Change is often uncomfortable, and adapting to it can be messy. Whether you’re implementing The Great Game of Business®, staging an acquisition, creating a new culture committee, or looking into employee ownership, consider these tips from CEOs that can help business leaders communicate your message in ways that build buy-in and rally your team behind the effort.

Vontae Douglas' journey at Tasty Catering began with working part-time at small summer events. A combination of business education, financial literacy training, and coworkers close enough to be considered family has transformed Vontae's summer job into a career in a field that he never expected. Financial literacy training and working with the numbers behind the business was new for Vontae, but this business training and education opened doors to a completely new work experience. He and his team have been taught to understand what the financial numbers mean, how to read them, and how to individually respond to impact future results and the success of the company.

My GGOB Story The year was 2011, and I was living it up as a young single 20-something in Springfield, MO. I was a proud community college graduate holding an associates degree in ‘electronic media production’ with a slight obsession with attending large-scale music festivals. You know the ones, Coachella, Bonnaroo, The HangOut Music Fest. I lived for them and I was always planning out which one I would attend next, always keeping in mind what my small hourly call center wage would support.

For more than 25 years, we’ve helped thousands of companies implement open-book management to its fullest capacity. Along the way, we’ve developed a list of common mistakes companies make while using transparency and open-book management in their organization. If you think you are not executing open-book management correctly, or are not seeing the results you expected, then you may be making one of these four common errors:

It’s one thing to teach a strategic planning process, but it’s another thing altogether to actually practice what you preach. Here at The Great Game of Business®, not only do we talk the talk, we walk the walk.

We love to see and hear the inside stories of companies putting the principles and practices of The Great Game of Business® to work in their organizations. As we revealed at the 2018 Great Game of Business Conference, we have a goal to impact 10 million lives in the next 10 years in the #sharonthedream campaign. Here are three of our favorite videos representing three very different stories of how the Great Game has made a difference...

Through the years, the team at SRC and The Great Game of Business have seen our share of doubters, disbelievers, critics and skeptics - everyone from CEOs, to managers, to hourly employees who said open-book management couldn't work... that teaching employees about business was crazy…that transparency was not necessary in business. Some of the biggest disbelievers came from right here at SRC…the birthplace of open-book management! One doubter with a particularly fascinating story is Denise Bredfeldt, a former transmission rebuilder at SRC during the early days of The Great Game of Business. To be fair, Denise lived through the dismal buyout of International Harvester; a time when trust and morale were at an all-time low. Before SRC was founded, Denise even circulated an underground newsletter mocking the company culture and management, and she wasn’t about to jump on the open-book bandwagon.

The Great Game of Business team is packing up to head to Atlanta, GA to be a part of this year's NCEO 2018 Conference! The GGOB team is thrilled to be presenting multiple sessions at this years premier gathering on employee ownership, the NCEO Employee Ownership Conference. Come by and see us at booth #14 in the exhibitors section.