Open-Book Management is...

Open-book management at its most effective far outperforms a definition as simple as “sharing financial information with employees”. Open-book isn’t just about opening your financials to your company, it’s about responsibility, ownership, results, and growth; all of these things can come together to move the needle forward in your organization. With proper training and knowledge, all levels of your business start to act and engage just like owners or leaders.

Fully engage with your employees by teaching them the workings of your business and the financial literacy needed to understand your books.

With this knowledge, everyone begins to be able to make decisions that impact the business on a daily basis, everyone gains a stake in the outcome. The heart of The Game is very simple: We believe the best, most efficient, most profitable way to operate a business is to give everybody in the company a voice in how it’s run and a stake in the financial outcome—good or bad.

Our ultimate goal is to create a “business of business people” who think, act and feel like owners.

Does Opening the Books Mean Sharing Everything?

Salary Information Always Remains Confidential

The goal of the open-book strategy is to create accountability and responsibility in staff members by showing them their impact on numbers that are important to your organization. Financial information such as salary and bonuses paid to individuals is not relevant to that goal, nor to the financial literacy training, and consequently is not shared with employees.

Awareness Breeds Engagement

The GGOB approach isn’t about finger pointing. Instead, it’s about reflecting on past failures and successes, as well as present-day challenges. This helps staff members understand what they can do to improve results in the future. The focus of The Game is squarely on the “why” and the “how” rather than the “what.”

Scorecards Benefit Only Your Organization

If a competitor gets access to a scorecard it really has nothing more than raw data. Without knowledge of the processes and procedures behind the numbers, there is no way for an organization to capitalize on those stats.

Explaining Your Critical Numbers

The focus of The Great Game® is the data that matters most to your organization. We refer to these as your Critical Number. We help you use those metrics to teach your staff about your business from the perspective of a manager or owner. They become intimately familiar with this data and aware of how their efforts impact the company’s results. Numbers that can’t be used to help achieve this goal aren’t shared.

Our Approach

Our approach to running a company was developed to help close one of the biggest gaps in business: the gap between managers and employees. We call our open-book approach The Great Game of Business®. What lies at the heart of The Game is a very simple proposition.

The best, most efficient, most profitable way to operate a business is to give everybody in the company a voice in saying how the company is run and a stake in the financial outcome, good or bad.

In some ways, we see “business” as incidental to what we do. Our real business is education. We teach people about business and give employees the knowledge and tools that help them understand:

  • What winning means in business
  • How to track, measure and improve performance
  • How to share in a self-funding stake in the outcome

Our ultimate goal is to create a “business of business people” who think, act and feel like owners. Open-book management is one of the key components of our approach, though it is only a portion of our overall process.

OBM Infographic PNG-1