Customer Reviews

A Stake in the Outcome: Building a Culture of Ownership for the Long-Term Success of Your Business

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What could Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham come up with to match the excitement of The Great Game of Business? Perhaps nothing, but they've come pretty close with A Stake in the Outcome, a continuation of the remarkable story of SRC and its traiblazing initiatives in Open Book Management, employee ownership and organization-wide involvement. The first portion of the book is a recounting of the earliest days of SRC, a story that will be very familiar to readers of the earlier Stack book. But the reading quickly becomes compelling as he continues the story and builds the irrefutable case for equity ownership throughout an organization. Jack Stack is a consummate teacher: experienced, entertaining, inspiring and entirely logical. In this work, he demonstrates once again that "he knows his numbers." For fans and pratitioners of Open Book Management, or those intrigued by the potential behind employee ownership, this is an important new book.

Jack Stack has become well-known in some circles as the poster boy of open book management. He and his colleagues at SRC (Springfield Remanufacturing Corporation) have built a company and set of business practices (Great Game of Business) around the concept of sharing numbers with your employees. Yes, it's more than just sharing numbers, it's empowering the employees to be true team members, enabling them to take personal and collective actions to influence the numbers and to share in the profits.

Open book management is a great concept that has made a significant difference for a lot of companies, and even the U. S. Coast Guard. Stack presented the concept in his 1992 book, "The Great Game of Business" (Currency Doubleday). That book was a valuable how-to package.

"A Stake in the Outcome" is more of the story of the transformation of a remanufacturing plant owned by a large corporation into a thriving independent business. In the midst of the text, the reader will find some advice, some brief case studies of other companies, and some experience descriptions that may be instructive. But, when it all shakes out, this is the story of the growth of a business. It's an historical review with plenty of detail. It's Jack Stack's story.

If you're looking for an instruction book of how to build an employee-centered open book management company, this isn't it. If you're looking for an instructive report of what one company went through, from the leader's perspective, this book fits that description. It's Jack Stack's book, even though Bo Burlingham, an editor-at-large of Inc. Magazine, is shown as co-author. Burlingham's photo doesn't appear on the dust jacket, just Stack's.

Reading the book is like listening to Stack telling his story, with the emotion, the ego, the pride, and the rough-and-tumble. It would be interesting to hear this story shared by others. You can gain that experience by visiting SRC in Springfield, Missouri, but you can't get it from this book.

I found the Great Game of Business to be uninformative.
However, A Stake in the Outcome made up for it! If you've ever considered becoming an entrepreneur, READ THIS BOOK!

While this book does go into details about the author's amazing success with his company, SRC, the advice is tailored to senior executives who are in the position of founding or leading young companies. The author candidly admits that personal experience in leading a company is the only real way to learn, because each company has its own unique challenges, and because situations look quite different in the heat of a tense moment, rather than in the comfort of a book. Nonetheless, this book does give the reader plenty of areas to think more about, and tells a great story in the process.

In his latest book, A Stake in the Outcome, Jack Stack (and coauthor Bob Burlingham) extends and amplifies the lessons he taught in his first book, The Great Game of Business. This is the detailed story of how Springfield Remanufacturing Corporation evolved into SRC Holdings and it is a great read! Many of us have wondered over the years how SRC was evolving. We knew a bit about the diversification activities but none of the details and, certainly, little of the philosophy. This book pulls the curtain aside and lets us look at the fascinating details of this very worthy endeavor.

Stack and his cohort at SRC have, literally, created a new business model - in the sense that Peter Drucker uses the term. There are significant lessons to be learned here and I intend to point my Strategic Management students in the direction of this book. What is particularly appealing to me is that the book is not a watered down "ain't we wonderful" retrospective summary. It's a detailed presentation of what went on including all of the mistakes and "lessons learned".

A lot of "business management" books are all fluff; not here.

There is not one wasted word in this wonderful book, which should be mandatory reading in every business in America.

