Great Game of Business adds players to roster

Rich Armstrong has filled the vacancy created when Great Game’s General Manager and Public Relations Director Alexis Brown moved to Doctors’ Hospital’s communications director post in January.

Armstrong slid from various jobs with Springfield Remanufacturing Corp., the parent company of The Great Game of Business, to Great Game’s general manager. He worked for SRC for 15 years.

The company also made a change in its marketing department, hiring Steve Baker in September as director of sales and marketing. His previous experience dealt mostly with marketing of retail products, most notably for Heartland Fragrances, along with a brief stint as a private sales consultant.

But working for Great Game, which opens a company’s books to its employees, is a whole new ballgame for Baker.

“Now, all of a sudden, people really need what I’m selling. (The game) helps people, it adds value, it does something for them,” Baker said. “It has a tremendous impact on people’s lives – not just owners but employees.”

Playing to win

Jack Stack came up with the idea of The Great Game of Business when he and 118 co-workers purchased Springfield Remanufacturing Corp. in 1983. In an effort to turn around the floundering company, he implemented a new philosophy, focused on giving every employee a look at how the business operated and showing their stake in the business’ success.

He went on to write a book detailing his philosophy, called “The Great Game of Business,” which has now developed into its own company – one of 17 under the SRC Holdings umbrella. The Great Game employs a full-time staff of six and contracts with five speaker/practitioners.

The open-book business philosophy Stack espouses has been utilized in more than 2,000 companies across the nation and around the world, including Southwest Airlines, Capital One and Harley Davidson.

Springfield-based Interactive Hotel Solutions Inc., a 2001 startup by Doug Lurvey and Jason Harris, both of whom had worked for Springfield-based Travelnow.com before the company was purchased by Hotel Reservations Network, has grown by leaps and bounds since it implemented the program in June 2004. At that point, the company had 12 employees; it now employs more than 40. Revenues from 2004 to 2005 have grown by 108 percent, and the company is now worth more than $50 million.

Lurvey, Interactive Hotel Solutions’ president, said the program’s proactive approach is what sets it apart from other management styles.

“Prior to doing The Great Game of Business, we were always looking backward, at how we performed last year, trying to analyze that,” he said. “Now we look at what we’re going to do the next 12 months, 24 months, even the next five years.”

Interactive Hotel Solutions has gone beyond simply implementing Great Game practices, though – it recruited one of Great Game’s own. Krystal Simon, Baker’s predecessor at The Great Game of Business, now is director of affiliate development for Interactive Hotels, in part to help the company more fully integrate the open-book philosophies.

Randy Haran, CEO of Texas Air Composites Inc. in Cedar Hill, Texas, discovered The Great Game of Business when he read Stack’s book of the same name in the mid-1990s. When Haran started TAC in 2000, he informally implemented some of those business techniques, but said the company was “going through the motions with no clear path.”

“In the summer of 2003, I was at the airport and realized that Jack Stack had a second book, ‘A Stake in the Outcome,’” Haran said. “I read that book, got excited and re-engaged, contacted the Great Game and wanted to formalize our open-book philosophy. They came down, did a workshop, and since then, we’ve been a practitioner.”

Results have been good. TAC was No. 196 on the 2005 Inc. 500 list of the 500 fastest-growing private companies in the United States. The company had $10. 2 million in revenue for 2004, with 565.8 percent growth over the last three years.

TAC’s Haran said personal involvement and accountability are the reasons for the company’s success.

“When we have issues or questions, it’s not management answering the question. It’s hourly employees answering the questions for other hourly employees,” he said. “There are people who were not familiar with business literacy a year ago that now understand the contribution and the influence that they have on the financials. It’s a really effective tool for spreading accountability across the whole company.”

Those two features – personal accountability and the ability to look forward – are the aspects of the Great Game that Baker said are the most important.

“What the Great Game allows is for everybody to get involved in the business,” he said. “In many situations, people can work their entire careers without really understanding why they’re doing what they’re doing. The overwhelming success of the people who have truly used the great game is an indicator of how well it works.”

[[In-content Ad]]