In October 2013, Jack Stack spoke at the Inc5000 conference where he revealed several unforeseen benefits of practicing open-book management. Inc.'s Burt Helm summarized these benefits in a recent Inc. article: 5 Unexpected Benefits of Opening Your Books. In the article, Helm noted the following specific benefits: The Team Discovers Its Value Leaders Are Born Sharp Questions Improve Financial Statements Employees Bring Know-How Home The Entire Community Benefits

“Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.” ― Confucius About ten years ago in my past life – as CEO of a medical equipment company which I have since sold – we were exhibiting at a trade show. An attendee walked by, checking out our booth. As I started to introduce myself, he exclaimed with a scowl, “Our business goes to the lowest priced vendor! Price is everything!” If his goal was to set the tone for our interaction, he succeeded. I’m rarely at a loss for words, but I had never encountered anyone so obviously hell-bent on turning his organization into the home of crazy-low prices. The one positive outcome of my blissfully brief meeting with him was the eventual inspiration for this article.

“Can you help me?” a woman whispers during the intermission. “There’s a person in this room I despise so much that I can’t even look at him.” I inquire, “Do you want the ‘fix-it,’ approach, the easy-to-do-but-won’t-really-change-anything answer…or do you want the transformational, hard-to-do-but-I’m-serious-about-changing solution?” She’s desperate, and is ready to get past this barrier once and for all.

Greene County, MO is the first county government organization to attempt to apply the theories of the Great Game of Business to their organizational culture. Unfortunately, this does not come without some new barriers. Being a government organization, Greene County cannot give out bonuses or gain buy-in through equity. How does Greene County expect to move forward in The Great Game without one of its key components?

Having an ESOP at your company means that some of your company’s stock will be held in the retirement savings accounts of your employees. Is this something a business owner might live to regret? One of the first questions raised by business owners about ESOPs is the issue of corporate control. After all, the employees have stock. Could they make trouble? Would it be inmates running the asylum? The answer, in a word, is no.

Extraordinary always stands out in a sea of ordinary. Where ordinary requires minimal commitment, achieving extraordinary demands 100% dedication to doing whatever it takes to get to the top. Many people, and companies, are OK with being ordinary and performing just good enough to get by. In business, achieving extraordinary is one thing – but maintaining it is where the real work of leadership, accountability, systems, culture building, and refinement are put to the test. It's comparable to an Olympic athlete who trains for years to achieve peak performance for that one moment on the world stage. Once training stops, peak performance diminishes. Being the best and staying the best demands discipline, commitment, and tenacity.

Most people today have heard of the concept of “lean,” the continuous improvement system pioneered by the automaker Toyota. Organizations like GE have since applied similar concepts to create other system like Six Sigma. The basic idea is to eliminate waste wherever and whenever possible inside a production system. The rub, however, is that while most organizations that embrace lean see short-term results, they also struggle to sustain those gains over the long haul. The lean effort becomes frustrating for many organizations as they realize a culture of continuous improvement is never achieved.

At SRC, we just wrapped up yet another sales-and-marketing meeting, something we hold twice a year as part of our High-Involvement Planning (HIP) process. The whole thing blew me away. Not only was I amazed at how much information we can generate about our business through this process, I was also struck by how good our folks have become at presenting and articulating the reality of their businesses.

*Excerpted from Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, Part 3: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Managing Ourselves As much as we may not want them to, the reality of every workplace is that the staff is watching our behaviors very closely. They watch how we deal with customers, how we handle money, how well we meet our commitments. They look at little things and big things alike. They see it all. They hear it all. And, through our vibrational energy, they actually feel it all too. What that means for workplace leadership is that we need to mindfully manage our own behavior in order to set the tone we desire on all fronts. Certainly, just leading by example won’t insure that our organizations are successful. But it always improves the odds. And there is absolutely no down side to modeling the behaviors you want your staff to pick up on.

My involvement with the concept of creating a culture of character and competence began with a discussion with Tom Hill, the CEO and Chairman of Kimray, Inc. and founder of Character First. Kimray is an Oklahoma City based manufacturer of oil and gas control valves. Founded in 1948, they continue to be a leader in their industry and are a profitable and generous company. At the time, I was the vice-president of a local university and was trying to understand how to motivate my team to consider a new approach to some of the challenges we were facing. Tom listened to some of my concerns and then asked an important question. He said, “When you look back over the past year, how many of the challenges you had with your team were character based and how many were competency based?”