William Mundell has had a career spanning the fields of finance, politics, and entertainment.

He is Chairman of WorkToOwn, a non-profit company focused on increasing economic mobility in America by creating a first ever measure of ownership inequality by company, and using that benchmark to progressively motivate more broad-based ownership.

He is also Chairman of Neurosphere Entertainment Inc, a Hollywood film development company with a mission to leverage the soft power of entertainment to make a positive impact on the US-China relationship.

Upcoming projects include “Untitled Dean Lung Project”, a true story about a Chinese manservant in 19th century America, who donated his life’s savings to the founding of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. Filming is expected to start in 2025 and John Woo is attached to the project.

Past projects include ”Better Angels”, a documentary on US–China relations, directed and narrated by two-time Academy Award winning director Malcolm Clarke, and “Gerrymandering”, a documentary on the widely abused practice of drawing electoral districts to fix elections, directed by Academy Award winner Jeff Reichert.

Previously William Mundell served as Chairman of ZBB Energy Corporation, a New York stock exchange alternative energy company.

He is also the former Chairman and CEO of Vidyah Inc., a company founded out of Knowledge Universe, a joint venture fund of Larry Ellison and Mike Milken.

Prior to that, Mr. Mundell served as President and CEO of Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates, founded by Nobel Laureate economist Dr. Lawrence Klein, and as Chairman of Trade, Inc., controlled by Bain Capital and Sutter Hill.

Mr. Mundell was an adjunct professor at UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management and is an honorary professor at Tsinghua University in China. He has authored numerous articles published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times.

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NEUROSPHERE ENTERTAINMENT is a film development company founded by William Andrew Mundell and Ina-Alice Kopp in 2022. The Los Angeles-based company finances the development of projects from ideation to script, with a thematic focus on heartfelt, inspiring stories related to the US and China. Neurosphere’s mission is to build a better understanding between the two countries and encourage learning from each other.

PAST PROJECTS include ”Better Angels”, a documentary on US–China relations, directed and narrated by two-time Academy Award winning director Malcolm Clarke, and ”Gerrymandering”, a documentary on the widely abused practice of drawing electoral districts to fix elections, directed by Academy Award winner Jeff Reichert.

UPCOMING PROJECTS include ”Untitled Dean Lung Project”, a true story about a Chinese manservant in 19th century America, who donated his life’s savings to the founding of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. Filming is expected to start in 2025 and John Woo is attached to direct.

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Work to Own is a non-profit founded by Bill Mundell to address the systemic lack of economic mobility in America through a first ever Employee Ownership (EO) Index, in effect a “Gini co-efficient” for companies. 

The EO Index enables American companies to take the lead in shaping a market-driven standard for broad-based ownership of equity by their employees. 

Research by Opportunity Insights at Harvard University reveals that 90% of children born in 1940 grew up to earn more than their parents. For children born in 1980, this figure has declined to 50%.  

With America’s wealth concentrated in company equity, the clearest market solution to enhance economic mobility across America is to give American employees the opportunity to earn equity in the companies they work for. 

And yet despite research demonstrating mutual benefits for both shareholders and employees, and elaborate government incentives (especially with ESOPs), broad-based ownership has failed to catch on economy wide.Some blame this on the complexity of the ESOP program, but at bottom this is more likely a market failure driven by a lack of easily accessible information. 

EO INDEX: SHAPING A NEW STANDARD FOR EMPLOYEE OWNERSHIP

Currently, there is no financial market standard to benchmark broad-based employee ownership at the company level.

The EO Index solves this problem by empowering the managers of American companies with data-driven insight to determine the optimal balance of employee-owned equity across the pay scale. 

In the first iteration of developing the EO Index, we have designed two baseline measures. These components are based on detailed employee ownership data for 1,000 of America’s largest public companies:

We are collaborating with top market participants to refine these measures and co-create additional components based on more granular data.  

LEVERAGING MARKET FORCES TO SHAPE A WIN-WIN

The EO Index creates a market solution where government policy has failed, enabling managers to create shareholder value while at the same time positioning their companies as change agents in the creation of generational wealth for their employees.

