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What's The Best Antidote To Supply Chain Shortages? Living The Golden Rule

May 16, 2022 by Jack Stack 0 Comments
At a time when we’re more disconnected than ever, let’s start treating each other with kindness and empathy. Emotions are running hot these days as the weather starts to warm up around the country. People are on edge. Patience and empathy for others might be at all-time lows. Maybe we should start calling what we’re going through the Great Disconnect. And you know what’s causing it? Shortages.
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And The Winner Is…

Mar 2, 2021 by Jack Stack 2 Comments
How Healthy Competition Drives Continuous Creativity And Productivity At SRC By Jack Stack I’m a big believer in the positive power of competition. I believe it’s a universal truth that all people like to win—and hate to lose. But as I’ve written about before, losing is also an opportunity to learn and to improve. So, why wouldn’t we try to build in some of that healthy competition into the workplace? To take some of the drudgery out of our day-to-day routines and spice things up with some competition? At a fundamental level, that’s what The Great Game of Business® is all about.
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Facts Matter More Now Than Ever

Jan 12, 2021 by Jack Stack 0 Comments
We live in a strange time. It’s not always clear what’s true or what’s a figment of someone’s imagination—like a made-up story that people think is true that then spreads like wildfire on social media. When people can’t agree on facts anymore, it creates all kinds of problems.
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In A Time Filled With Noise, How Do You Get People To Hear You?

Nov 23, 2020 by Jack Stack 1 Comment
The pandemic has forced all of us—coaches, teachers, pastors, business leaders, and even parents—to walk a very narrow line. On one hand, we all need to take every action we possibly can to keep our friends, neighbors, kids, and co-workers healthy and safe even as the virus continues to surge. On the other hand, we have to find creative ways to keep society functioning—without jeopardizing the health of each other.
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How Do You Build Confidence?

Nov 9, 2020 by Jack Stack 1 Comment
I recently wrote a blog about how, when our company conducted our second High-Involvement Planning (HIP) meeting in October, only 74% of our associates told us they were confident in the sales plan for the company—which was down from an 80% confidence rating when we conducted the same survey in June. Historically, we’ve seen confidence ratings consistently in the high 80s—sometimes into the 90s. Maybe it’s easy to write off the 74% number due to the ongoing uncertainty of the pandemic as well as the election and other factors. But it did get me wondering about what truly inspires confidence in people. That led me to conduct an informal survey where I asked our associates to send me their responses to a simple question: “How do you build confidence?” I was blown away by the diverse range of answers we received. I found it interesting to see all the different approaches people recommended, so I grouped them into a couple of categories:
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Can Your Company Stand the Test of Time?

Oct 27, 2020 by Jack Stack 1 Comment
Every October, we conduct our second sales-and-marketing meeting of the year (the first is held in June)—a ritual we’ve continued every year since 1983. The sales teams from each of our divisions make presentations to everyone inside the company—including our board of directors—and we ask our people to vote on their confidence in those plans. For us, this process—what we call High-Involvement Planning—is the lynchpin of how we build a true culture of engagement inside our business.
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Why We Want to Do Away with Jobs

Sep 17, 2020 by Jack Stack 2 Comments
How often have you heard this: “All we ask you is to do the job, nothing more.” Well, I don’t want people just to do a job. I want them to have a purpose in what the hell they’re doing. I want them to be going somewhere. I want them to be excited about getting up in the morning, to look forward to what they’re going to do that day. Maybe it’s a matter of tricking people into wanting to come to work. I say “tricking” because I don’t think it’s a natural thing. Most people would rather be doing something other than work—I certainly would—but they feel they don’t have any choice. Companies reinforce that feeling. They not only tell people just to do the job, they set up the work so it is just a job. They say, “Drill as many of these holes as possible, as fast as possible, and don’t think about anything else.” That’s one way to run a company. What you wind up with are workers who think a job is just a job. I call them the living dead.
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A Time to Reimagine Capitalism

Sep 8, 2020 by Jack Stack 1 Comment
Every year I look forward to attending the Great Game of Business’s annual conference. Over the past 28 years, it’s always been an opportunity to improve—to receive an education on how we can continually improve upon the lives and those of the people working inside our companies and within the communities that support us. I chuckle when I think back to our first conference—what we called The Gathering of Games at the time—which we held in our hometown of Springfield, MO. We honestly weren’t sure how many people were going to show up. A few dozen intrepid souls did make the trip—so we decided to hold another conference the following year, moving it to St. Louis to make it easier for more people to attend. We built on that momentum year after year—building up our community of like-hearted Great Game™ players with each conference. While I have learned so much from the incredible lineup of speakers and presenters that have blessed the stage over the years, I’ve learned just as much—if not more—from the attendees themselves over a shared meal or a cold beer at the bar after hours. They have been my most cherished friends and teachers when it comes to how we can collectively reimagine capitalism.
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Greatness Comes from Looking Ahead

Jul 28, 2020 by Jack Stack 3 Comments
What a 9-year-old Can Teach Us About Life One Saturday morning, I found myself standing and watching a Little League baseball game. I had a mask on my face and was safely isolated away from anyone else. It was so weird. But I enjoyed being outside in the sun, hearing the familiar sounds of a ball popping into leather and the pings of the bat when hitters made contact. It almost felt like the start of something new.
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When the Virus Hits Close to Home - A Tribute

Apr 13, 2020 by Jack Stack 2 Comments
Even on days when there might be a glimmer of hope in turning the corner on this pandemic gripping our country—when it seems like we might actually be flattening the curve—bad news can hit in an instant. We learned on April 8, we lost one of our own. Warren Burros, a longtime Springfield Remanufacturing Company associate passed away after battling Covid-19. Warren was part of the SRC team right from our start in 1983 and was with us until the day he retired in 2006 at the age of 65.
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About The Great Game of Business

Our approach to running a company was developed to help close one of the biggest gaps in business: the gap between managers and employees. We call our open-book approach The Great Game of Business. What lies at the heart of The Game is a very simple proposition: The best, most efficient, most profitable way to operate a business is to give everybody in the company a voice in saying how the company is run and a stake in the outcome. Let us teach you how to develop a culture of ownership, where employees think, act and feel like owners.