In September Gershman gathered his employees together and told them to say good-bye to the old company. Henceforth, they would be working in teams -- "little Published Images," as the boss put it. They would be responsible for their own clients' newsletters, start to finish.
Today teams with names like Quality Matters essentially run their own businesses. A team salesperson lines up clients. Team operations people produce the product. Scoreboards in each team's area track numbers such as quarterly sales. A recently installed bonus system, pegged partly to sales and partly to quality scores, offers employees a "win" of up to 40% of salary. When a team reaches a certain level of output, it splits -- and junior people on the old team can move into more senior positions on the new.
Since the changeover, says Gershman, earnings are up 35%, and the company's own customer-satisfaction measures are up 78%. But don't call it a game -- even though the Quality Matters team will soon be installing a new, larger scoreboard.
GRANDDADDY OF GAMES
The lights dim. The action starts. But this isn't a sport, it's business -- the Great Game of Business, as practiced by Springfield Remanufacturing Corp. (SRC), the midsize Missouri company that may be having more effect on American management than any 10 of the nation's business schools have.
Go back to 1983. SRC is a struggling division of International Harvester (now Navistar). Jack Stack and the division's 12 other managers arrange to buy it out. But then Stack and the doughty dozen realize they own a factory with a doubtful future and a mountain of debt. "What else could we do?" asks Stack rhetorically. "We had to teach people how to make money."
Thus was born, over time, the Great Game -- fathered by Stack and mothered by necessity.
The Game is partly a compensation system: hefty bonuses for all are pegged to whatever financial goals are most critical in a given year. (This year most divisions have set targets for operating income and at least one other figure.) But it's mostly an elaborate system of business education, teaching employees to understand -- and take responsibility for -- the numbers that govern SRC's financial health every week and every month. Engine remanufacturing, Stack likes to point out, is a brutally competitive business, and SRC aims to be the low-cost producer. "At the staff meetings we find out if we are or we aren't."
The meetings -- dubbed the Great Huddle by Stack -- take place every other Wednesday at 8 a.m. Some 35 or 40 managers and employees representing SRC's business units and departments gather around a U-shaped table. The lights go down. A spreadsheet is projected onto a big screen. Then: action. The Heavy Duty division calls out its sales and costs for the two-week period just ended, along with anticipated numbers for the weeks to come. Automotive goes next, then on down the table.
As every unit reports, controller Sydney Moore pops the figures into a laptop, updating the big spreadsheet. Stack and the others watch the ever-changing bottom lines with practiced eyes, noting problems and parceling out responsibilities. By the end of the meeting complete financials will be printed out, and unit reps will take them back for distribution and discussion. Will next meeting's numbers be on target? That's now up to the players -- the employees -- in every department. They know the score.
By now more than 1,200 managers from companies large and small have watched SRC's system in action, thanks to regular training seminars sponsored by the company. (Yes, they let you sit in on a Huddle.) Many thousands more have read Stack's book The Great Game of Business (Doubleday-Currency). And if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, plenty of companies -- including some on these pages -- are sincere flatterers of SRC.
UP TO SPEED
How can I play these games you're talking about? They presume some financial literacy -- and my employees wouldn't know a balance sheet from a balanced diet.
Join the club. Virtually none of the game players started out with more than a couple of certified public accountants, M.B.A.'s, and other financial sophisticates on their payrolls. But they did find some effective and even entertaining ways of teaching employees the basics of business. Some tips:
Create a fictional company. The financial-education classes at Foldcraft, a restaurant-seating manufacturer in Kenyon, Minn., started a mythical chocolate-chip-cookie company -- and enjoyed instructor and chief operating officer Chuck Mayhew's home-baked cookies at the end. Bill Palmer of Commercial Casework leads employees through a little book called The Yo-Yo Company, published by Springfield Remanufacturing Corp. (800-FUN2PLAY).
Use those old classroom standbys, audiovisual aids. Video Arts (800-553-0091) produces a number of financial-education videos including an expensive but funny one called The Balance Sheet Barrier, starring British comedian John Cleese. Root Learning (419-874-0077) creates visual displays that help communicate complex information in easy-to-understand formats.
Bring in outside help. In its Accounting Game, Educational Discoveries (303-786-8100) sponsors daylong classes in basic accounting, complete with plenty of hoopla to demystify the subject. It will customize a program for your company, too. The Business Center (615-675-2275) also offers a customized training program that teaches employees the "basics of business."
Play a game. Intel Corp.'s Embedded Microcontroller Division (EMD) in Phoenix bought a business-training game called Profit & Cash (800-883-GAME) and set up an 11-week contest. Some 80 people (in teams of four) played the game, says Intel's Jeanette Hendrych. "People were very competitive! When one team really got ahead, another wanted to audit its score sheets. And some teams started to benchmark with others -- which is what we need to do in business."
