A few years back, we hosted our Annual Great Game of Business Conference with the theme, “The Wisdom of the Crowd.” The event has always been a great place to learn from other open-book practitioners, and specifically remember this Gathering's opening keynote speaker James Surowiecki speaking about his book, The Wisdom of Crowds, which discusses how the collective wisdom of a group can outweigh the wisest person within the crowd. I was conflicted. How can the average of a group of contributors yield a greater result than that of the highest member in the group? For me, this was a hard-to-understand concept that seemed to severely oppose my traditional, mathematical thinking.

In an open-book company, communication can make or break the success of your Game. MiniGames™, Huddles, and scoreboards are simply tools that are only as good as the communication and actions you create around them. Check out these tips from Great Game™ Coach, Dave Scholten, about communicating effectively to maximize The Game at your Business.

When the company does well, our professional lives go forward. But when the company doesn’t do well, eventually, it will impact the employees. The most common employee response to a company failure is “we never saw this coming!” Over the last 10-20 years, we have watched large, successful U.S. companies enter into failure mode. It constantly hits our media networks. It’s painful to see the impact of this demise on the people who have committed their professional life to the failing company. The failure of the corporation never seems to be “fair” to these employees. So, it’s appropriate to propose that the company’s success has to be important to the employees.

In an open-book company, we keep score in order to simply and consistently inform the players if they are winning or losing, and who is accountable. Check out these tips from Great Game Coach, Dave Scholten, for measuring the right results to maximize The Game at your business.

Rewards are essential to The Great Game of Business® and for improving work culture and engagement. So much so that we should begin with its definition. Reward: To make a gift of something to someone in recognition of his or her services, efforts or achievements. Reward systems recognize staff members who excel in areas, such as customer service, loyalty and sales ability. There are many reasons to begin a reward system, for example:

Think back to when you first opened your business or launched your company. All your hopes and dreams centered on having happy, returning, high-spending customers, right? Your first few customers offered you a great chance to learn how to interact with them to create a great customer experience. As your business grew, so did the amount of people buying from you, and with each new customer you earned, something else happened…you needed more employees! That’s when it all started to change. You learned just how much employee engagement matters, and the more people you hired, the more crucial that realization was to your businesses success.