Are you ready to introduce Great Game® to your employees? Reading the book as a group is a great way to establish the concepts of the Great Game of Business® with your staff, whether your company is new in implementing open-book management, introducing new hires to The Game, or refreshing your Great Game knowledge.

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 28% of the 2018 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.

Inspired by Rich Armstrong & Steve Baker's upcoming book, Get in the Game: How to Create Rapid Financial Results and Lasting Cultural Change. For nearly forty years, The Great Game of Buisness® has been known as the “open-book people.” The term open-book management (OBM) was coined by John Case in Inc. Magazine back in the 1980s, and the name stuck. With SRC and Great Game’s approach to OBM, Jack Stack, our CEO and founder, was even dubbed the “Father of Open-Book Management” by Inc. But if you ask Jack what he thinks of OBM, he’ll tell you—it’s not just about opening the books! Financial transparency is worthless without education, accountability, and reward. The only way to see your people AND your organization grow and transform is by teaching employees how business works.

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.

Did you have a bonus plan in place last year? If so, was it effective? How is this year’s plan working out? If you have a good year and want to share some of the fruits of your labor with your team, great, but to do so without a well-planned and executed bonus plan is a wasted opportunity. So, here’s a list of best bonus and incentive practices to help you get the most bang for your bonus bucks.

Huddles are daily or weekly meetings that drive employee engagement and serve as a self-correcting measure to keep your company on the path toward achieving its goals. Huddles are the linchpin of any successful open-book implementation, but if you find engagement and understanding are low in your organization, you’ve learned an important lesson: Huddles can’t do it alone. In order to foster cultural adoption and high involvement in the planning and execution of your organization’s goals, you’ve got to make the process accessible to your team. Here are three keys for reaching your team and driving their participation:

Over more than two decades, our employees have consistently been exposed to the teachings of the Great Game of Business® through meetings and trainings at Daryl Flood, Inc., but we found that we wanted to take this training beyond the classroom to interact directly with employees on an individual level. How? Through gamification of our training courses. This allows us to share content with employees in a format that is fun and motivates them to engage in learning at their convenience. There are four things to focus on when building a successful gamified education program:

Individuals in the workplace need to feel appreciated in order to enjoy their job, do their best work, have positive work relationships and stay with their organization long-term. The key ingredient in meaningful, significant, and effective appreciation is individualization—expressing appreciation in the recipient’s preferred “language.” Varying the ways company leadership communicates appreciation will improve chances of hitting the mark, so we've compiled 10 easy ways your leaders can show appreciation to any associate:

“In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson.”  ~Tom Bodett I remember the grip of fear and dread that day. How could I forget? After 18 years in business, we faced a nearly insurmountable crisis that could have brought it all to an end. A few months earlier I had hired a bright young man that seemed to have what it takes to grow into a valuable member of our team and become a shining star. His name was Travis and he applied to be an estimator and project manager. Filling this role successfully would increase sales and help us grow. But in time I learned my assessment was wrong! Oh, how wrong!

An open-door policy refers to the practice of business or organizational leaders leaving their doors open so that employees feel welcome to stop by and meet informally, ask questions, or discuss matters that have been weighing on their minds. These days, with open office environments, co-working spaces and remote team members working around the globe, the “open-door policy” is more metaphorical than ever before. The equivalent of walking through a physical open door in many organizations is now sending a text message, a direct message on Facebook or Slack, an instant message on Skype, or a ping on Basecamp. Regardless of whether the interruption is through an actual door or a digital door, the theory is that an organization uses such openness to build a culture of trust, collaboration, communication, and respect regardless of an individual’s position in the hierarchy.

Are you toying with the idea of attending the Gathering of Games conference in September?  If you believe all employees can more positively contribute to your business if they are educated and empowered to do so, this might be just the event you are looking for.

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 are challenged to adopt best practices for building and maintaining a generational inclusive workforce to attract and retain top talent in their organization. In order to meet the needs of today’s workforce, here are four best practices to transform your work culture and build a generational inclusive workforce: