- Stack, Jack with Bo Burlingham. The Great Game of Business. New
York: Doubleday, [1992] 1994. ISBN 0-385-47525-X.
- When you take a company public in the United States,
there's inevitably a session where senior management sits down with
the lawyers for the lecture on how, notwithstanding much vaunted
constitutional guarantees of free speech, loose lips may land them
in Club Fed for “insider trading”. This is where you learn of such
things as the “quiet period”, and realise that by trying to cash out
investors who risked their life savings on you before any sane person
would, you're holding your arms out to be cuffed and do the perp
walk should things end badly. When I first encountered this absurd
mind-set, my immediate reaction was, “Well, if ‘insider trading’
is forbidden disclosure of secrets, then why not eliminate all
secrets entirely? When you're a public company, you essentially
publish your general ledger every quarter anyway—why not make it
open to everybody in the company and outside on a daily (or whatever
your reporting cycle is) basis?” As with most of my ideas, this
was greeted with gales of laughter and dismissed as ridiculous. N'importe…right around when
I and the other perpetrators were launching Autodesk, Jack Stack
and his management team bought out a refurbishment business shed by
International Harvester in its death agonies and turned it around into
a people-oriented money machine, Springfield Remanufacturing
Corporation. My Three Laws of business have always been: “1)
Build the best product. 2) No bullshit. 3) Reward the people who do
the work.” Reading this book opened my eyes to how I had fallen short
in the third item. Stack's “Open Book” management begins by inserting
what I'd call item “2a) Inform the people who do the work”.
By opening the general ledger to all employees (and the analysts,
and your competitors: get used to it—they know almost every number
to within epsilon anyway if you're a serious player in the market),
you give your team—hourly and salaried—labour and management—union
and professional—the tools they need to know how they're doing,
and where the company stands and how secure their jobs are. This is
always what I wanted to do, but I was insufficiently bull-headed to
override the advice of “experts” that it would lead to disaster or
land me in the slammer. Jack Stack went ahead and did it, and the
results his company has achieved stand as an existence proof that
opening the books is the key to empowering and rewarding the people
who do the work. This guy is a hero of free enterprise: go and do
likewise; emulate and grow rich.
September 2004 