The future of change in the cooperative sector lies in the knowledge management tool. Cooperatives must go beyond their capacities, hours and offices, in order to achieve economic growth, otherwise they will be doomed to failure.
Cooperativism is a key social-economic model for reactivation in this stage of global economic recession.
To reach competitive levels in the global market, leaders, officials and workers look for formulas based on knowledge and to achieve the long-awaited economic growth.
In this sense, education plays a very important role in which you necessarily have to invest. The vision and attitude of cooperative entrepreneurs does not end at the offices, much less at the end of their working hours.
The current times require going beyond the limit of our personal capacities to develop the formulas that allow us to realize the future that cooperativism deserves. Now it is not enough to work well and that large, small or medium-sized cooperatives are profitable, increase their operations, remunerate their workers well and have harmonious internal relationships, but the new context requires maximum effort to develop our social model.
The true revolution of cooperativism is one that is aimed at a new type of "open model", within the country and the world. To do this, a long-term vision must be taken into account, working with professionalism, clear competition rules and a agile and less bureaucratic structure.
Cooperative integration. It is urgent, then, to work without fainting for the full integration of the cooperative movement, otherwise it will fall apart and will be reduced to a second-class company system.
The more society progresses, partly due to the contribution of cooperativism; This will have greater challenges to realize its benefits and merits. The cooperative sector would have to apply formulas and procedures from the best consultants in order to achieve the “optimum and quality” degree among its members as part of a new generation that seeks consensus among its leaders, who must have a long-term vision.
The aim is to change, a concept that has been heard for a long time, but there are few cooperatives that put it into practice, therefore, it is necessary to reflect on this conversion.
Current vision. Analysts, advisers and researchers, as well as modern managers of top management of successful companies increasingly recognize that business management requires adequate knowledge of what has been called the "environment" of the company.
This concept is the economic, social, political and legal environment in which cooperative companies operate.
In this sense, the environment is not static, nor are cooperative companies and immediate knowledge of the changes that it is undergoing, as well as the forecast of the course or future orientation that it will experience in its socio-economic, political and legal dimensions, will favor management more efficient than that management carried out without that information.
The non-permeability of the Boards of Directors and Management to assimilate to the new conditions of the environment in which their cooperative companies operate produced the disappearance of many of them, which ended up not supporting the growing accumulation of the deficit, while in other cases he had them on the verge of liquidation.
The causes of this crisis were:
1. The resistance of the directors and managers to adopt and sustain decisions (relative to the evaluation of interest rates and forced savings) that had a controversial character against the immediate interests of the associates, but that in average terms ended with more than a hundred cooperative companies and, therefore, with the savings of the associates, at the same time as it affected the public reliability regarding the cooperatives.
2. Insufficient knowledge about how important it is to enter new market segments; and in the need to offer new products or services that were not urgent to be offered in the past decade.
In summary, in modern company management it is recognized that there is a close relationship between the business unit and the environment in which it operates and it is statistically proving that companies that do not achieve a reasonable adaptation to new circumstances frequently end in crisis.
Company dynamics. The environment is not immobile, but changing, therefore the influence it exerts on a cooperative company will not be permanent.
At the legal and political level, cooperatives will be exposed to favorable situations when they achieve legislation that gives them an effective protection framework and when they are recognized for their high incidence in society.
On the other hand, the influences of the environment will be expressed negatively in circumstances in which harmful laws are issued to cooperative organizations.
Similar situations occur in the social and economic plane. In the second, decisions that expand employment, that protect the national industry and that promote investment will have positive effects.
