South Mountain Company founder John Abrams likes to joke that as a student at Wesleyan University in the late 1960s, he was “the first person in the class of 1971 to drop out. I couldn’t sit in a classroom. I had to be part of a new world. South Mountain became an expression of that.”

Born in San Francisco, Calif., to a family of academics, Mr. Abrams came of age during a time when a shift in global consciousness was percolating around the nation and the world. Fifty years after his arrival on the Vineyard, that consciousness continues to grow.

The roots of South Mountain Company began in the 1970s, when Mr. Abrams moved to the Vineyard for what he thought would be a six-month sojourn to help build a house for his parents. Now, in 2025, the company he founded continues to thrive, even though Mr. Abrams officially retired in 2022 and handed over the reins to the next generation of builders and designers.

This spring Mr. Abrams published his second book, From Founder to Future: A Business Road Map to Impact, Longevity, and Employee Ownership, which details his philosophies on leadership and business.

He freely admits the book had a rocky start to publication. At the end of 2022 he sent off a proposal to Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

“I sent it to the founder and he got it right back to me, and he talked about some of the awful truths about book publishing,” Mr. Abrams recalled.

The message was that his proposal, as it stood then, needed a ton of work.

“I hung up the phone, and said, at this stage in my life do I want to subject myself to that rigor? And I almost immediately knew the answer — that yes, this is exactly what I want. I called him 10 minutes later and we set off to work.”

From that moment onward, Mr. Abrams describes a writing and editing process “absolutely filled with delight” that was also akin to “putting together a jigsaw puzzle with 1,000 different people.”

Twice, he said, he traveled to a cabin in Vermont and hibernated for a four-to-five day stretch to work on the manuscript.

One of the book’s opening salvos is the matter-of-fact notion that if worker pay had grown as quickly as CEO pay during the past 50 years, the minimum wage would stand at nearly $100 per hour. The book proposes that employee ownership is not only the answer to address wealth inequality and promote equity, it could also help heal the nation’s fractured democracy.

“I really feel now that in some modest way, the book is an antidote to the prevailing, or to this new spirit, of cruelty rather than kindness,” he said. “Essentially, this book is an ode to the America to come, the one where we all share the bounty.”

South Mountain, a 40-person working co-op, is among the world’s highest-scoring B-Corps, a designation that shows a company has met a high level of social and environmental performance, along with accountability and transparency.

But long-lasting, structurally sound companies don’t spring up overnight, Mr. Abrams said. Back in the company’s early days in 1973, Mr. Abrams said there was a “strictly by the seat of our pants mentality” that involved “stirring in random ingredients to make a soup of business practices.”

It would be decades before he and his colleagues would begin to understand the recipe, let alone be able to memorialize and share that plan.

“I think my primary goal was to prepare this company to endure past me,” he said. “We spent three intensive years developing leadership capacity and getting ready for that transition. We felt like during the process we really put everything on the table. And maybe six months before my retirement we looked at each other. We were ready for this change. I always just wanted to leave that company in the best shape it’s ever been. I feel like I did that, and now they’re taking it to new places.”

While From Founder to Future tells the story of South Mountain, it also weaves in tales of other companies from around the world, from Once Again Nut Butter in Nunda, N.Y., to the Mondragon Cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain and in the vast network of cooperatives in the Emilia-Romagna province in Northern Italy.

“I really believe in discourse and listening and humility, and I think that’s the way we get our best work done,” he said. “Each business is different from all others. Each has its own culture, values and aspirations. The book offers a wide variety of employee ownership options and approaches. My hope is that one or more of the methods, and one or more of the stories will inspire readers to say, ‘Hey, that sounds like me, that sounds like us, that sounds like the business we want to be, that sounds like our future. I’ll take it.’ Those are the people this book is for.”

Just as South Mountain has been engineered to keep growing and changing and adapting to the times, so has Mr. Abrams. In the weeks since the book has been published, he said he has received a number of speaking and podcast requests.

“I intend to keep blogging on this subject, and I intend to keep expanding my own knowledge,” he said. “People have contacted me and told me stories and given me new information, and so already after I saw my book in print, there were things I wanted to expand on, I wanted to improve. I’m hopeful I’ll end up doing a second edition.”

Visit abramsangell for more information about From Founder to Future and what Mr. Abrams is currently up to.