I, Tomato: Morning Star’s Radical Approach to Management

The Morning Star Company, which handles 40 percent of California’s processed tomato crop, is the largest tomato processing company in the world. That’s impre…
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Question by Colheraine: does anyone have a recipe for green tomato butter or fresh ripe tomatoes????
my mother used to make green tomato butter and green tomato pickles but can’t seem to find anyone that knows

Best answer:

Answer by Dr R
You can make curry of green tomato like other vegetables. Make it little sweet.
Try some more Indian veg dishes here
http://indian-veh-food.blogspot.com

Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!

25 Comments

  1. MORNING STAR’S RADICAL APPROACH TO MANAGEMENT.

    For more than 40 years, Morning Star has been demonstrating that you don’t
    need managers to run a successful company.

    The Morning Star Company, which handles 40 percent of California’s
    processed tomato crop, is the largest tomato processing company in the
    world. That’s impressive, but the most unique thing about Morning Star is
    that it has no managers. Instead, Morning Star embraces an approach they
    call “self-management.” As Paul Green, Jr. of Morning Star’s
    Self-Management Institute puts it: “Self-management is, at a very very high
    level, exactly the way you live when you go home from work. We just ask you
    to keep that hat on when you come to work at Morning Star.”

    Even if you don’t agree with everything they have done you should look at
    this video because it shows another way and will challenge many of your
    firmest beliefs.

    I, Tomato: Morning Star’s Radical Approach to Management

  2. Far too many companies say they cannot pay fair wage to labor, but then
    they have this high price dead layer of management, so get rid of the
    deadbeat mangers workers can supervise themselves, and the company can pay
    fair wages in today’s so called highly competitive market.

  3. *Radical approach to managing a company*

  4. Video report on how self-management at Morning Star works.

    “The Morning Star Company, which handles 40 percent of California’s
    processed tomato crop, is the largest tomato processing company in the
    world. That’s impressive, but the most unique thing about Morning Star is
    that it has no managers. Instead, Morning Star embraces an approach they
    call “self-management.” As Paul Green, Jr. of Morning Star’s
    Self-Management Institute puts it: “Self-management is, at a very very high
    level, exactly the way you live when you go home from work. We just ask you
    to keep that hat on when you come to work at Morning Star.”

    In our everyday lives, we don’t have bosses telling us which careers or
    hobbies to pursue. If we want to purchase a car or a home, we don’t have to
    get permission. Sure, we consult with friends and family before making
    important decisions, but as long as we’re prepared to take responsibility
    for our choices, we’re free to do what we want.

    The same spirit reigns at Morning Star. Employees decide how their skill
    sets can best help Morning Star succeed and then develop their own lists of
    roles and responsibilities in collaboration with their colleagues. If
    Morning Star employees want to purchase new equipment, they don’t ask
    managers for permission. Rather, they discuss potential purchases with
    colleagues who will be affected by the purchase and, if others with
    expertise support the decision, they simply buy what they need. There is no
    R&D department at Morning Star. There are, however, strong incentives for
    every employee to innovate. Workers who successfully innovate don’t receive
    new titles. They earn the respect of their colleagues in addition to
    financial compensation.

    Running a firm without managers seems like a crazy idea to many, but is it?
    If the most prosperous societies are organized around institutions that
    promote freedom and responsibility, why shouldn’t a similar approach work
    within a firm? If market-based societies are best able to take advantage of
    local and dispersed knowledge, then doesn’t it make sense to give staffers
    with the most local knowledge the freedom to make decisions?

    More than 50 years ago, Leonard E. Read wrote “I, Pencil,” an essay that
    asks how we can expect central planning to succeed when nobody in the world
    possess all the knowledge needed to produce even a simple pencil. For more
    than 40 years, Morning Star has been demonstrating that you don’t need
    managers to run a successful company.

    (Full disclosure: Morning Star founder Chris Rufer is a supporter of Reason
    Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason TV.)

    About 6 minutes. Produced by Paul Feine and Alex Manning.”

  5. This video is talking about Morning Star’s self management model. I’m not
    sure I get this concept in it’s entirety. I’m more or less self managed at
    work on a day to day, but I do need a manager to help deal with bigger
    problems I can’t resolve. They say that politics doesn’t exist in this
    company so maybe they don’t have “bigger problems” they can’t solve. I like
    the sound of that.

