Preface

Ownership is one of the most powerful codes of our society. It shapes the way we live, work, and interact with the world. Companies – and through them the products we use, the services we rely on, the workplaces that sustain us – are all governed by the rules of ownership. How a company is owned determines who makes decisions, how value is created, and who benefits from that value – in short, it directly steers corporate behavior. As Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics, puts it: “More than the design of specific products or services, what matters most is the deep design of the organisation itself.”

For decades, the dominating societal and legal understanding of corporate ownership was to define companies as commodity: something to inherit, sell, or trade; a commodity; a tool for generating financial wealth for its owners. This framing is at the heart of a shareholder-value capitalism, where business ownership is treated as an investment to be maximized rather than a responsibility to be exercised – with the result that the company’s purpose, its stakeholders and effects on society often become an afterthought to shareholder value and short-term profit maximization. But what if we saw ownership differently – not as entitlement, but as responsibility? Not as a tool for wealth extraction, but as stewardship?

Historically, many cultures have recognized ownership as something far beyond personal financial gain. All over the world, family businesses are firm in the belief that the company doesn’t serve the family but the family serves the company. In Japan, many of the world’s oldest companies have survived for centuries by entrusting leadership to those most capable, not to heirs or those who can pay the most. And in many indigenous cultures, ownership is viewed not as personal possession, but as a responsibility to the land, the community, and future generations. Many of these models were not about wealth extraction, but about stewardship.

Steward-ownership is building on these traditions and values and translates them into a concrete, legal company model. As Prof. Nien-Hê Hsieh from Harvard Business School observes: “Steward-ownership is taking us back to the future. When corporations first formed, governments only granted the right to incorporate for a clear purpose. Over time, we’ve strayed from that original sense of corporation. So while steward-ownership points to the future, it also brings us back to the origins of what corporations were meant to be.”

Steward-ownership challenges the notion that money equals power, asking the radical questions: “Who should have power and why?”; and “What is enough?". By decoupling money and power in the long run, steward-ownership ensures that companies remain self-determined and purpose-oriented in the long run. “It rewrites the psychology of companies, changing the deep structures that shape their behavior”, as The New Yorker describes it. Steward-owned companies don’t exist for the wealth of their shareholders and they are stewarded into the future by capable, value-aligned people closely connected to the company.

Independently from each other, companies across generations and regions have adopted the same principles, same notion of corporate ownership and brought it to life – a convergent evolution, which we call steward-ownership today. As Germany’s President Frank-Walter Steinmeier puts it, the entrepreneurs trailblazing this form of business form an “economic avant-garde” that strengthens the idea of a free and social market economy. While each entrepreneur’s focus is first and foremost to create coherence between their company and its ownership structure, together they show how entrepreneurship can be a force for good.

Steward-ownership cannot be understood through abstract principles alone. It’s the companies – family businesses, startups, and global corporations reimagining ownership – that really bring it to life. Whether for a SME looking to secure succession, a tech startup striving to remain independent, critical infrastructure or social businesses striving to prevent mission dilution – steward-ownership answers a diverse set of real-life entrepreneurial challenges. That’s the beauty of this movement: the variety, the diversity of solutions.

For this movement to become even more diverse and flourishing, steward-ownership needs to become more accessible. We need more narratives about this company type, better-suited legal and political frameworks and a shift in the quality of capital available so that entrepreneurs can not only make a free decision whether the model is right for them but also implement it.

“The stories we tell literally make the world”, as writer Chris Cleaves reminds us. For a while now, we have mainly been told stories of entrepreneurial success such as high financing rounds, exits, multi-million-dollar multinational corporations and monopolies.

But this needs to change. As steward-ownership entrepreneur Juho Makkonen puts it, “economists are great at making capitalism sound like the laws of physics: that these are the objective truths about how things work and can't be changed. This isn't true. Our economic systems are created by humans, and they can be changed by humans.” This book highlights stories, reflections, and insights from those already working on this change with innovative forms of ownership. We hope it will inspire you to find your connection to ownership as stewardship, not as wealth-ownership – and allow you to tell your own story. And maybe together we can prove Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert right and show that this is “the future of business."