It’s one thing to teach a strategic planning process, but it’s another thing altogether to actually practice what you preach. Here at The Great Game of Business®, not only do we talk the talk, we walk the walk. 

Employee engagement is a hot topic for the start of 2020 as business owners are focusing on attracting and retaining top talent. How are you going to invest in your employees this year and keep them engaged? As an employer, are you up to par with what your staff is looking for? According to this survey from CareerBuilder, employees are saying they want to get ahead in their career and utilize more training, but aren't offered educational opportunities to learn the skills needed to do so: Only 32% of employees are satisfied with the opportunities for career advancement.  58% think their company does not offer enough opportunities to learn new skills and help them move up in their career. If offered, 73% of employees whose companies do not currently offer educational opportunities or workshops outside of work hours say they would be likely to participate if they were available. Employees want to learn, grow, and contribute to the success of the organization. Have you considered training your employees in these areas?

Yup. It’s that time of year. We gather the family for the holidays, light the fire and watch Christmas Vacation. And it’s hilarious…until you remember that you still haven’t finalized your company’s bonus plan for the New Year. Yikes! You don’t want to end up like Frank Shirley (Clark W. Griswold’s boss), do you? As you design your organization’s bonus plan for the New Year, I want you to keep in mind a few things about designing what we call a Stake in the Outcome®. For those who play the Great Game of Business®, providing a Stake in the Outcome is one of the most important parts (and least understood practices) of the entire business operating system. And it goes way beyond the bonus!

The big payoff to us for playing The Game is that we become a more educated, more flexible organization. We can respond instantaneously to changes in the market. We can turn on a dime for a customer if we have to. We can respond to problems in the length of time it takes to place a phone call. We can do all that because we have a company filled with people who not only are owners, but who also think and act like owners, not like employees. That’s an important distinction. Getting people to think and act like owners goes far beyond giving them equity. 

How often have you heard this: “All we ask you is to do the job, nothing more.” Well, I don’t want people just to do a job. I want them to have a purpose in what the hell they’re doing. I want them to be going somewhere. I want them to be excited about getting up in the morning, to look forward to what they’re going to do that day. Maybe it’s a matter of tricking people into wanting to come to work. I say “tricking” because I don’t think it’s a natural thing. Most people would rather be doing something other than work—I certainly would—but they feel they don’t have any choice. Companies reinforce that feeling. They not only tell people just to do the job, they set up the work so it is just a job. They say, “Drill as many of these holes as possible, as fast as possible, and don’t think about anything else.” That’s one way to run a company. What you wind up with are workers who think a job is just a job. I call them the living dead.

Companies with the best people will dominate their market by 2020. Jack Stack has been saying it throughout this year as SRC focused on their 2019 Critical Number™: "People." But how do you attract, and maybe more importantly, retain the best employees? By providing them with more than a day job, but a career where they're learning, growing, and contributing to the success of the organization.

A few years back, we hosted our Annual Gathering of Games 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.

Historically, businesses using traditional management styles have been reluctant to give all their employees the knowledge they need to make good business decisions day in and day out as they do their jobs. Open-book management takes a much different approach. It’s all about capturing and sharing both financial and organizational knowledge with every employee and empowering them to use that knowledge to contribute to the long-term success of the organization, as well as their personal success. The benefits of knowledge sharing are numerous, and here are just a few:

In more than 35 years practicing The Great Game of Business® at SRC, as well as three decades helping thousands of companies implement The Game in their own companies, we have determined the fastest, most efficient and most reliable path to Rapid Financial Results and Lasting Cultural Change™ follows a set process.  We honed and developed the 10-Step Approach to GGOB Implementation to guide companies implementing The Great Game of Business in their organizations. 

As business leaders, we care deeply about employee engagement, but we can’t operationalize a culture of engagement by ourselves. Without a strategy for scaling it across the business, it’s tough to move the needle. As my own business has grown, I’ve realized that the best thing we can do for our employees is to focus on the top two or three actions that will have the greatest impact—and hold our people-leaders or “trusted lieutenants” accountable as owners of those initiatives.

You’ve likely experienced people who occupy leadership positions and people who are leaders. There’s quite a difference. People who only occupy the position use power to get what they think is needed. Their use of questions often includes blame or demands control. Perhaps you’ve heard this one: “Don’t you agree, or is there something you didn’t understand?” People who are true leaders do the opposite. They ask questions to get people thinking about and owning the results of their work and the collective results of the company.

We love to see and hear the inside stories of companies putting the principles and practices of The Great Game of Business® to work in their organizations, which is why we love to find videos by and about Great Game practitioners! As we revealed at the 2018 Gathering of Games Conference, we have goal to impact 10 million lives in the next 10 years in the #sharonthedream campaign. Here are three of our favorite videos representing three very different stories of how the Great Game has made a difference across the globe...