Budgets: The Board’s Plan for Governance Investment
By Michael Healy 135 March - April - 2008 The board of directors fulfills an essential governing role in a cooperatively owned, democratically controlled business. Few assets are more valuable to a cooperative than a board that functions well, learns what it needs to do its job expertly, and provides excellent leadership. Providing that excellent leadership requires expertise, and developing expertise requires investment. In [...]
Balance Sheets: Getting the Picture of Your Co-op’s Financial Position
By Mark Goehring 132 September - October - 2007 Our cooperatives aim to provide value on behalf of member owners and often take a wide-ranging approach on how to express and demonstrate that organizational accomplishment. When it comes to managing and reporting financial performance and condition, traditional financial statements do quite nicely. Financial statements are not good places in which to exercise “local control” [...]
Monitoring Report Decision Tree
This flowchart describes the steps and questions to use during the process of accepting or rejecting a monitoring report. Use during a meeting or beforehand to prepare yourself.
Handling Emotional Conflict of Interest
By Carolee Colter 130 May - June - 2007 By now, probably most co-op boards of directors have a policy on conflicts of interest. For example, when a board member has a financial stake in a company that potentially or actually competes or does business with the co-op, this information is revealed to the board, and the affected board member may be barred from [...]
The Board Role in the Accountability Stream
By Marilyn Scholl 130 May - June - 2007 Boards of directors are the critical link between owners and management in the accountability chain for a cooperative. If boards don’t have a good understanding of how accountability works or don’t have good systems for accomplishing it, the job can be frustrating. Accountability mirrors empowerment To begin, we must recognize that accountability and empowerment go [...]
Monitoring the Manager
By Mark Goehring 123 March - April - 2006 There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is commonly known to directors and managers. It is a dimension open to interpretation—potentially as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between too much and too little, between knowing and doing, and it lies between the pit of a director’s [...]
Rebating Superdividends to Members in the UK
West Midlands Co-operative Society (WM) and Oxford, Swindon & Gloucester Co-operative Society (OSG) have recently merged to create the fourth largest co-operative society in the UK: The Midcounties Co-operative. They currently operate co-operative funeral services, co-operative childcare, retail stores, travel agencies, post offices and Motorworld. Superdividend has revolutionized the membership of The Midcounties Co-operative. Superdividend rebates members a share of the Society’s profits in [...]
Avoiding Post-Expansion Burnout: The board of directors’ role
By Bill Gessner 120 September - October - 2005 More than half of our food co-ops have engaged in planning and implementing an expansion project during the past three years. As demanding as these projects can be, the real challenge begins when the co-op opens its doors in the expanded store. An earlier article by Carolee Colter (CG #116, Jan.–Feb. 2005) described the challenges [...]