Word: spedan
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From Oxford to Oxford. The chain began in 1864, when John Lewis, a buyer of silk and dress materials, opened a shop in London's Oxford Street. Legend has it that his son Spedan, while checking the books one day, found the family was earning more than the entire roster of employees. He devised a profit-sharing scheme, and in 1929 started paying "partnership benefits" to all. With no common shares issued, about half the profits are paid out annually in bonuses and nonvoting shares to em ployees, amounting to about 15% of their salaries. Through councils in each...
Another of Spedan Lewis' pioneering ideas was "learnership," a plan to recruit university graduates for executive training. Says the official company history: "Mr. John Lewis objected to these elegant imports almost as strongly as he objected to young women with red hair, and it became necessary when he made his periodical visitations at Oxford Street for all red-haired girls to keep out of sight and all young men with incurable Oxford accents to put on their hats and walk about pretending to be customers." But the practice survived, and the chain's present chairman, scholarly Sir Bernard...
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