SRC Celebrates 40 Years In Business—And The Best Is Yet To Come The employee-owners of SRC have a lot to celebrate this year. Not only does 2023 mark the company’s 40thanniversary, but the ten businesses that comprise SRC Holdings continue to set records with their performance despite the challenges of high inflation, soaring interest rates, and continued supply chain challenges.

Peter Drucker is credited with saying, "culture eats strategy for breakfast". Even in today’s tech driven economy, a company’s human capital is still the most powerful potential competitive advantage. Great work culture is incredibly hard to build and even harder to maintain. Usually, workplace culture is measured in terms of employee engagement. The cultures I admire most built their employee engagement around these strategies below:

2021 seemed to fly by, at least here at The Great Game of Business. We were planning our year just yesterday, and then, BAM, the year was over. At least, that is how it felt. Looking back on 2021 made us take stock of the most read Great GameTM blogs. In case you missed them, here they are in order: #8 - 10 Easy Ways Leaders Can Express Appreciation in the Workplace Individuals in the workplace need to feel appreciated in order to enjoy their job, do their best work, have positive work relationships, and stay with their organization long-term. The key ingredient in meaningful, significant, and effective appreciation is individualization—expressing appreciation in the recipient’s preferred “language.” Varying the ways company leadership communicates appreciation will improve chances of hitting the mark, so we’ve compiled 10 ways leaders can express appreciation in the workplace and foster positive work relationships in order to establish a recognition culture. <>

For nearly four decades, SRC Holdings have been evangelizing the importance of tapping into the universal human need to win. The Great Game of Business® educates your people in the rules of business, rallies them around a common goal, empowers them to see and improve the score, and engages them by allowing them to share in the rewards— What we call a Stake in the Outcome®—presenting them with the opportunity to win as a team. If you want to see success the way SRC has for almost four decades, you must start with communication. You need a system to ensure that you get the most out of your meetings. That doesn’t mean you need one identical to SRC’s meetings, or Huddles as we call them. On the contrary, your system will inevitably look, sound, and feel very different, as well it should. Companies are as diverse as people, and nothing is more distinctive than how you communicate. You have to develop a language and style with which you and your people feel comfortable, which fits your business personality. You will also have to adapt other companies’ techniques to your circumstances, and you may well have to invent new methods of your own.

Historically, businesses using traditional management styles have been reluctant to give all of their employees the knowledge they need in order to make good business decisions day in and day out as they do their jobs. Open-book management takes a much different approach. It’s all about capturing and sharing both financial and organizational knowledge with every employee and empowering them to use that knowledge to contribute to the long-term success of the organization, as well as their own personal success. The benefits of knowledge sharing are numerous:

We were humbled and honored to be inducted into the Great Game of Business All-Star Hall of Fame. The Great Game of Business has changed the way we do business, but that is secondary to the sense of ownership, pride, and resilience that has come from playing The Game. Our team member’s reflections on how our work culture has changed say it best.

We run SRC with a lot of participation, but it is not a democracy in the political sense of the word. A political democracy derives its authority from the consent of the governed. A company derives its authority from the consent of the marketplace. The people who work for a company may think it’s just terrific, but they’ll have to work somewhere else if the company doesn’t make money or runs out of cash. So the market tells us what a lot of our decisions have to be. The trick is to recognize what the market is saying and adapt accordingly.

How Healthy Competition Drives Continuous Creativity And Productivity At SRC By Jack Stack I’m a big believer in the positive power of competition. I believe it’s a universal truth that all people like to win—and hate to lose. But as I’ve written about before, losing is also an opportunity to learn and to improve. So, why wouldn’t we try to build in some of that healthy competition into the workplace? To take some of the drudgery out of our day-to-day routines and spice things up with some competition? At a fundamental level, that’s what The Great Game of Business® is all about.

How One Business Owner Empowers Her Team To Think And Act Like Owners In 2006, Aimee Woodall set off from Georgia on a 2,190-mile adventure to hike the Appalachian Trail. Alone. Woodall was inspired to tackle the five-month trek a year earlier when she inadvertently struck up a conversation with a couple of hikers in the town of Hot Springs, NC. While Woodall, a native of Houston, Texas, wasn’t much of a hiker at the time, she wasn’t going to let that fact get in the way of beginning an epic adventure. “It’s my personality to dive into things in an extreme way,” says Woodall. “And I like the challenge of jumping into something cold turkey. I don’t let fear get in my way.”

I recently wrote a blog about how, when our company conducted our second High-Involvement Planning (HIP) meeting in October, only 74% of our associates told us they were confident in the sales plan for the company—which was down from an 80% confidence rating when we conducted the same survey in June. Historically, we’ve seen confidence ratings consistently in the high 80s—sometimes into the 90s. Maybe it’s easy to write off the 74% number due to the ongoing uncertainty of the pandemic as well as the election and other factors. But it did get me wondering about what truly inspires confidence in people. That led me to conduct an informal survey where I asked our associates to send me their responses to a simple question: “How do you build confidence?” I was blown away by the diverse range of answers we received. I found it interesting to see all the different approaches people recommended, so I grouped them into a couple of categories: