Fellows
Our OAW Fellows help ensure our research programme is always highly relevant and addresses critical challenges for employees, businesses and policy-makers. Fellows are all leaders in their fields, from inside the EO sector and beyond:
Patrick Burns, Senior Fellow
Patrick Burns is a senior fellow with Ownership at Work; a board member of the Employee Ownership Association and was its chief executive from 2004-11, transforming it from a campaign group into the acknowledged voice of the UK’s £30 billion employee ownership sector.
Patrick is a winner of the Philip Baxendale Fellowship Award for outstanding contribution to the growth of employee ownership in the UK.
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He chairs the Trust Board of financial planners Paradigm Norton; recent roles have included board membership of the eaga Trust, chairing the shareholder council of employee owned Be Caring, and advising public sector bodies as director of mutuals development with Prospects Group from 2012-17, including acting as one of the Coalition Government’s mutuals ambassadors. He has previously held roles as policy director of The Work Foundation think tank, as a management journalist and as an economic adviser with the TUC. He is a Visiting Fellow of the University of Kingston Business School.


Graeme Nuttall OBE
Graeme Nuttall OBE is a solicitor and chartered tax adviser; partner Fieldfisher, London; Executive Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at The Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, a trustee of the Institute for the Future of Work and a director of several employee ownership trust trustee companies.
Author of ‘Sharing Success: The Nuttall Review of Employee Ownership’ (Department for Business, Innovation & Skills, 2012), ‘EO v3.0 – Employee ownership with added Gandhian purpose’ (Fieldfisher, 2020) and co-author and contributor to various publications including ‘Employee Ownership: Legal and Tax Aspects’ (with John Nelson-Jones) (Fourmat, 1987).
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Through his advice to the pathfinder public service mutuals Graeme helped make the case for them as a way to transform public services. Graeme was a member of the HM Treasury Advisory Group that developed the UK’s tax advantaged share incentive plan and enterprise management incentives arrangement. The employee ownership trust was introduced in the UK as a result of the findings of the Nuttall Review. He was the FT 2013 Innovative Lawyer of the Year. Graeme received an OBE in the Queen’s 2014 Birthday Honours for services to employee share plans, public service mutuals and employee ownership.
Loren Rogers
Loren Rodgers joined the staff of the U.S.-based National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO) in 2005 as director of research, and in 2010 he took over from Corey Rosen as the NCEO’s executive director. He has been working in employee ownership since 1995 as a researcher, consultant, public speaker, author, and media contact.
Loren specializes in all forms of employee ownership, with an emphasis on U.S. employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) and equity compensation plans, including best management practices in plan design, communications, employee involvement, governance, management, and organizational culture.
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He speaks extensively and writes for academic, trade, and employee-ownership publications in the US and abroad on topics including employee motivation, open-book management, employee education, organization dynamics, and business literacy. He works with firms on technical training, group norms, survey assessment, plan design, and communications.
Before joining the NCEO in 2005, Loren was a senior principal at Ownership Associates, an employee ownership consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked for ten years. Loren has a Masters in Public Policy from the University of Michigan, where he studied employee ownership and international development with a focus on Slavic Europe.
Loren grew up in the Midwest of the United States and lived in Czechoslovakia for three years. He is taking a deep breath after renovating an old house in Oakland with an extensive garden and a beehive. He is a rock-climber, cooks Indian food, and is humbled at the opportunity to keep the NCEO a strong and vital contributor to employee ownership.