Inadvertantly, Stack addressed the issue of a "culture of ownership" just in time to face a generational shift in the work force.

"Theory X" worked for the veterans of WWII; "Theory Y" worked, to a degree, for the Baby Boomers.

"Generation X," and "Generation Y," see the cultural climate of business in an entirely different light; yet, they must find a voice in working with American business, for the good of all.

Incredibly distrustful of authority, and poorly served by the education system they have left, something new is needed to bring order out of the chaos of their perceptions.

If you are looking for silver bullets, look no further than Stack's books (and Ricardo Semler's "Maverick").

In "The Great Game of Business," Stack discussed the restructuring of Sprinfield Remanfacturing, starting with a debt/equity ratio of 89 to 1.

Success brought a new, painful awareness of two basic issues: one, growth leads to conflict arising, and must be resolved; and two, businesses do not scale very well.

A larger business requires a qualitatively different framework to resolve conflicts in; the price of the necessary knowledge is very high, indeed.

Good news!

Stack and the people at SRC Holdings Corporation - the name should give you a hint of the magnitude of change required - have done the heavy lifting for you!

The best accompaniment you can have as you try to apply his principles is a good primer on economic value added (EVA) accounting.

Incidentally, Chapter 10, "Crossing the Great Divide," includes a great story about "The Secret of the Chinese Firecracker Factory," where the issue of scaling the business model is addressed following an insight gained from the manufacturing process of Chinese firecrackers.

The same insight was expressed in Chapter 15 of "Maverick," by Ricardo Semler. Called "Divide and Prosper," Semler addresses the issue of the appropriate scale and structure of the business in the same light as Stack. Semler also addressed a good many of the issues Stack faced from an invaluable perspective, particularly management structure (see Chapter 21 of "Maverick.")

Stack has given one and all an invaluable guide to The Next Step after Open Books; keep it close to hand, give it to all of your people, and let people who wonder about "who moved their cheese," keep wondering!

The book describes with candor the experience of the author in building a succesful employee-owned organization. It narrates, in very human terms, the journey of a group of people to build what has become a case study in business management studies. From the motivations of the people involved, to the challenges and dilemmas they faced, to the strategies and solutions they found, the book provides tremendous amount of insight for anybody considering creating an organization that shares ownership with employees and aims to have an ownership culture.

I'm currently looking at a compensation model with the company that I am working with. The book was helpful, and I enjoyed the read.

"A Stake In The Outcome" by Jack Stack (with Bo Burlingham)

On a scale of one to ten, I'd rate Jack Stack's new book (A Stake In The Outcome) a 20! An unadulterated, slam dunk winner! In short, if you want to know what's going to be required of business owners worldwide within a decade, you simply cannot afford to ignore this book.

In very accessible, user-friendly terms, Stack explains (from 20 years of practical, hands-on experience, not from a theoretical rooftop) the principals that are destined to provide the philosophical and practical foundation of 21st century business...worldwide. And if you don't know `em, understand `em, and implement `em, your business is destined to go the way of the dinosaur. Simple as that.

I'm talking about a democratically inspired, capitalistic revolution that's already underway, and if you don't get on board soon, it'll be too late. So it ain't optional, it's required reading! If you intend to remain viable, (let alone competitive) in the near future it ain't optional, it's mandatory!

In fact I predict that, because of his brilliant and practical insights, this blue collar visionary (along with his loyal troops) is himself, destined to be considered one of the founding fathers of the 21st century. Ignore him and you'll lose, guaranteed!

Rick Osbourne
Managing Editor
P.G. Publications
Batavia, IL

This book is essential business reading. Stack is the CEO of Springfield ReManufactring Corporation (SRC) and the driving force behind the open-book management movement. This passionate account uses the SRC story to illustrate the principles of open-book management, the great game of business, and employee ownership. Stack argues that successful companies have to extend ownership in every sense of the term to their employees. It is especially strong on showing how sharing ownership, financially and psychologically, is the key to creating lasting innovation in companies.