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SALISBURY, MD---As a keynote speaker, Dr. Frank Shipper of ºÚÁÏÍø’s Management and Marketing Department in the Franklin P. Perdue School of Business recently addressed an audience estimated at more than 2 million during the inaugural International Rendanheyi Model Forum in Qingdao, China.

The conference was organized by Haier Group and MLab. Haier is the China-based household electronics company whose holdings include General Electric Appliances. The company’s CEO, Zhang Ruimin, became familiar with Shipper’s research by reading his book Shared Entrepreneurship: A Path to Engaged Employee Ownership. Mlab was co-founded by Gary Hamel, whom the Wall Street Journal has ranked as the world's most influential business thinker.

“Mr. Ruimin highly identifies himself with your management philosophy,” said Ji Guangqiang, Director of Haier’s Culture Center, in the invitation to Shipper.

Shipper discussed the employee-owned company management style, which he has studied at businesses including W.L. Gore & Associates, Herman Miller, Equal Exchange, Mondragon in Spain, and the John Lewis Partnership in the UK. This type of management fits well with Haier’s Rendanheyi model, which promotes employees realizing their own value in the process of creating values for others, Guangqiang said.

The forum drew approximately 2,000 guests, though an estimated 2 million more followed via live streaming, Shipper said. Other presenters represented the London Business School, Wharton, the London School of Economics and the International Institute for Management Development in Switzerland. A video of Shipper's presentation is available at .

Haier is not the first institution to tap Shipper’s knowledge of employee ownership. For the past three years, he has been an invited speaker at the annual Business Fights Poverty conference, held at the University of Oxford, England. Furthermore, he regularly presents at the Beyster Institute in La Jolla and at Rutgers University.

His research also has been referenced by national media, including MSNBC and The Wall Street Journal, and featured on Rutgers University's School of Management and Labor Relations’s Curriculum Library for Employee Ownership, the largest global online library on employee ownership.

He has received several grants and awards to continue his work, including Rutgers University’s prestigious Kevin E. Ruble Fellowship.

For more information call 410-543-6030 or visit the SU website at www.salisbury.edu.