Work to Own is an internal non-profit project of The Giving Back Fund, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. Donations are tax deductible to the extent allowed by law. | EIN: 04-3367888

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In an environment where wealth inequality is a political issue, this piece makes the case that the best approach is not more government redistribution programs but rather having companies extending share ownership far more broadly. Author Mundell discuses an original way to encourage more widespread employee stock ownership.

In his last published work, John Steinbeck, that great chronicler of the working class, mused that Americans never embraced socialism because the poor didn't expect to stay poor; they instead viewed themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

Today, the mood is more somber. A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that intergenerational mobility in the U.S. is on average no higher than in Europe. A recent Gallup poll found that Gen Z respondents were almost equally split on whether they view capitalism or socialism more favorably.

Decades ago, Congress made an earnest effort to head this off. With America’s wealth increasingly concentrated in companies, it forged a bipartisan consensus to incentivize companies to extend share ownership more broadly. By rewarding nonexecutive employee performance with company stock—in addition to wages—employees get a pro rata claim on all the future profits the firm earns. Wealth creation through equity ownership is profit sharing both now and in the future.

Imagine, for a moment, that instead of today’s gig workers and their companies being locked into a never-ending transactional dance over their status, that top-rated Uber drivers had the opportunity to earn stock in their company.

Yet despite research demonstrating mutual benefits for corporations, shareholders and employees, and elaborate government incentives (especially with ESOPs), broad-based employee ownership has barely migrated outside of Silicon Valley. Conventional wisdom points to the complexity of the ESOP program, but tinkering with it over time hasn’t helped, and meanwhile the need grows more urgent.

Before reaching for yet another government fix, shouldn’t we first see if a fully informed market can produce a solution on its own? Outside of ESOPs, there isn’t enough public reporting of employee ownership data, even for publicly traded companies. And that means there is no transparent scorecard, no easy way to compare one company to the next and, of critical importance, no way for companies to compete with each other on employee-ownership adoption.

To create that scorecard, we must make currently invisible employee-ownership data visible to all Americans. The tool required is a public-facing Employee Ownership (EO) Index, in effect, a “company Gini coefficient” that measures employee stock ownership within and between companies. The power of such an index shouldn’t be underestimated. In addition to potentially impacting market value, it’s a way for companies to signal their good intentions.

The ESG (which asks stockholders to consider a company's commitment to environment, social and governance issues when making investment decisions) taught us just how sensitive corporations are about their reputations, even with regard to societal problems they aren’t fully equipped to solve. In contrast, broad-based employee ownership is completely within their control and totally consistent with profit maximization. The EO Index offers both companies and the public a flashlight to reveal which companies are leading, which are following and which are impeding change on this defining issue for the future of democratic capitalism in the U.S.

Our nonprofit organization, Work to Own, along with a team from Harvard Business School and other leading institutions, is releasing a first-ever Employee Ownership Index for the S&P 500. Though it will require further refinement because of the data limitations, we believe it will create a new market standard for measuring broad-based ownership that will encourage a race to the top.

The SEC could greatly improve the robustness of the rankings by mandating that companies disclose employee stock compensation by income cohort, but until then, Work to Own will be supplementing our existing measure with surveys of the leading companies to produce a more definitive ranking of the S&P 500.

The more robust the tool, the more empowered companies will be as change agents, and the less demand there will be on government to expand redistributive programs. For while progressively larger rounds of redistribution have improved the living standards of the poorest Americans and strengthened the safety net, they haven’t solved the economic mobility problem and, arguably, have imposed huge costs on the efficient functioning of the market economy.

Rather than continue this course, we must find solutions that expand wealth from the bottom up. Then, and only then can the founding vision of America be restored, and, as Steinbeck described in another essay, can the working class once again be “temporarily embarrassed capitalists.”

—William A. Mundell, Founder and Chairman of Work to Own, and Chairman of Neurosphere Entertainment.

Making Corporations The Change Agents To Jumpstart Economic Mobility

“Hard Boiled” director John Woo is developing a historical drama about Chinese American Dean Lung — the valet of Oakland’s first mayor Horace Walpole Carpentier — whose donation helped found Columbia University’s Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. The film has the working title “Dean Lung.” 

