Barcelona- More Than A Club

I love Barcelona Football Club. As they say themselves it's Mes Que Un Club. It's owned by the fans and has long been associated with the free spirit of the Catalonia region of Spain. Despite being in effect a co-operative, they are also one of the richest, most successful football clubs in the world.
As John Lewis and numerous other employee or customer owned companies show, there is an viable alternative to running a business in order to please the short term interests of shareholders. If only some British clubs, currently up to their ears in debt, had adopted the Barca model.

Quality Wins

Your Life Your Style is to be Winchester's stockist of Steiff teddy bears. It may be you haven't heard of Steiff but to anyone who collects these delightful furry toys, they are the number one. Why? Partly because they've been making bears for 100 years but mainly because the quality is superb.
Like many German firms, Steiff bring together good design, precision manufacturing and obseesive quality control. They tried making some of their bears in China but found so many items were below their standard that they went back to making them exclusively in Germany.
Our own manufacturers can learn from this. For years, British goods became a by-word for shoddy, thanks to complacency and lack of worker involvement. Then the far east took over mass production.
When Britain did something well, it was a world beater- Rolls Royce or malt whisky for example. Thankfully a new generation of British manufacturers are in that tradition and recognise that you can't beat the Chinese on price but you can succeed by offering good design, skilled manufacture and quality control.
We visited the Grayshott factory this week which houses Dartington Pottery. As well as the special edition pieces we stock, they provide crockery for many restaurants. The work of these thirty or so people, who operate as a co-operative, is breathtaking in its skill and care. If a customer wants cheap ceramics, China beckons but if they want quality and value, Grayshott is there for them, and offers an example to British manufacturers in the 21st century.

Barcelona's Victory Is Good Business

We English are expected to support English clubs in Europe but I don't much like the English Premiership set-up so I prefer to support a team I do admire like Barcelona.

Compare and Contrast. Man Utd, like all English clubs, embraced the free market and in their case ended up owned by an American company who saddled them with £700 million in debt. Barcelona are owned by their 113,000 members who elect their Board and President. They even turned down a £20 million sponsorship of their shirts in favour of promoting UNICEF. Football clubs started as teams with fans- Barcelona have stayed that way and still manage to be more financially successful than Man Utd.

There is a lesson. Don't underestimate co-operatives as a way to run a business- John Lewis, The Co-Op Bank and the Phone Co-Op all do very well, as do many of the trusts that run arts organisations. The danger of the more common business model is that shareholders come before customers and employees. The result is bigger and more remote (geographically and emotioanlly) companies.

Giving power to the people who are the company- the employees or the customers- ensures that the business doesn't forget why it was created in the first place.