Yesterday was the first day of class for my Masters program. I was excited to finally get started. We began with an overview of the class and the structure of the program. It is basically the following: there is an initial portion that is one semester long that all students take part in. Then each student picks area of concentration either, General Management, Finance, Marketing, Supply Chain Management or Management of Athletic organizations and possibly (if enough people participate) a cooperative management one. Not sure which I wil do yet.

There are 25 five students including me, 6 of us are from other countries one Chilean, a Venezuelan woman and a Columbian and two Mexicans who haven’t arrived yet because of visa problems. The rest are from Spain. They are mostly from all over the Basque region and a few from beyond. The group seems to be a mix of those who are currently working and young people who have never worked. We also got our first assignment, which is to do a business plan in a group. I have three other people in my group, the live about an hour away in either San Sebastian and Bilbao, which should make group work interesting.

The highlight was when José Maria Ormaetxea, one of the five founders of the first Mondragón Coop, ULGOR (which later became Fagor), as well as the founder of Caja Laboral and the first director (the coop bank) and former President of MCC gave a speech about the cooperative experience to us. He 80 years old but still quite vibrant and seems to have an exceedingly clear and sharp memory of the early days of the coops. He outlined the growth of the Coops from a small group of student who were around the Priest Arizmendiarrieta to its current state.
He divided the MCC's history into three phases: 1) the Christian period from the founding of the first coop in1955 until 1973. The period when a small group of people who surrounded Arizmendi spread the coops motivated largely by christian values and because of the Dictatorship in the context often of Christian meetings etc.

2) The second phase he identified was the Romantic phase from 1973 until 1990. This period is characterized by a widening of the cooperatives to individuals who are motivated by idealistic, but now religious beliefs and is also a period of tremendous growth. When many new coops are started, when Lagun-Aro the social service coop was setup and the first research center was set up. The expansion of inter-cooperative support.

3) The third period Ormaetxea identifies is the period of Pragmatism from 1990 to the present. This is the period of increased competition, European integration and huge expansion. It is also the period when Coops begin to incorporate large amounts of non-owner workrs and operate subsidiaries internationally. The Mondragón Cooperative Corporation (although formed in 1987) takes on the leading role in defining the course of the coops.

Ormaetxea also made the point that because of globalization and increased competition that most likely in 50 years there would be no coops. That is, there would be companies with a small token amount of cooperative leadership, but in order to remain flexible and competitive they would not be able to incorporate new workers as owners and would have to do much of their work abroad. When ask about the prospect of turning subsidiaries in other countries into coops, he replied in no uncertain terms that it was impossible and would never, ever happen! Specifically, the company Fagor has a plant in Poland with 1,000 workers who seem uninterested in becoming a coop. However, Ormaetxea, a man who helped lead the fashioning of the world’s premier industrial cooperatives from an impoverished backwater, during the repressive reign of Franco believes spreading coops or even growing them at all is impossible.

He seemed to me like a man who was prone to overstatement and liked to make an impression. He is quite entertaining and it was impressive to meet him in the flesh. I will let you know how the class goes in the next few days.

Tomorrow my classes start at Mondragón Universitatea, (or the University of Mondragón) in addition I will be doing an internship which will start sometime later in the year. Here is little background on the University. MU itself is only about ten years old, however it roots lie in the very first project that the founder of the Mondragón Coops, the priest Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta, undertook. Today it is an integral part of the MCC and many graduates go directly into the coop workforce. Originally founded as a technical secondary school in the 1940´s, it would provide a basis for the coops in terms of forming young people with the necessary skills and same vision for transforming their community. In 1997, after years of evolution and the creation of a social science school and a business school, the University was formed by merging the three separate institutions. Its explicit goal is to link the academic world closely to the world of work, specifically in the coops. Most undergraduates are required to work in a coop at come point during their studies and in the program I will be in, contact with coops is frequent (plus hopefully the internship). It is a small institution and relatively intimate. As I get to know it better I will provide more info.