  6. A company without bosses. That’s an innovative company IMHO.

  7. I’m sorry, but you’re a little off base. The whole notion of a firm entails
    lack of internal price systems—it is THE FEATURE that differentiates firms
    from groups of individual contractors. This isn’t a controversial
    statement. It’s the whole impetus behind Nobel Price winning economist
    Ronald Coase’s watershed article “The Nature of the Firm.” As far as force
    goes, if a person is allowed to quit without consequence other than loss of
    compensation, then the contract is voluntary, not coerced.

  8. So this company has been successful for 40 years. The one question I have
    is if this is an effective model for numerous industries, why has it not
    been more broadly adopted?

  9. “doesn’t work in the real world” sorry, what alternate dimension does this
    company operate in?

  10. I don’t understand how this point is an argument in favor of
    Self-Management. If anything, it’s an argument in favor of the idea that
    technology might one day render firms of all kinds obsolete, regardless of
    which management systems they use. Care to clarify?

  11. I meant general real world, where all 7 billion humans are involved, not
    just 50 employees

  12. I think you missed the point. The people being profiled in this video don’t
    really need to “own” anything in order to have a sense of satisfaction.
    They get wages they like and they do work they find satisfying. Whether or
    not they have stake the the company is kind of meaningless, though it would
    make alot of sense to own stock in the company you work for and are
    actively invested in improving. Does ownership need to be “collective” if
    it’s radically democratized? I think not.

  13. The video tells other story. 14:13 Self-management is a socialist idea, and
    always has been. Deal with it. (I am not able to post the link in any form,
    but google for “I.3 What could the economic structure of anarchy look
    like?”, go for the link at pageabode and read setion I.3.2.)

  14. What has that got to do with anything? At all? Besides you being a
    quota-counting product of the prevailing culture and racist mindset in the
    US?

  15. If employees were born into firms and never made a conscious decision to
    work there, you might have a point. I don’t think that’s the case, but I
    see from the article that your father also works for MorningStar, so maybe
    there’s some sort of inter-generational serfdom taking place there. It’s
    fine if people want to work in this system, but the market will select
    against it if it can’t beat normal management systems in ROI in a broad
    range of circumstances (and it wouldn’t if Coase is correct).

  16. very hayekian

  17. Being collectively owned by the workers vs. being privately owned by all
    the workers seems to be more of a conflict of terms more than anything else
    as regardless of which term you used you’d be effectively talking about the
    same thing right?

  18. If I don’t make an income I will die. That’s a ‘cute’ idea.

  19. when you hear things like this you must assume there is some union
    propaganda at work.

  20. I wasn’t talking about Libertarianism per se, rather I just found it odd
    that a pro-capitalist group like ‘Reason’ would give positive coverage to a
    company experimenting with a socialist idea. However you make an
    interesting point and I’m glad you did. This video (watch?v=EOl43BA0mR8)
    advocates some of the same things that seems to be going on in the video
    but perhaps with slightly different language or primary intent.

  21. While Chris J. Rufer is the guy that started the company it’s unclear as to
    if he can be called the owner. When I looked at this company’s website I
    notice that the few times it refers to him as a fellow colleague rather
    than any kind of boss, then again that may just be how he prefers to think
    of himself. So whether it’s a worker co-op this guy started or he’s just
    choosing to run it this way I can’t be sure of until or unless I can find
    out more about it.

  22. How involved is hiring? How is work assigned? How do workers advance? I
    basically work in this kind of environment now, but I still have superiors
    (thankfully) I can run to if something goes wrong or if I need help.

  23. My personal experience with Libertarians and Socialists is that both groups
    have more in common than either of them care to admit, and that many of
    their conflicts seem to be a conflict of terms rather than actual ideals.

  24. No market? Are you kidding me? No price system… I guess wages in exchange
    for labor isnt market driven … no force involved? tell that to workers in
    planned economies… everything in our economy is market drivern…
    everything… there may not directly be competition inside a firm, but that
    does not mean that there is a lack of a market.

Comments are closed.