In The Great Game of Business, Jack Stack shares his experiences and lessons learned throughout the years, including what he was taught about management early in his career. What was the most important lesson he learned about management? Ignore almost all of those "best practices."  What he was being taught and what he had learned about management were entirely different! He discovered that the practice of management is filled with myths guaranteed to screw up any company, and we've compiled our blogs on the 5 Myths of Management here:

At SRC Holdings, we see our succession management program as one of our most important strategic advantages. It is also one of our greatest challenges because our managers must not only be good at their jobs but also good at building and maintaining our culture. Every year, we dive deeply into our workforce and employment data to evaluate ownership succession planning results while actively supporting the progress and alignment of our strategic workforce goals. During this process, the big objective is to complete detailed strategic workforce planning. The goals of this process can be achieved by answering four basic questions: 

One thing that scares me about our economy is the whole trend of downsizing. What’s really going on is that companies are getting rid of people and replacing them with machines. They view people as a contingent liability. They’re missing the fact that productivity depends on people. I don’t disagree that machines can make you more competitive. They can absorb overhead. They don’t take breaks. They don’t go on vacation. They don’t sit around wasting time. What machines can’t do is figure out how to make money. Only people can do that. If you have people who know how to make money, you’ll win every time.

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.

I have always believed that you take on a big obligation when you hire somebody. That person needs to bring home money, put food on the table, take care of children. You can't take that obligation lightly. Of course, the individual has obligations to the company as well. Employment is a two-way street. But as much as possible I want it to be someone's choice whether or not he or she leaves the company. It really bothers me to see people laid off through no fault of their own. To prevent that from happening, we have a contract among ourselves. Everything we do is based on a common understanding that job security is paramount—that we are creating a place for people to work not just this year or five years from now, but for the next fifty years and beyond. We owe it to one another to keep the company alive.

Anthony Wilder is a full-service, custom architecture, construction, and interior design provider founded by the husband-and-wife team of Anthony and Liz Wilder. The Wilder team has been creating award-winning projects in and around the Washington, DC, metropolitan and tri-state area for more than twenty years. Back in 2006, the company was setting records in helping their customers’ dreams come true as the housing market boomed. Revenues were way up, and the firm had built up a two-year pipeline of backlog work to come. Everything was going great, and as the old saying goes, “Why fix something that isn’t broken?” And then the recession hit.

“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 the 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 Gathering of Games conference to help inspire them in rolling out Great Game™ practices throughout the company.

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. 

I recently saw a semi-truck with a large arrow pointing towards the cab of the truck and this statement, “Our greatest asset sits 63 feet up here.” I have seen it before, but this time it struck me differently. I thought, Does the culture of that company support this statement or is it no more than a marketing slogan? Companies want to be “on top”, “cutting edge”, “innovative”. The question is: Does the culture support the cutting edge marketing? It’s great to have a catchphrase or some values on the wall, however, it is not easy to lead a group of people every day, month, and year after year. It’s not easy to lead the pack and in fact I am going to say DON’T lead the pack.  Lead yourself first. Any great business coach will tell you to know your team, but do you know yourself, who you are, and why you do what you do?

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.