There are two primary objectives of this course. The first is to provide students with an intellectual toolkit to analyze their companies and industries through the lens of ownership. The way in which a company is owned significantly affects its ability to compete by shaping the type of resources it has access to as well as how it makes decisions. Ownership models are also better at solving different types of strategic problems (e.g., scale and differentiation). By understanding these dynamics, students will be able to build long-term, sustainable strategies that account for the strengths/weaknesses that are built into both their companies as well as those of their competitors. They will also be able to consider when a shift in ownership model (e.g., Dell going from public to private) can be a tool for changing the trajectory of their company. Finally, they will be able to analyze their industry and its main players through the ownership lens, which will help them to identify new opportunities (e.g., acquiring a family business with a succession problem) as well as threats (e.g., a cooperative that will respond aggressively to price cuts to preserve its market share).

The second objective is to provide exposure to the range of ownership models and the ways in which they differ from each other. We will analyze companies from the major types, including cooperatives (Land O’Lakes, Tillamook), employee-owned (SRC, W. L. Gore), charity-owned (IKEA, Hershey), mutuals (REI, Vanguard), family businesses (Cargill, Mars), and partnerships (Brown Brothers Harriman). We will also explore hybrid companies. A number of leading companies, like Alphabet, Berkshire Hathaway, and Ford, are a mix of public ownership and private control. Others are private but have a mix of different ownership models, such as WaWa (employee and family) and Bosch (charity and family). Many of these cases may be familiar to students, but we will be analyzing them in a different way, exploring how some of the distinctive attributes of their strategies and cultures are connected to their ownership models. Many students will work for companies that are not widely held public companies, and most of them will compete against such companies.

The focus of this proposed course is on the connection between the ability of a company to build/sustain competitive advantage and its ownership model (e.g., public, employee, charity, family). Ownership shapes both the resources that companies have access to (human, financial, and social capital) as well as how they allocate those resources to create advantage. Ownership models can be seen as solutions to specific strategic problems. For example, public companies came to prominence because of their ability to pool capital in an industrializing world that required economies of scale. As broader trends change the competitive context, then different ownership models will become more or less advantageous.

We will explore how ownership practically affects the ways in which companies build their strategies, as well as how their competitive advantage shifts when their ownership model changes (e.g., going public). Guest speakers – current/former CEOs – will also be incorporated into the course to allow student to interactively explore how companies in practice use ownership as a competitive weapon. In their final exam, students will apply the course lessons to a specific situation.

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