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A Stake in the Outcome: Building a Culture of Ownership for the Long-Term Success of Your Business
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 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 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.
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 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 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.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
28 people are currently reading
256 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 18, 2016
Jack Stack was plant manager at International Harvester when a recession threw his and many of his coworkers' jobs in jeopardy. To save them, they came up with the creative solution of pulling everyone together, borrowing a lot of money, buying the plant from IH and turning it into an employee-owned-and-run operation.
After the purchase, Stack and his team had to figure out how not just to do the jobs they were already trained to do, but how to also successfully manage and grow their fledgling operation. A Stake in the Outcome highlights the principles they developed to turn their team of clock-punching employees into savvy, vested owners.
Stack has written a previous book, The Great Game of Business, in which he describes how they began to do this. He is a firm believer that everyone in a company, all the way down to the janitorial staff, can be taught to understand how things run and what has to be done to succeed, and he sees a commitment to opening up the financial books and educating everyone on the meaning of the numbers as key.
Over the years, however, Stack learned that giving people stock options and teaching them how to optimize profit in their own departments isn't always enough to develop the long term thinking needed for a truly successful owner's mindset. This book delves more deeply into some of the issues they ran into in this regard, including struggles to diversify that pushed people out of their comfort zones, challenges with the imbalance of stock value between old and newer employees, and the thorny problem posed by the need to have enough cash on hand to liquidate the stock of retiring employees.
Stack is an accessible writer, and despite my lack of knowledge about their core business of engine remanufacturing, it was easy to understand the universal problems they faced. It was also inspiring to read how they solved them. As the owner of a rapidly growing business myself, I appreciated being able to learn from Stack's long term perspective and understand the unintended consequences of actions they took that he was not able to see until years later. This is a valuable and thought-provoking book that has given me a great deal to consider about how to better build my own company.
After the purchase, Stack and his team had to figure out how not just to do the jobs they were already trained to do, but how to also successfully manage and grow their fledgling operation. A Stake in the Outcome highlights the principles they developed to turn their team of clock-punching employees into savvy, vested owners.
Stack has written a previous book, The Great Game of Business, in which he describes how they began to do this. He is a firm believer that everyone in a company, all the way down to the janitorial staff, can be taught to understand how things run and what has to be done to succeed, and he sees a commitment to opening up the financial books and educating everyone on the meaning of the numbers as key.
Over the years, however, Stack learned that giving people stock options and teaching them how to optimize profit in their own departments isn't always enough to develop the long term thinking needed for a truly successful owner's mindset. This book delves more deeply into some of the issues they ran into in this regard, including struggles to diversify that pushed people out of their comfort zones, challenges with the imbalance of stock value between old and newer employees, and the thorny problem posed by the need to have enough cash on hand to liquidate the stock of retiring employees.
Stack is an accessible writer, and despite my lack of knowledge about their core business of engine remanufacturing, it was easy to understand the universal problems they faced. It was also inspiring to read how they solved them. As the owner of a rapidly growing business myself, I appreciated being able to learn from Stack's long term perspective and understand the unintended consequences of actions they took that he was not able to see until years later. This is a valuable and thought-provoking book that has given me a great deal to consider about how to better build my own company.
April 29, 2008
I'm currently looking at a compensation model with the company that I am working with. The book was helpful, and I enjoyed the read. Here are the things I took away from the book:
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June 17, 2021
I really enjoyed the two books by Jack Stack. Reading them was like a portable MBA for how to build and run a business. Although I may not need or apply every lesson he learned or use every tip, I got a lot out of reading his own story: how he approached problems, dealt with people, managed conflicts, and thought about the future.
March 9, 2024
There are some gems in this book, no doubt about it. However, author’s style of writing made me skip some pages a few times. It’s one of the longest books I’ve read, although it’s only 266 pages…
February 8, 2015
Must read for ESOP companies/owners
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews