Games Companies Play

Got some specific goals you want to achieve? Worried about lack of focus among your employees? Numbers not quite where you'd like them to be? For the solutions to those and other vexing managerial problems, maybe you should join the scores of companies that are playing to win

I love a good game -- tennis, say, or softball. After hours. On the weekend. I don't usually think of "game" and "business" in the same mental breath, except maybe on company-picnic day.

But here I am, out in the business world, just doing my job, and I keep running into companies that say they're, well, playing games.

I'm not talking bowling leagues or golf tournaments here. I file that kind of game in the company-picnic category. Nor am I referring to the grab bag of sales competitions, suggestion programs, and employee-of-the-month contests that clutter up so many businesses. Those are tired old games in which a few people win and everybody else loses. Managers persist in thinking they're good for morale.

But a lot of companies are playing another kind of game entirely these days. And you may find, as I did, that this game playing shakes up -- not to say, transforms -- some pretty basic notions about how to run a company.

Here's the idea.

Most of us conceive of "business" and "management" in simple-enough terms. A business is an organization with a mission, sort of like an army. (You've seen the books about Genghis Khan and the rest as model business leaders.) Managers map out the strategies and command the troops.

Well, say the game players, forget all that stuff. And think of business not as war but as a game.

Think of it as a game, moreover, in which the players aren't just a company's top executives but every blessed employee on the payroll. After all, doesn't everybody in a business have a stake in winning -- in making money and growing? And isn't everybody's livelihood at risk if the company loses?

Start thinking this way, and you begin to see the job of management a little differently.

Say your company has a problem. Maybe inventory accuracy is way low. Maybe warranty costs or overhead are way high. The usual managerial reaction would do the U.S. Army proud. Send out memos. Hold high-level meetings. Berate -- or fire up -- the troops to do better.

The game players, by contrast, just set up a game designed to change the situation. It has an easily measurable goal -- "95% accuracy by the end of the year," for example. It has rules that everybody understands. At the end there's some kind of payoff for a win.

Or say you just want employees to remember and keep on remembering the importance of preserving cash or boosting gross margins or maybe just recording a profit at the end of a month. No problem, say the game players. Teach everybody to track those numbers. Show employees how what they do affects the figures. Then put up a big scoreboard and watch what happens. Oh, yes -- pass out bonuses if employees hit monthly or quarterly targets.

The effect of such measures is electric. Like competitors in any contest, people lie awake nights figuring out ways to win. "They do all the work!" exclaims Steve Wilson, president of Mid-States Technical Staffing Services, smiling broadly. "I don't have to be responsible for everything anymore."

I know -- you're worried about those scoreboards. You share the Great Terror of Games, which is that the key numbers in your company will somehow leak out to -- and benefit -- the competition. Oddly, that fear disturbs the sleep of game players such as Wilson not one whit. "Let 'em find out," says Wilson, a no-nonsense West Point graduate. "We think our numbers would scare the crap out of competitors."

If you have a sense of dÉjà vu by now, it may be because the idea of game playing didn't appear out of thin air. This magazine first wrote about Springfield Remanufacturing Corp. (SRC) and its Great Game of Business several years ago. We've revisited SRC and other game players periodically. Many of those others model themselves after SRC.

What's catching me by surprise this time around, though, are the sheer numbers. We talked with 50 or 60 game-playing companies over the past couple of months. We stopped for lack of time, not for lack of names.

We found them, moreover, in all sorts of industries. The sophisticated fund-raising experts at Share Systems Inc., ensconced in Boston-area offices a mile from Harvard University, may not have much in common with the operators of the die-casting machines at Pace Industries' Cast-Tech Division, in rural Monroe City, Mo. Never mind -- both groups of employees can tell you exactly what they have to do to make money in their business and exactly how they're faring in their current monthly or quarterly game.

What makes games work? Chief executives who are (or who once were) athletes like to use sports analogies. They invoke the pride of a great performance and conjure up visions of Olympic-style efforts.

Maybe they're right. But in my view, games get people working hard and smart, mostly because they transform the workplace in two critical ways.

First: in a game, everybody's on the same side -- against the competition.

Most workplaces are shot through with divisions. Hourly versus salaried. Technical versus sales. Accounting versus everybody else. People jockey for position, point the finger, gossip, and politick. A well-designed game, tied directly to a company's performance on key numbers, cuts through all that mess. Everybody wants to win. People have to help one another to do so. Ask for some cooperation and you're not so likely to hear the phrase (as one Pace employee put it), "That ain't my stinkin' job."

Second: in a game, people set their own goals. They may need advice and guidance. They don't need marching orders. Look at the little parable of work and bowling to the left. It speaks volumes.

What's most interesting about the games, of course, isn't the general precepts, it's the details. So on the following pages you'll find a whole array of them. How the games came into being. What they were designed to accomplish. How well they've worked in practice.