The Great Game of Business
The Only Sensible Way to Run a Company
What's it about
What if every single employee thought and acted like an owner? Imagine the explosive growth and engagement that would unleash. The Great Game of Business reveals a revolutionary system for achieving just that, transforming your company’s financial performance by turning business into a winnable game for everyone. You'll learn the secrets of open-book management, a proven method for teaching your team financial literacy and giving them a direct stake in the outcome. Discover how to create a culture of transparency and accountability where every employee is motivated to boost the bottom line because they win when the company wins.
Meet the author
Jack Stack is the pioneering founder and CEO of SRC Holdings Corporation, widely recognized as the father of open-book management for turning a failing factory into a thriving, employee-owned success. Along with co-author and acclaimed business journalist Bo Burlingham, he transformed his real-world experiment in financial transparency and employee empowerment into The Great Game of Business. This revolutionary system was born from the necessity of survival, proving that teaching business literacy to everyone creates a more engaged, profitable, and resilient company.
The Script
The delivery truck rumbles to a stop outside a small, independent hardware store. Inside, the owner watches as the driver unloads a pallet of new inventory—a shipment of high-end power saws. He’d ordered them weeks ago, gambling that a coming wave of home renovation projects would make them fly off the shelves. But now, seeing them in person, a knot forms in his stomach. The invoice is steep. If they don't sell, he’ll be paying for them all winter, unable to stock the snow blowers and ice melt his customers will actually need. He’s the only one who knows the numbers, the only one carrying the weight of that risk. His employees, meanwhile, are busy helping customers, oblivious to the fact that their hours, and maybe even their jobs, depend entirely on the fate of those saws.
This silent, lonely burden is the default reality for most business owners. But what if everyone in that hardware store—from the person stocking shelves to the cashier—understood the numbers? What if they saw the invoice, knew the profit margin on each saw, and felt the same urgency to sell them as the owner? This question led Jack Stack, then a manager at a struggling manufacturing plant in Springfield, Missouri, to try something radical. Facing the near-certain closure of his factory, a division of International Harvester, he and his colleagues bought the failing company themselves. They had no cash, immense debt, and a workforce that was completely in the dark about the business's dire financial state. Stack realized their only hope for survival was to teach everyone, from the machinists on the floor to the administrative staff, how to read the financials and think like owners. This desperate experiment in open-book management became the foundation for 'The Great Game of Business'.
Module 1: Business as a Game, Not a Chore
The core premise of the book is disarmingly simple. To get people engaged, you have to change the way they see their work. Most employees view business as a mysterious, intimidating black box. The authors argue that this is a colossal waste of talent. They found that even a drill press operator, who seemed only focused on his narrow task, was a self-made millionaire from real estate investments. His entrepreneurial mind was completely untapped at work.
To unlock this hidden potential, you must reframe business as a competitive game. Think about it. Games have rules. They have a way to keep score. And they have a clear definition of winning. This structure appeals to a universal human desire to compete and succeed. When you treat business like a game, work becomes an engaging challenge.
At SRC, they named the system "The Great Game of Business" to explicitly invite everyone to play. They taught people what the numbers meant. Suddenly, concepts like "cost of goods sold" or "gross margin" were points on the scoreboard. An employee could see how reducing waste in their department directly improved the team's score and, ultimately, the company's health.
This brings us to a crucial insight. To win the game, everyone needs to know the rules and see the scoreboard. This is the essence of open-book management. It’s about giving people the information they need to make smart decisions. Before implementing the game, a survey at SRC showed employees believed the company’s profit margin was 40-50%. The actual figure was closer to 3%. Once the truth was shared, the resentment and suspicion vanished. It was replaced by a collective desire to improve that number. People finally understood the stakes. They saw that winning was about securing their own jobs and building a stronger company for everyone.