In The Great Game of Business, Jack Stack shares his experiences and lessons learned throughout the years, including what he was taught about management early in his career. What was the most important lesson he learned about management? Ignore almost all of those "best practices."  What he was being taught and what he had learned about management were entirely different! He discovered that the practice of management is filled with myths guaranteed to screw up any company, and we've compiled our blogs on the 5 Myths of Management here:

You and your team have come up with your Critical Number™: the one metric that represents a weakness or vulnerability that, if not addressed and corrected, will negatively impact the overall performance and long-term security of the business. But now what? How do you successfully start making things happen and impacting that number? With targeted day-to-day improvements that add up to long-term success. MiniGames™, are an engaging, short-term activity designed to pursue an opportunity or correct a weakness within a company. They bring a laser focus to those everyday, small wins that put us that much closer to the big win and help drive short-term performance metrics that contribute to a year-end revenue goal or Critical Number. Take this example from Get in the Game. By focusing on something as simple as spoons, the chain reaction resulted in a $1 million impact in revenue in just one year at Kerbey Lane Cafe:

You've heard the Great Game of Business® is about transforming your business to achieve Rapid Financial Results and Lasting Cultural Change™. But, you might be wondering: what results do our real practitioners experience? We've pulled together some of the amazing results and transformation from our 2019 All-Star champions. The principles of Great Game™ are time-tested to produce amazing results like these below. Could this be you?

  You might have heard that Jack Stack is releasing his third book.   His original bestselling book, The Great Game of Business, has inspired companies and business owners across the world with a life-changing business operating system that educates your people in the rules of business, rallies them around a common goal, empowers them to see and improve the score, and engages them by giving them skin in the game. It is in its 34th printing, was recently selected as one of the "100 Best Business Books of All Time," has been cited in 140 scholarly articles and 100 business books, and has been published in 14 languages.   Now Jack is releasing his new book, Change the Game: Saving the American Dream By Closing the Gap Between the Haves and the Have-Nots to share the Why behind the Great Game of Business® operating system:

Winners are fanatics about keeping score. They understand that if you’re not keeping score, you’re not playing for real.   Whether in business or in a game, the primary objective of keeping score is to consistently inform the players if they are winning or losing and who is accountable... moving the process of keeping score from “them measuring us” to “us measuring ourselves.”  Keeping score gives people the critical feedback they need to make the right adjustments, improve performance, and win the game.

Meeting together as a team to discuss the financials and critical elements of your business is a vital part of The Great Game of Business®, but more importantly, it is an opportunity to focus on the people responsible for those numbers and the story behind the numbers. Successful workplace Huddles affect all team members' mindsets and influence your team's performance in the financials.  Here are 8 tips to help you get the most out of your Huddles:  

If you approached an employee at your company and asked them who creates the financial numbers in your company, what would they say? Odds are, they’d probably point to the accounting department. Sure, accounting has a lot to do with your company financials, but they don’t really create them. Your employees create the financials through the decisions they make and the actions they take. So how do you help your employees understand their part in creating the numbers and how their actions can affect those numbers? We recommend you follow the five golden rules of teaching employees about company financials:

Taking the leap into open-book management and a transparent culture can be intimidating, so we asked the best of the best in open-book why they implemented the Great Game of Business®, and what motivates them to continue investing in The Game. 

In more than 35 years practicing The Great Game of Business® at SRC, as well as three decades helping thousands of companies implement The Game in their own companies, we have determined the fastest, most efficient and most reliable path to Rapid Financial Results and Lasting Cultural Change™ follows a set process.  We honed and developed the 10-Step Approach to GGOB Implementation to guide companies implementing The Great Game of Business in their organizations. 

When it comes to employees learning financials, it may seem overwhelming for those who don’t have a background in accounting or business. At first, nearly anything you say about the financials will sound absolutely foreign. So what can you do to break down this communication barrier? There are a number of techniques you can use when communicating the numbers to ensure everyone is on the same page. Here are four strategies to improve communication about financials with your employees:

Wouldn’t it be nice if you just had a checklist that led you through the rules of making your staff Huddles work every time? Well, we thought it might be nice too, so we compiled the following steps to help you make the most of your staff Huddles.

As the old saying goes, opposites attract—which can be especially true in business. When Reed MacNaughton and Dan Cocozza met back in college, however, they became friends based on what made them alike. They were both engineering students who took all the same classes together at Union College in Schenectady, NY. They also pledged the same fraternity, Sigma Phi,  and when they graduated in 2004, they both moved to New York City, where they roomed together as they started jobs as structural engineers. Later, they both became entrepreneurs when they each founded their own business: MacNaughton moved back to his home state of Connecticut to start a residential construction firm while Cocozza stayed in the big city. They were both very successful in their ventures.