The university still refers to the letter Lung sent to Columbia president Seth Low in 1901. “I send you here with a deposit check for $12,000 as a contribution to the fund for Chinese learning in your university,” it said. Later, in order to honor him, Carpentier provided additional donations. “I hope I can make it before I retire. I really want to do it,” Woo told Variety at Fantasia Film Festival in Montréal, where he picked up his Career Achievement Award.

“He was this man’s servant and there were conflicts at the beginning, but later, they started to learn from each other. When he retired, he donated all his savings to the university. His picture still hangs on the wall.” 

Woo described the film — whose script is being written, with financing being sought — as “serious drama, but not too serious.” 

“It’s a very human story,” he said, also underlining its universal appeal. 

“These days, there are so many misunderstandings between the people in the West and the people in the East. I think we need to work on it more, work on understanding each other. I want to make a movie that would serve as a bridge between two different cultures. We can be friends – I really believe that.” 

Before that, Woo will stretch his action muscles with Joel Kinnaman starrer “Silent Night,” already hailed as his comeback. 

“It’s a pretty unique film, even though it’s a common story: a son gets killed and a father tries to avenge him. But there is no dialogue – it’s completely visual,” he said. 

“It was very challenging. I had to make sure the audience understands the story and accepts it, and accepts this character’s emotions. I am so lucky to have found an actor like Joel. He delivered a great performance and he was so happy to do it, too. After all, he didn’t have to talk!” 

Always interested in dramatic storylines and high stakes, with his characters looking for redemption or fighting for their honor, Woo partly attributes it to his Christian upbringing. 

“I guess that’s where it comes from. When I was younger, I just loved the church. When I decided to make films, I automatically started to put a lot of Christian imagery in them. Concepts of redemption and love for people, spirituality. I never wanted to lecture about religion. I just wanted people to feel this atmosphere.” 

Still, despite all the drama, humor is always the key, he said, which is something he misses in new action spectacles. 

“It’s all about action, action, action and special effects. They are missing a sense of humor. But it helps, in real life as well,” he said. 

“Humor brings meaning to our relationships. When I was still shooting films in Hong Kong, we always liked to make people laugh.” 

While the instant recognizability of his work might have eventually hurt his international career, he admitted, he grew to appreciate people’s love for some of his famed visual motifs, such as white doves flying around in slow-motion. 

“The funny thing is that sometimes, I didn’t want to use these things in my films. I would go: ‘It’s too much, let’s do something different.’ And then the whole crew would rebel! ‘John, please, put some birds in there somewhere!,’” he said with a laugh. 

“But I am so grateful. After all these years, people still love my movies. I was so amazed, seeing all these people [at Fantasia] who care for me and support me. It’s very encouraging.” 

Some of his stars also continue to reach out, including his “Face/Off” leads. 

“Nic Cage always says nice things about me in public. The truth is, I don’t talk too much with my actors. They are busy, I am busy. And I am not very social! But some keep sending me Christmas cards, they keep celebrating my birthday. Especially John Travolta.” 

“He has been sending me cards every year!” 

John Woo Develops Historical Drama ‘Dean Lung’.

Speaking to Deadline from Fantasia Film Festival (Montreal, July 14-August 3), where he is being honored with a career achievement award, Hong Kong filmmaker John Woo revealed details of his recent return to U.S. filmmaking – feature films Silent Night and Peacock’s reboot of his iconic 1989 action thriller The Killer – as well as an upcoming passion project about the man who helped establish Columbia University’s East Asian Languages & Cultures Department. Woo wrapped Silent Night, produced by Thunder Road and Capstone Studios, in Mexico in May. The film stars Joel Kinnaman as a father on a mission to avenge his young son who was killed in the cross-fire of gang violence. Kid Cudi, Harold Torres and Catalina Sandino Moreno also star. NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock recently announced Woo’s English-language remake of The Killer as part of its first slate of original films.

