This reminds me of a similar story told by E.F. Schumacher in his 1979 book "Good Work." Quoting from the chapter "A viable future visible in the present":
The second link of my little chain is this company called Scott Bader,
a plastics company founded by Ernest Bader, a Swiss Quaker immigrant to
England before the First World War. He's now about eighty-five. Ernest
Bader was penniless when he started in England. He said, All my life I
will have to work for others. What a dreadful system. Well, it didn't
work out like that. He was an entrepreneur and he had a business and in
1951 he suddenly woke up and said, I am now doing to all these people what
I suffered from when it was done to me. I am not going to go out of this
life with this feeling. No, I must do something. So he got in touch with
various people, including myself, and said, I want to put this on a basis
that I as a Quaker and a pacifist believe in. I don't believe in what I
am doing. And so we worked very hard and hammered out a constitution for
this firm. Ernest Bader said, No, I don't want to have ownership of this
company, and so all the capital, except 10 percent, was vested in the
commonwealth, which was set up for this purpose as a limited company. The
equity doesn't lie anymore with Ernest Bader, it lies with that
commonwealth, and everybody who works for a certain length of time becomes
a member of the commonwealth. Legally speaking, the commonwealth is the
owner of the operating company. At first the family retained 10 percent
founder's share, so arranged that they had a majority, not with the
intention of using it but as a last resort. Because it is jolly difficult
to build something up but it is very easy to ruin it.
[...]
It was not until 1963, that is, twelve years later, that we felt it worked.
The founder's shares were also put into the general pocket of the
commonwealth, so it is the administration of the commonwealth that owns
the thing.
Schumacher goes on to describe how this created a radical realignment of incentives for the company and to list some of the effects created by this realignment. For example, they put a cap on the maximum spread between the highest paid and lowest paid employees, committed to staying small (spinning off new companies when they needed to grow), and required that a significant portion of all profits be invested in the local community.
Scott Bader still exists and is still owned and run by the employees:
"The company is owned by a trust on behalf of all its employees — known as partners - who have a say in the running of the business and receive a share of annual profits"
i hope every business decision does not need to be put to a vote by entire staff.
Not that much different from how things work in public corporations. Every shareholder has a say in the running of a business, but AMD does not check with me for every single decision they make, even though I own a share of the company. Except in this case, the shareholders and the employees are identical sets.
That's the way most coops work coop by ownership not coop by management except for major decisions where everyone one get their say.
I once chaired a share holders meeting of a coop and had to ask the founder to stop speaking as he had all ready spoken on the substantive motion and other junior members wanted to speak. Thank goodness for Citrine (The Uk equivalent to Roberts Rules of Debate)
Scott Bader still exists and is still owned and run by the employees:
http://www.scottbader.com/governance.html