Jack Stack

Oh my gosh.

Jack Stack.

Fantastic book.

His whole argument was if you brought everybody behind the curtain and you showed them the financial mechanics of a business and brought some profit sharing into the mix, you could turn everybody into an owner mindset.

It's a really good story.

Jack Stack is the author of the book.

John Williams was on my podcast, spoke to our group.

that leads to 46 is the critical number.

So one of the interesting developments now, and some of the things you've been talking about have been around forever.

I mean, if you look at like Jack Stack's Open Book Management.

Right.

And they are

And so for those listeners that don't know what I'm referring to, this is Springfield Remanufacturing Corporation, which began its life very inauspiciously as a spinoff from a much larger organization.

It was a money-losing engine remanufacturing company.

And Jack Stack, together with Bo Burlingham, said, hang on, you know...

Our workers can go out on a weekend, and they can recite every player's baseball batting averages for the last 25 years, and they can tell every football handicap, every golf handicap.

And I think it's really critical for leaders to communicate and to have town halls and to share what's working and even share what's not working.

I remember Jack Stack in the game of business said that there was, he was working with a Springfield manufacturing company and he was saying that their jobs were very secure and they didn't have to worry.

And the janitor came up to him and said, you know, I don't think that's true.

Every seven years things change.

You're listening to a podcast.

So anybody listening to this who wants to read a good book, The Great Game of Business by Jack Stack is a great book.

And he is the godfather of open book finance.

And I will steal from him in the sense of that you have to connect the whys and the dots between what the organization does how it drives profitability to what the individual roles of that team member can do to affect that outcome.

Jeremiah is my business partner.

And we found the great game of business by Jack Stack, which is an open book financial management approach to business.

And we implemented that back.

It was in the middle of COVID when we first implemented it.

And, like, none of that was working.

And then I may- I read this book called The Great Game of Business, and, uh, Jack Stack in there gave the profit and loss statement every month to every employee.

Like, even the guy in the factory who swept the floors got a copy of the P&L And he also gave them financial education, how to read a P&L.

What did this mean? You know, what, uh, it's not for the average person, if you didn't get a business degree, looking at a P&L is like r- trying to read Greek, you know, if you're not Greek.

Can't wait.

So Bo Burlingham, he wrote Small Giants, um, Great Game of Business with Jack Stack, and, um, he wrote a book called Finish Big, and John, that was the inception point of my journey after we sold.

Um, and Bo essentially, the whole point is like how do you finish big as a privately held own- owner/operator? And he, he said, in summarizing the whole book, "Know who you are, what you want from the business, and why." He talks a lot about identity.

Well, I was miserable, and so was my dad after we sold, 'cause of this identity crisis.

Like, we would never run a business that wasn't open book financial management.

Uh, we got exposed to it, um, from Jack Stack, The Great Game of Business.

Yeah.

We, we listened to a podcast with him, then we read the book.