At first glance, the idea of republishing a 20-year-old book was not favored by its author, Jack Stack.
“He said, ‘Why on earth would you want to promote a 20-year-old book? Why not write a new book?’” said Steve Baker, vice president of The Great Game of Business Inc., the company spawned by the original book. “So, we compromised.”
In July, a special anniversary edition of “The Great Game of Business” was printed with the goal of influencing a whole new generation of business professionals. The original principle remains: Empower employees to think and act like owners by opening the company’s financial books.
Stack took the lead, writing a 23-page introduction reflecting on the impact at his own company, SRC Holdings Corp., since his open-book management concepts were first shared with the masses in 1993.
“The associates here have just done a tremendous job based on the system. From a quantitative standpoint, the statistics are mind-boggling,” Stack said, noting SRC companies have grown revenues fivefold the last two decades, to roughly $450 million in 2012. “I thought it was important to tell people about the power of this kind of system in the fact that here’s a company that has been doing this for 31 years, and the results have been really strong.”
The journey began in 1983, when Stack spearheaded an employee buyout of the closing International Harvester plant in Springfield. He said the fledgling Springfield ReManufacturing Corp. stock was initially valued at 10 cents a share; thirty years later, he said the corporation was worth $60 per share.
Beyond SRC, Baker said national companies such as Southwest Airlines, Harley-Davidson and Capital One, as well as local businesses such as Paul Mueller Co. and Springfield Business Journal, have adopted “Great Game” strategies to tap into the power of their cultures.
Second halfBefore nearly 50 people collaborated in writing, editing and producing “Great Game” anniversary elements, Baker and Great Game President Rich Armstrong started talking two years ago with publisher Crown Business, a division of Crown Publishing Group/Random House LLC in New York.
“We didn’t want to change the book,” Baker said. “We wanted to celebrate it and bring it to a new audience, a new generation of business leaders.”
For 20 years, Baker said people have asked, “Where’s the how-to?” Those questions led to Baker and Armstrong developing the resource guide, dubbed Get in the Game, which accounts for the last 67 pages of the new edition.
“Imagine an additional third, more new material that will actually allow people to implement ‘The Great Game’ in their own organization,” Baker said.
He said the guide had been imagined as a list, and then as step-by-step instructions, but they ended up using stories from companies that had applied Stack’s open-book management style.
“We did what my kids would call a mash-up. We said let’s take all the best stories from all the implementations we’ve been involved with, and put them into what we’d call a ‘factitional’ company. It’s one story, but it is made up of hundreds of accounts,” Baker said.
To coincide with the rerelease, The Great Game hired Springfield-based Web developers 40 Digits LLC to redesign GreatGame.com and add an online resource for companies to take the first step. 40 Digits also designed the new book cover, which went through 26 versions before arriving at the final product.
Another local company, Associated Video Producers Inc., worked with Stack to create the audio version of the book. Baker said The Great Game had the foresight years ago to buy the rights to an audio book and hired AVP to produce it for the anniversary edition. Stack recorded the introduction and the body of the book, while Baker and Armstrong handled the resource guide. Baker said the trio spent more than 20 hours recording during the course of several weeks to produce the seven-hour audio book.
Original co-author Bo Burlingham, an editor-at-large for Inc. magazine, also was brought back to edit Stack’s new introduction.
“The idea of putting out a book is much bigger than most people would think,” Baker said, adding a key was open lines of communication with publishers to meet their deadlines and expectations. “And to do it through a publisher is a really big thing to me because you are dealing with their machine, if you will, the physical printing [and] their work with Barnes & Noble, Amazon and iTunes to have the e-books ready.”
Measuring resultsIn July, the book was the No. 1 selling business paperback in America, according to Nielsen BookScan ratings, Baker said, and through Aug. 28, the book has sold nearly 300,000 copies and has been printed in 11 languages. More than 5,000 copies of the audio book, which is available through GreatGame.com, had sold since the anniversary edition was released.
“This thing just keeps chugging along,” Baker said. “It has never been out of print in 20 years. It’s in its 24th printing.”
What started as a remanufacturer of truck and automobile engines, SRC has diversified into 33 business entities focused on everything from logistics, packaging and distribution to failure analysis and reverse engineering. Stack said the company’s growth wouldn’t have been possible without the guidance of the employee owners.
“Not only do (workers) have the opportunity to earn a decent wage, they have the opportunity to build their own equity, their own fortune, based on how well we continue to build the company,” Stack said.
The employee stock ownership plan accounts for original employees averaged more than $400,000 in 2012, according to Stack.
“It is common sense. It is not rocket science,” Stack said. “It is about giving back. If it can work for us, it can work for most organizations.”
