The co-head of global private equity firm KKR and founder of nonprofit Ownership Works and the Expanding ESOPs coalition shares his compelling vision of ‘inclusive capitalism.’

With his goal nothing short of upending the economic order, Pete Stavros talks with us at the Center for Social Capital about promoting the worker ownership movement globally. As co-head of global private equity firm KKR, he is well-positioned to help it forward.

His passion notwithstanding, as he tells it, it was a fortuitous series of steps that put him here. It started with his choice of ESOP accounts as an esoteric topic for independent work in business school. “I ended up publishing a paper on that in 2000-ish, somewhere around then, 2001. And then to fast-forward, I got into a leadership position at my current firm, KKR, in like 2009, 2010 maybe. I took over the industrials investing group and that’s when I was able to start experimenting with worker ownership. So, kind of long story, but that’s what’s happened and how I ended up here.”

But he knows the need from personal experience. “My dad was an hourly construction worker. He was a road grader, so he paved roads for a living, earned an hourly wage with a union shop in Chicago, did that for 40 years. And my dad always brought work home to the dinner table. So, we talked a lot about what it was like to be an hourly worker — hard to build wealth, earning … whatever … 15 bucks an hour.”

Building off his success with broad based employee ownership at KKR, he founded the nonprofit Ownership Works to get other private equity firms to embrace the model. He notes, “We’re only three years into this. I mean, that’s what is so exciting to me is the numbers get so big so fast in the context of a country where half of America basically has no net worth. I could see us creating a hundred billion [dollars] of wealth for workers. I think that’s totally possible.” It’s an approach to capitalism totally in sync with the values of Social Capitalism, and a way to overcome the problem Pete expresses of the rewards being very unequally shared — replacing that with what he calls “inclusive capitalism.” Says Pete, “If we’re going to talk about inclusive capitalism, everyone’s got to participate. And if any economist would say, ‘Capitalism is the best way to organize an economy, but has this very unfortunate side effect,’ well, we can fix it. We can have everybody participate in ownership. It is fixable.”

As Pete talks about how this is attainable, he also discusses the challenges from the bottom up (a “this is too good to be true” cynicism) and from the top down (the critical role of empathetic leadership in driving the cultural shift required for these programs to succeed). And he talks of a second nonprofit he started, Expanding ESOPs, which is seeking to supercharge the incredibly powerful, but vastly underused, employee stock ownership plan model to build worker wealth and stronger companies all over the country.

It’s a compelling vision from someone who clearly believes in it. Click on the link below for a front-row seat on this exciting conversation.