Nearly every day, a business owner makes the personal decision to retire. That’s an easy decision to reach in principle. But what about the specifics? The concrete plan? Figuring that out can be overwhelming.

Workers want a good salary and other financial rewards, but non-financial rewards for employees may be just as important – sometimes more so – in encouraging employees to give their best effort. Through the years, open-book companies like New Belgium Brewing (a craft brewery located in Fort Collins, CO) and Tasty Catering (a full-service caterer out of Chicago, IL) have learned how to best incentivize and motivate employees in creative and meaningful ways — without merely handing out money.

If you’re considering selling or transitioning out of your company, you’ve certainly worried about the future of your organization. One of the most stressful parts of selling your company is the valuation – the process that puts a dollar-value on all of your hard work. Here are the three levels of valuation you should understand before selling your business:

Co-authored by Mark Banks Do either of these two scenarios sound like your company? The hard-earned time, energy and money that went into creating a work culture for performance is starting to fall apart. The new implementation of open-book management isn’t gaining any traction. If either of these sounds familiar, you may be suffering from the number one open-book management culture killer: lack of trust.

We’re excited that you will be joining us for the Gathering of Games. Often attendees go into this annual conference with a clearly defined goal in mind, whether it’s learning more about a specific topic, or gathering ideas to tackle a nagging issue. With that in mind, we have developed a series of tracks surrounding the three central themes of the Great Game as well as three topical tracks for a total of six tracks. Here, we offer a sneak peak of the first three tracks, and full details are below.

Co-authored by Jack O'Riley MiniGames™ are a powerful tool for engaging your team while pursuing an opportunity or tackling a weakness within your company. These short-term improvement challenges drive performance metrics that contribute to the year-end revenue goal in addition to impacting behaviors of your employees. Engaging employees through an incentivized program provides an opportunity to develop your staff and discover their hidden skill-sets. Often times, MiniGames also improve teamwork and employee satisfaction scores. What does it take to put together a MiniGame? Be sure to include these must-have elements when developing your next short-term incentive challenge:

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” -Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize winner in Economic Sciences Our current work environments seem to be on a trajectory for greater and greater distraction. We are constantly keeping up with shifting priorities and an explosion of goals, initiatives, projects and trends. Just as mindfulness practice can help you refocus in your personal life, integrating organizational mindfulness into the workplace will help the company advance towards its primary goals.

Co-authored by Mark Banks If there is one thing I’ve learned in an open-book business it’s that it takes the right attitude to succeed. Recruiting the right players can make or break your team’s performance. Often times when we look to hire folks into our organization or promote from within, we simply look at their skill set, but I believe we must challenge ourselves to look at their attitude.

The top three reasons people leave their jobs are these: lack of clear expectations, lack of recognition and lack of supervisor’s willingness to listen to them. Even if you don’t believe the numbers you hear, I believe we can all agree that the cost of replacing an employee is significant. In fact, it costs you anywhere between 2 and 4 times that employee’s salary. Needless to say, it is in most people’s best interest (at least financially) to decrease turnover.

Though he’s referring to baseball, Jim Evans’ stance on tracking metrics can be applied to professional organizations just as they are to professional baseball organizations. Metric tracking is a fundamental process for companies that practice the Great Game of Business. And although it’s an essential part of playing The Game, it isn’t uncommon for companies to find themselves at a loss for whether or not they’re tracking the right numbers (what we would call a Critical Number™). Sometimes company leaders don’t even know where to start tracking!