**The First Management Classic of the New Millennium!
**A bold experiment is taking place these days, as leading-edge
companies turn upside down the management paradigm that has dominated
corporate thinking for more than one hundred years. Southwest Airlines
is perhaps the most visible practitioner, soaring through economic
downturns while its competitors slash their budgets and order massive
layoffs, but you can find other pioneers of the new approach in almost
every industry and market niche. Their secret: a culture of ownership
that allows them to tap into the most underutilized resource in business
today-namely, the enthusiasm, intelligence, and creativity of working
people everywhere.
No one knows more about building a culture of ownership than CEO Jack
Stack, who's been working on one for the past twenty years with his
colleagues at SRC Holdings Corporation (formerly Springfield
ReManufacturing Corporation). Along the way, they've turned their
company into what Business Week has called a "management Mecca,"
attracting thousands of people representing hundreds of businesses to
SRC's home in Springfield, Missouri. There the visitors learn how to
incorporate the ideals and values of SRC's remarkable corporate culture
into their own organizations-and then they go back and do it.
Now, in A Stake in the Outcome, Stack offers a master class on
creating a culture of ownership, presenting the hard-won lessons of his
own twenty-year journey and explaining what it really takes to build for
long-term success. The pioneer of "open-book management" (described in
the best-selling classic The Great Game of Business), Stack and twelve
other managers began their journey in 1982, when they purchased their
factory from its struggling parent company. SRC grew 15 percent a year,
while adding almost a thousand new jobs, and the company's stock price
rocketed from 10 cents to $81.60 per share. In the process, Stack
discovered that long-term success required constant innovation-and that
building a culture of ownership involved much more than paying bonuses,
handing out stock options, or setting up an employee stock ownership
plan. In a successful ownership culture, every employee had to take
the fate of the company as personally as an individual owner would.
Achieving that level of commitment was extraordinarily difficult, but
Stack realized that the payoff would be enormous: a company that was
consistently able to outperform the market.
A Stake in the Outcome isn't about theory-it's about practice. Stack
draws from his own successes and failures at SRC to show how any company
can teach its employees to think and act like owners, including how to
implement an effective equity-sharing program, how to promote continuous
learning at every level of the organization, how to fire up employees'
competitive juices, how to broaden the concept of leadership and
delegate responsibility for the business, and how to build a workforce
that is fast on its feet and ready to take advantage of every
opportunity. You'll also learn about other companies that have succeeded
in building cultures of ownership-and the lessons they can teach the
rest of us.
Written in Jack Stack's straightforward, witty,
no-beating-around-the-bush style, A Stake in the Outcome is like
having a one-on-one session with a master entrepreneur and business
innovator. It shows managers and executives of companies both large and
small how to build a ferociously motivated workforce that is energized
and committed to meeting and overcoming the most daunting challenges a
company can face.
