Deciding what your company wants to be when it grows up should be a team effort. We continue to live in unprecedented times. Nothing seems predictable, and it's just about impossible to get anyone to agree to a consensus. Take inflation as an example. While plenty of economists continue to forecast that inflationary pressure is a temporary product of strong demand and snarled supply chains, others point to skyrocketing prices as evidence that an inflationary wrecking ball is already at work wreaking permanent economic damage. Tracking issues like these regularly makes it easy to get lost in the day-to-day weeds.

High-Involvement Planning™, or ‘H.I.P.’, has been critical to SRC’s sustainability of The Game and its long-term financial success. H.I.P. has kept us focused and committed to The Game, primarily because it keeps it fresh and exciting by changing things up, year after year. It redefines our Game each year, with new Critical Numbers™, new financial targets, new challenges to conquer, and new goals to achieve. H.I.P. is also where we leverage the business know-how we have worked so hard to create. We use the collective knowledge of our team to raise our level of thinking from 90-day MiniGames™, to annual bonus plans, to 5 and 10-year visions for the company. The result of High-Involvement Planning is a vision—and a specific plan to achieve the vision.

“If people don’t participate, they don’t buy in. If they don’t buy in, they don’t commit. If they don’t commit, they don’t deliver!” These words can be found on page 348 of The Great Game of Business. What a simple yet powerful statement. Businesses, small and large, struggle with employees delivering on their metrics. Maybe it’s not a delivery problem, but a buy-in problem. According to Great Place to Work, Employees who find their job to have “special meaning: this is not ‘just a job’” are 4 times more likely to give extra to the company 11 times more committed to stay 14 times more likely to look forward to coming to work How can you give special meaning to their job? Get their buy-in on the plan.

You just can’t find good help these days! If you're like me, you've heard this saying and have likely said it yourself a thousand times! It has been so difficult and discouraging to find the right employees to hire in our company that, for about two years, I all but refused to grow my business. Growth meant I would have to hire and train new employees just to have them leave once we started seeing some real return from this new employee. And after twenty-five years of business, I did not want to continue fighting the with many millennials—often trouble with work ethic and frequent job-hoping. I had a choice: keep suffering or find a solution. So, I made it my mission to discover the real issue and determine a solution!

How the founders of Chillibreeze pursue their purpose: “We Start Every Day With Gratitude.” It was a Christian mission that first brought Joanna and Ralph Budelman to India in 1995. Their lives, and those who work with them, have never been the same since. The couple, who grew up in Louisiana and Illinois, respectively, share a deep belief in the power of entrepreneurship to create positive change in the world. After arriving in India, they founded the first of what would eventually become a series of businesses over the subsequent ten years that have created great jobs for people in the communities they have lived and operated in.

Change is often uncomfortable, and adapting to it can be messy. Whether you’re implementing The Great Game of Business®, staging an acquisition, creating a new culture committee, or looking into employee ownership, consider these tips from CEOs that can help business leaders communicate your message in ways that build buy-in and rally your team behind the effort.

To overcome today’s challenges, and build a sustainable business for the long term, it’s time to transform how you get work done The biggest challenges our organization faces, like most everyone else in our post-pandemic world, is shortages of parts and people. With global supply chains snarled, we find ourselves sitting on warehouses full of engines waiting for silicon chips worth a few dollars each. Meanwhile, we were incredibly fortunate to hire 500 new associates over the past year. But, we’re still shorthanded when you subtract the 250 or so employee-owners who retired at the end of 2020. And, despite the superhuman efforts from our human relations teams, that’s not going to change anytime soon.

Liquidity options are plentiful for business owners: strategic sale, private equity, management buyout, family transfer, and leveraged recapitalization. Which path should you take? We know that 42% of the 2021 Great Game™ All-Star companies and many others walked a different path—implementing an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). Apart from the fact that ESOPs can be a great exit strategy for open-book companies, here are the top five reasons why open-book management companies should consider an ESOP.

3 Principles to Retain Talent 10.9 million. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, that is the number of job openings in the United States as of the end of July. To add fuel to the fire, there are 4.9 million more people than before the pandemic who are currently not working or even looking for work. Then consider that 3.6 million people retired during the pandemic, and 2 million more are expected to leap into retirement. No wonder nearly 90 percent of the 1,200 employers surveyed by SHRM reported a lack of people to fill open positions, and 73% stated the application rate is declining as well. At SRC, it is no different. We have hired more than 600 new employees across all divisions within the last few months, and we still need more people. But why the shortage? That is a head-scratcher for sure. More than likely, it is a combination of many things—a perfect storm. You really can’t point the finger at one specific thing that is causing it. One thing is for sure. It has caused businesses to think differently about their people. The Great Game of Business has said it for years - People are your greatest asset. Invest in your people, and they will invest in you. That’s easier said than done, right? Yes and no. It’s not always easy, but it is simple. Recently MITSloan Management Review analyzed a total of 1.4 million employee reviews. The purpose of this study was to determine what matters most to employees. They narrowed the reviews down to around 150 topics, with 10 bubbling to the top.

Top Six Great Game No-Nos: What NOT to do if you (really) want to play The Game During the time that we’ve been helping others implement The Great Game of Business, we’ve seen the ups and downs and are often surprised by the number of people who are “fair-weather Great Gamers”, meaning they have passion and intent to play The Great Game of Business®, but are missing the mark in one or more areas. Here are the top six (because five just wasn’t enough) Great Game No-nos: