The Great Game of Business Blog

Sign up to receive our blog posts conveniently in your email box

The Secret To An Engaged Workforce: Painting The Big Picture Together

Nov 16, 2021 by Darren Dahl 0 Comments
Deciding what your company wants to be when it grows up should be a team effort. We continue to live in unprecedented times. Nothing seems predictable, and it's just about impossible to get anyone to agree to a consensus. Take inflation as an example. While plenty of economists continue to forecast that inflationary pressure is a temporary product of strong demand and snarled supply chains, others point to skyrocketing prices as evidence that an inflationary wrecking ball is already at work wreaking permanent economic damage. Tracking issues like these regularly makes it easy to get lost in the day-to-day weeds.
Read More

3 Essential Steps to Get Buy-In from Your Entire Company

“If people don’t participate, they don’t buy in. If they don’t buy in, they don’t commit. If they don’t commit, they don’t deliver!” These words can be found on page 348 of The Great Game of Business. What a simple yet powerful statement. Businesses, small and large, struggle with employees delivering on their metrics. Maybe it’s not a delivery problem, but a buy-in problem. According to Great Place to Work, Employees who find their job to have “special meaning: this is not ‘just a job’” are 4 times more likely to give extra to the company 11 times more committed to stay 14 times more likely to look forward to coming to work How can you give special meaning to their job? Get their buy-in on the plan.
Read More

You Don't Have To Be A Non-Profit To Inspire Positive Social Change

Nov 2, 2021 by Darren Dahl 4 Comments
How the founders of Chillibreeze pursue their purpose: “We Start Every Day With Gratitude.” It was a Christian mission that first brought Joanna and Ralph Budelman to India in 1995. Their lives, and those who work with them, have never been the same since. The couple, who grew up in Louisiana and Illinois, respectively, share a deep belief in the power of entrepreneurship to create positive change in the world. After arriving in India, they founded the first of what would eventually become a series of businesses over the subsequent ten years that have created great jobs for people in the communities they have lived and operated in.
Read More

7 Tips for Communicating Change

Oct 28, 2021 by Cassie Potts 0 Comments
Change is often uncomfortable, and adapting to it can be messy. Whether you’re implementing The Great Game of Business®, staging an acquisition, creating a new culture committee, or looking into employee ownership, consider these tips from CEOs that can help business leaders communicate your message in ways that build buy-in and rally your team behind the effort.
Read More

How Deming’s 14 Points For Management Can Help Us Thrive in A Post-Pandemic World

To overcome today’s challenges, and build a sustainable business for the long term, it’s time to transform how you get work done The biggest challenges our organization faces, like most everyone else in our post-pandemic world, is shortages of parts and people. With global supply chains snarled, we find ourselves sitting on warehouses full of engines waiting for silicon chips worth a few dollars each. Meanwhile, we were incredibly fortunate to hire 500 new associates over the past year. But, we’re still shorthanded when you subtract the 250 or so employee-owners who retired at the end of 2020. And, despite the superhuman efforts from our human relations teams, that’s not going to change anytime soon.
Read More

Top 6 Great Game No-Nos

Top Six Great Game No-Nos: What NOT to do if you (really) want to play The Game During the time that we’ve been helping others implement The Great Game of Business, we’ve seen the ups and downs and are often surprised by the number of people who are “fair-weather Great Gamers”, meaning they have passion and intent to play The Great Game of Business®, but are missing the mark in one or more areas. Here are the top six (because five just wasn’t enough) Great Game No-nos:
Read More

Learn From My Mistakes: Why Caregivers Need To Embrace Financial Literacy

Sep 28, 2021 by Dr. Ray Tuck, DC 0 Comments
Read More

Are You Really Opening the Books?

Sep 1, 2021 by Rich Armstrong 0 Comments
Inspired by Rich Armstrong & Steve Baker's new book, Get in the Game: How to Create Rapid Financial Results and Lasting Cultural Change. For nearly forty years, Springfield Remanufacturing Corporation (SRC) and subsidiary The Great Game of Business, Inc. have been known as the “open-book people.” The term open-book management (OBM) was coined by John Case in reference to SRC's "maverick" management practice in an Inc. Magazine article back in the 1980s, and the name stuck. With SRC and Great Game’s approach to OBM, Jack Stack, our CEO and founder, was even dubbed the “Father of Open-Book Management” by Inc. But if you ask Jack what he thinks of OBM, he’ll tell you that opening the books is only part of the story... financial transparency is worthless without education, accountability, and reward. The only way to see your people AND your organization grow and transform is by teaching employees how business works.
Read More

Decentralizing Business to Accelerate Company Growth and Stability

Jul 7, 2021 by Esther Tang 0 Comments
For many today, it would be unthinkable— if not sheer torture—to run a company supported by data arriving by pony express and steamship. Yet, in the 1800s, that’s what American industrialists regularly did to huge success. How could Carnegie and Rockefeller have made significant, informed decisions with material gathered by mere telegraph, letters, and only later, telephone? Weren’t they alarmed that their milk was fresher than their business intelligence?
Read More

3 Ways to Build Trust Through Transparency

Jul 7, 2021 by John Hall 2 Comments
The power of transparency in business— and how it positively affects your brand — is often lost on some leaders, and I understand that. When you lead a major corporation, you might feel that being more transparent means you’ll have to show your cards to clients and customers or give away more than you’re comfortable with. And what happens if you share anything that’s not business-related and alienate someone in your audience? That fear keeps many leaders from sharing an authentic story and truly connecting with their key audiences.
Read More

Lists by Topic

see all

About The Great Game of Business

Our approach to running a company was developed to help close one of the biggest gaps in business: the gap between managers and employees. We call our open-book approach The Great Game of Business. What lies at the heart of The Game is a very simple proposition: The best, most efficient, most profitable way to operate a business is to give everybody in the company a voice in saying how the company is run and a stake in the outcome. Let us teach you how to develop a culture of ownership, where employees think, act and feel like owners.