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:

“Open-book management” was one of the popular phrases that got applied to the leadership system, The Great Game of Business®, that Jack Stack and his associates at SRC created back in 1983. But as Stack himself has said many times, most people don’t like to be managed. They like to be lead instead. In that spirit, perhaps it’s time we start thinking of Great Game™ as a form of what we might call “open-book leadership.” A fantastic example of open-book leadership in action comes from the front lines of a grocery store in Austin, Texas—H-E-B. Starting back in 2016, the large grocery chain began sending managers and employees—who H-E-B calls “partners”—to The Great Game of Business Conference to help inspire them in rolling out Great Game practices throughout the company.

While I am a voracious reader, I also listen to a lot of books on tape. A couple of years ago, as I first listened to The Great Game of Business on Audible on a cross-country road trip, I was captivated by Jack Stack’s rich voice as he described the transformation of his business through a totally new concept of how to run a business. Having been at the helm of a business for 28 years at that time, I thought I had seen—and tried everything. I will confess that through the years, my staff understandably would start rolling their eyes every time I launched a new initiative, planning process, or management approach that sprung from my latest read. But The Great Game of Business® was different. I asked everyone on my staff to make a priority of reading or listening to the book. I was committed to changing the very nature of our business this time, starting with training the team in financial literacy, and opening the books.

I have often heard that The Great Game of Business® (GGOB) seems like it is geared toward manufacturing companies, or organizations that are more product-based. That was my initial impression when I first read the book. While the practice of open-book management seems versatile, some of the rules may seem like they do not apply to a service-based company. But once you open the books and start playing The Game, it is easy to adapt.

If you are reading this and haven't already "opened the books" to share company financials with your employees, my guess is it's because you are scared. What are your real concerns about open-book management? Financial transparency in business is a concept so new, so counter to the way business has always been done, no wonder it scares people. Just the thought of opening the books is followed by a whole list of what-ifs. The thing is - it's not actually that scary when you break it down. Here are our answers when people hit us with the what-ifs:

When it comes to deciding upon an exit strategy, owners of closely held businesses have a lot to think about. Faced with the frightening prospect of turning over the business they have worked so hard to build to new ownership, they might worry about what will happen to the company—and their employees—once they’re gone. Selling the business to a third party isn’t always a welcome or viable option. But if there isn’t a qualified management team or successor in mind, what’s a business owner to do? Fortunately, there is an alternative that can help ensure the continuation of the business while providing significant financial rewards for both the owner and the employees: selling the business to employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP).

The word profit can mean many things to many people—especially in our current political climate. But for an increasing number of folks, profit has become a negative term—a dirty word—which has huge implications for the economic sustainability for businesses across the world. At a time when company values and purpose have gone mainstream, and when even the Business Roundtable has begun prioritizing stakeholders over shareholders, the basics of what goes into making a profit has come under fire.

Imagine a number, that if identified, would represent the single most important thing in your life; the one thing that would change everything. Whoa. That would indeed be awesome. But there’s more to it than that. There’s myth and magic that surrounds what we call the Critical Number™—that one operational or financial metric that represents a weakness or vulnerability that impacts the long-term security of the business. This clearly defined, company-wide goal will indeed change your business. And yes, it will change your life. But the Critical Number is not magic.

At the Great Game of Business®, one of the most common questions we coaches get tends to go along these lines: “I’d love to open the books and share the numbers with my people, but I’m just not confident they have the education or training to understand them. How can I teach them the financials effectively?” In starting on the path of open-book management, many business and organizational leaders worry about this. Most employees at most companies have not had formal business education, and many may lack much formal education at all. So, it’s not unreasonable to wonder whether most employees will ever be able to understand your finances and business model. When my clients ask a question like this, I like to ask them in return: “Do any of your employees like baseball?”

More and more news stories these days center around the R-word: recession. It certainly came up often enough at the 2019 Gathering of Games—including in Jack Stack’s keynote speech. There are plenty of warning signs to catch your attention. The list of potential culprits as to who or what might bring the country’s economic expansion to a halt ranges from tariffs and trade wars to increasingly long lead times and historically low unemployment rates. What’s interesting is that Stack and his team at the SRC family of companies have been forecasting a recession to hit in 2019 or 2020 for the past 10 years—a process they kicked off right after the last recession just about obliterated the economy. Part of the rationale behind that forecast was experience: