ABSTRACT
The John Lewis Partnership is one of the United Kingdom’s most famous retailers, with a reputation among customers and competitors for quality and success. As a private company with very little securitized debt, the John Lewis Partnership has not been given much attention by the capital markets and does not feature in retail sector rankings. The John Lewis Partnership is very much the creation of a single man, John Spedan Lewis, who set up the employee-owned trust in 1929 and instituted a system of representative participation in 1953. The Partnership appears to have struck a highly efficient balance between the needs of an effective business and the mechanisms for motivating the workforce. The John Lewis Partnership has been commercially successful because it has addressed certain business challenges that reflect the changing economic structure of the late twentieth century.