Fantasia is screening Woo’s 1992 classic Hard Boiled, one of the films that helped blast Hong Kong action cinema into the international stratosphere, as well as Face/Off, starring Nicolas Cage and John Travolta, one of several films he directed in Hollywood after making the transition in the mid-1990s (along with Hard Target, Broken Arrow and Mission: Impossible II). He returned to Asia in the mid-2000s, when mainland China’s fledging film industry was first starting to take off, where he directed two-part historical epics Red Cliff and The Crossing, as well as Japan-set crime thriller Manhunt, which premiered at Venice film festival in 2017.

Q: You seemed to have a lot of projects in development in Asia a few years back. Why decide to return to the U.S. to make a film?

JW: There were a couple of topics I wanted to make in China, but it was difficult to get the finance and I couldn’t find anything else I wanted to do. When I got the script for Silent Night from Thunder Road, I thought it was very unique and just loved it. What attracted me is that the script doesn’t have any dialogue – the whole movie is totally visual, you’re using visual images, sound and music to tell the story – so for me that’s something pretty new. If I’d stayed in China, I would probably still be making the same old things, another war movie or action movie, so even though this film has a pretty small budget and a tight schedule, that was fine with me. I also got to work with a wonderful actor in Joel Kinnaman.

Q: What stage are you at with the remake of The Killer?

JW: We originally tried to hire another director to shoot it, but couldn’t find anyone, so I took on the job. We maybe shouldn’t call this The Killer, because we’re making a very different version, as the lead character [an assassin played by Chow Yun-fat in the original] will be played by a woman. We’re doing the casting now. We were talking to Lupita Nyong’o but she had to pass so we’re looking for somebody else. The story is similar to The Killer, but we can say it’s more of a story about friendship than a love story.

Q: What was the project you were finding difficult in China?

JW: One topic was about the Flying Tigers [a U.S. volunteer group working with the China Air Force in the Second World War], a very big Hollywood-style, big-budget action movie. But it was a complicated film, we’d have to build old Flying Tiger planes and use a lot of VFX, so it was hard to get financed. It would have had a budget equal to Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbour.

Q: Do you keep in touch with the Hong Kong film industry? What do you think about the current state of Hong Kong film?

JW: I haven’t lived in Hong Kong for some years as I’m living in Los Angeles, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care about [the Hong Kong and Chinese film industries]. I think they need to make some changes, especially in Hong Kong, as it’s becoming limited creatively. We need to come up with more new stories as we have too many gangster films, and a few smaller lifestyle dramas, so we should think about what changes we can make, because otherwise the market is going to get smaller and smaller. Then of course the big problem is that they need more money – more investment in Hong Kong film, including investment from mainland China.

Q: After such a long break from working in North America, what was it like shooting in the U.S. and Mexico?

JW: People are still the same, I still get the same respect and all the crew worked so well together. I wish I could make all my movies in different countries. I’m on a mission to learn from new people, and learn from some other cultures, and also make a movie in Hollywood that’s like a bridge; to bring in the culture from China and the culture from the West and try to blend them together. There’s a couple of stories I’m working on. One is based on a true story about a Chinese guy, Dean Lung, who worked as a servant in New York in the 1870s, and his relationship with his master. He donated all his savings to Columbia University so they could set up a Chinese language and culture course. Then he convinced his master to also donate. They still have his picture displayed at Columbia and the course still exists. Hopefully, stories like this can increase understanding on both sides. We’ve got the finance, an American-born Chinese businessman is investing, and hired a writer for the film.

Q: How are you finding the audiences at Fantasia?

JW: This is my first time in Montreal and the fans are very supportive. I just found out that this festival started out by showing a few of my Hong Kong films, then they got a lot of support and started developing the festival, so I’m proud to be a part of their family. But there’s a lot of other great Hong Kong films and I hope these can start to appear around the world as well.

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Making Corporations The Change Agents To Jumpstart Economic Mobility

John Woo Develops Historical Drama ‘Dean Lung’.

John Woo On His Return To U.S. Filmmaking, New Project About Columbia University Donor Dean Lung & Remake Of ‘The Killer’