Isabella Miller
Isabella has been the Head of Branch of John Lewis in Glasgow since 2014. She leads 350 Partners to deliver great customer service in the UK’s largest co owned business. Isabella joined the John Lewis Partnership after graduating with a MA in Geography from Aberdeen University and has worked throughout the UK and in the JLP London head office.
Isabella has been President of the John Lewis Council and in 2020 was appointed Co-Chair of Scotland for Employee Ownership. She is a Director of Glasgow Chamber of Commerce and the Trading Company of the National Galleries for Scotland.Isabella is married with 2 children and is almost an ‘empty nester’. She loves open water swimming and fly fishing (but not at the same time).
Dr Aneesh Banerjee
Dr Aneesh Banerjee is Course Director of the Global MBA and Associate Professor in Technology & Innovation Management at The Business School (formerly Cass), City University of London. His research has been published in leading academic journals such as International Journal for Operations and Production Management, Social Science and Medicine, R&D Management, Strategic Organization amongst others and it has also been recognized with awards from the International Society for Professional Innovation Management (ISPIM) and the Academy of Management (AOM). In 2018, he co-authored the Review of Literature on Employee Ownership and the Final Evidence Report of the Ownership Effect Inquiry that led to the Ownership Dividend Report – The Economic Case for Employee Ownership.
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He lectures on topics in Technology & Innovation, Machine Learning, Data-driven Decision Making, and Digital Strategy and his pedagogy has been recognized twice with City, University of London’s highest recognition. Before re-joining academia, Dr Banerjee has spent close to a decade in several leadership roles in the technology industry with SAP and Accenture. He continues to consult on projects involving digital transformation, digital marketing, and building an organisational culture for data-driven decisions.


Stefan Stern
Stefan Stern has been writing and commenting on business and management for three decades. His career in journalism has included stints at Euromoney, the BBC, Management Today magazine, and the Financial Times, where he was the management columnist between 2006 and 2010.
In October 2010 Stefan was appointed Visiting Professor in management practice at the Business School (formerly Cass), City, University of London. He is a Fellow of the RSA, and continues to write for the FT, the Guardian and Prospect magazine, among other titles.
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In October 2015 he became director of the High Pay Centre, a London-based think-tank which looks at the issue of top pay. He stepped down from that role in April 2018. He is the author, with Prof Cary Cooper, of “Myths of Management – what people get wrong about being the boss” (Kogan Page, October 2017). His second book, “How To Be A Better Leader” [Bluebird – PanMacmillan], was published in March 2019.
Deborah Mattinson
Before co-founding BritainThinks, Deborah Mattinson jointly ran the Chime Research and Engagement Division. She was also pollster to Gordon Brown, firstly as Chancellor of the Exchequer, then as Prime Minister. Deborah frequently speaks, writes and broadcasts about the mood of the nation. In 2010, she published Talking to a Brick Wall – the story of the New Labour years through the eyes of the voter. Her latest book, ‘Beyond the Red Wall’ which explores how British ‘left behind’ communities created an electoral earthquake, was published on September 15th 2020.


Derek Walker
Derek Walker has been CEO of the Wales Co-operative Centre since 2011. During this time WCC has strengthened its position as a leading development body for social enterprises, co-operatives and employee-owned businesses in the UK and helped to stimulate significant growth within the Welsh social economy. The Wales Co-operative Centre has a team of specialist business transition advisors focusing on employee ownership and share schemes.
The Wales Co-operative Centre has also become a go-to organisation for work to strengthen communities and tackle poverty as a result of its pioneering work on digital and financial inclusion.
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Derek has overseen a programme of modernisation, income diversification and sustainable growth at the Centre.
Derek is a member of several strategic committees, such as Welsh Government’s Council for Economic Development and the Programme Monitoring Committee for EU funding in Wales. Derek is a board member of Cadwyn Housing Association and of Banc Cambria, the organisation working to set up a new community bank for Wales.
Prior to working at WCC Derek worked as Head of External Affairs at the Big Lottery Fund (Wales), as Head of Policy and Campaigns at the Wales TUC and was the first employee of Stonewall Cymru.
David Erdal
David Erdal has spent his life nudging business towards economic democracy. Teaching in China during the Cultural Revolution cured him of totalitarian systems; he then studied business at Harvard (MBA 1981). In 1985 he took over running his family’s paper mill, Tullis Russell, and moved it into democratically-governed employee-ownership, completed in 1994. As of October 2020 Tullis Russell continues to perform well in democratic employee ownership on three sites, respectively in England, South Korea and China. In the early 2000s he ran what is now the Baxendale consultancy, helping many businesses convert to employee ownership.
