but it's a start. As Anna-Lisa Miller who runs Ownership Works said to me one time, "A small step can make a big step smaller." So, let's get started. This is one step in the right direction to make the economy not only better for workers, but to make it more productive. I mean, when you think about those quit rates I mentioned and these engagement scores, which are terrible, it's a massive tax on economic productivity, and the only way to really generate wealth for the country is through productivity gains. That's the key. And I think this could play a small part.

Lance Glinn:

A small step can make a big step smaller. I like that from Anna-Lisa. Well, Pete, I appreciate you once again for joining us here Inside the ICE House.

Pete Stavros:

Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1:

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