The Great Game of Business Blog

Most companies these days are struggling to find enough people to chase all the opportunities in front of them. SRC, the birthplace of the Great Game of Business®, is no exception.  Jack Stack, CEO of SRC Holdings, understands that if SRC is going to be successful in the long run, it needs to become a better competitor in the “War for Talent.” One way to do so is for SRC to leverage The Great Game of Business methodology to create a line of sight where everyone inside the organization is focused on that goal. By making people their Critical Number, this is no longer just a problem for the human resource department to overcome: it becomes the focus for the entire company.

How Growth and Contingency Planning Can Help You Focus On Your Best Opportunities While Saying No To Distractions. The economy is opening up in a big way. Forecasts now peg the GDP to rise as astounding 6% this year. For some organizations out there, it might feel like trying to drink out of a fire hydrant to keep up with that kind of growth. Many of the SRC companies, for example, are seeing an unprecedented surge in demand for their products and services—levels the company hasn’t seen in nearly 40 years.

Vontae Douglas' journey at Tasty Catering began with working part-time at small summer events. A combination of business education, financial literacy training, and coworkers close enough to be considered family has transformed Vontae's summer job into a career in a field that he never expected. Financial literacy training and working with the numbers behind the business was new for Vontae, but this business training and education opened doors to a completely new work experience. He and his team have been taught to understand what the financial numbers mean, how to read them, and how to individually respond to impact future results and the success of the company. 

Ben Franklin famously said that the only things certain in life are death and taxes. But that’s only because ESOPs weren’t invented yet. With all the news about President Biden’s proposed tax changes grabbing headlines these days, I was reminded about a story I wrote a few years ago that was published at Forbes.com.

  Unfortunately, it’s not just decades-old companies that hoard information or run out of cash. It happens to companies of all shapes and sizes every day. And sometimes they’re even being told it’s good for their business. If that sounds crazy to you, you’re right. It’s crazy. And what about schools and innovation centers that teach a generation of young entrepreneurs what they need to do to succeed but don’t include classes on managing cash?

We were humbled and honored to be inducted into the Great Game of Business All-Star Hall of Fame. The Great Game of Business has changed the way we do business, but that is secondary to the sense of ownership, pride, and resilience that has come from playing The Game. Our team member’s reflections on how our work culture has changed say it best.  

  Planning is the pinnacle for any business. Without goals and plans to attain those goals, your company will struggle to grow and improve. In fact, a study published in the Journal of Management Studies stated that although businesses can find success without planning, companies with a plan grow 30 times faster than those who do not have one.  Springfield Remanufacturing Corporation (SRC) is well-known for its High-Involvement Planning™ structure. Using this structure, all SRC divisions develop their strategic plans and come together as a collective organization—involving everyone in the company, from hourly employees to management, in the planning process.     While it might seem extensive, this process proves an integral component of our open-book management structure. Over the years, educating, empowering, and engaging everyone at all levels in the business has repeatedly generated positive results. SRC uses four types of planning that translate directly into our sustainable business success. Let’s dig deeper into each of these four key types of planning:

  The Company's Largest Shareholder Think about how most people you encounter daily don’t really enjoy waking up and going to work every day if they go at all. When many (or most) people reach a certain age, they find it more comforting to think ahead to retirement than focus on what they might need to do that day at work. And yet there is an associate at our company, SRC, who still chooses to come to work even though he’s seventy-one. His job on the factory floor pays him about $31,000 a year. He doesn’t continue working for the pay; he shows up every day because he sincerely loves his job.

For the first time in our history, we have five generations in the workforce, each generation bringing a different perspective and their own set of expectations. Millennials are now the largest generation in the workforce, and employers must rethink their workforce norms. As diversity grows with this generational shift, employers across the globe find themselves with a workplace culture challenge as they try to adopt best practices for building and maintaining generational inclusion in the workforce to attract and retain top talent in their organization.

  How one entrepreneur uses The Great Game of Business to help fulfill her childhood ambition Erika Cisneros first dreamed of studying the law back when she was in the fifth grade. Her class conducted a mock trial of Goldilocks—who was charged with breaking-and-entering the home of the three bears—and she presided over the case as the judge. “That’s when I fell in love with the courtroom,” says Cisneros.

A few years back, we hosted our Annual Great Game of Business Conference with the theme, “The Wisdom of the Crowd.” The event has always been a great place to learn from other open-book practitioners, and specifically remember this Gathering's opening keynote speaker James Surowiecki speaking about his book, The Wisdom of Crowds, which discusses how the collective wisdom of a group can outweigh the wisest person within the crowd. I was conflicted. How can the average of a group of contributors yield a greater result than that of the highest member in the group? For me, this was a hard-to-understand concept that seemed to severely oppose my traditional, mathematical thinking.

Demystify business by empowering your people to set their own goals and share in the rewards. Then watch what happens  Seems that a day doesn’t go by without the online retail giant Amazon making some news. Whether it’s the surging demand for its products during the pandemic or the fabulous wealth of its founder, Jeff Bezos, the company is a magnet for attention. More recently, the world turned its focus on Amazon to see if the employees working inside one of its facilities in the state of Alabama would vote to unionize. Despite ongoing horror stories of the dog-eat-dog culture inside Amazon—a story with roots dating back to a story that grabbed headlines back in 2015—the vote failed.