Mark Harbeke

One of the speakers at our 2008 Top Small Workplaces Conference earlier this month was Rich Armstrong, President of The Great Game of Business. If you've heard of Jack Stack, the Great Game should sound familiar. He co-wrote a book on this simple but powerful concept in 1994, after using it to transform his near-bankrupt division of International Harvester, SRC, into a hugely successful enterprise today that includes 17 businesses that employ over 1,200 people.

Today Jack and his business coaches teach the Great Game to companies to help them become more transparent with their financials, get employees engaged and thinking like owners and, perhaps most importantly in our current economy, building profits for the business so it can stay open, providing jobs and economic stability to communities everywhere.

According to Rich, there are 4 steps to implementing the Great Game, as shown below.

I wanted to share with you a little of what he spoke about during his October 15 session on Open Book Management (OBM) regarding Step 3, "Follow the Action and Keep Score." In terms of employee engagement, this means creating an environment where managers don't hold employees accountable but, rather, where employees hold themselves accountable, based on the common pursuit of a "critical number," which can vary depending on the business.

Here's Rich on getting employees to hold each other accountable:

mp3 - 1.35 MB - 1:33

Although the OBM session that Rich presented at our conference was attended by some business leaders who are already using the Great Game in their organizations, Rich spoke on the basics of OBM for the uninitiated. As an addendum to that session, he will be presenting a webinar for Winning Workplaces tomorrow on the same topic, expanding on the basics to flesh out the ways to make the Great Game work for your business, and what that can mean in terms of your bottom line.

By the way, you don't have to take it from me that opening up your books and teaching your employees how to read your financials provides an easily understood through-line between employee engagement activities and achieving bottom-line results. Fourteen of our 15 newly named Top Small Workplaces have successfully implemented OBM, helping them maintain steady revenue growth to the tune of 23%, on average, over the last two years.

Learn how you can make your employee engagement best practices work for you – attend our webinar tomorrow and chat with Rich Armstrong of The Great Game of Business.