About South Mountain… And This Blog

South Mountain Company, Inc. is an employee owned design/build and renewable energy company founded in 1975.  Located on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, our worker cooperative’s 30 employees (more than half of whom are full owners) provide a full range of integrated environmental building services:  planning, architecture, building, interiors, energy efficiency services, and renewable energy.

Companies are entities that people start, capitalize, run, work for, buy and obtain services from, sell, and disband. But South Mountain has become, for us, as much a community as a company. My colleagues and I  not only build houses and neighborhoods, we build connections and bonds between people, between people and land, and between commerce and place. We are organized around the idea of maintaining and perpetuating an ongoing business community.

I took two six month sabbaticals in the winters of 2003 and 2004 to let the company emerge from the constraints of my leadership and to write a book about our way of doing business,  THE COMPANY WE KEEP: Reinventing Small Business for People, Community, and Place.  It was published by Chelsea Green in 2005 and a revised second edition – re-named COMPANIES WE KEEP: Employee ownership and the Business of Community and Place – was released in 2008.

Partly due to these books – and partly in the course of doing business, and speaking, and teaching – there has come to be a small group of people who have expressed interest in what’s going on at SMC – what we are doing and thinking about.  The purpose of this blog is to communicate about just that – what we (and you!!) are thinking, doing, and dreaming -  about being in  business and creating community in the 21st century.

Here, then, you will find musings from and about one small business on one small island.  Our lessons emerge from our stories, but ours is only one of the many small business stories of experimentation unfolding today in the most turbulent (and promising) of times.  The simultaneous development of countless such stories, rich with intersecting themes – like shingles layered onto a steeply pitched roof which shelter only because they are woven together – is what gives added meaning to these.  I hope many voices will make this a rich conversation.

This blog provides up-to-date news of goings-on at
South Mountain Company and occasional musings
and short essays from John (and others).