The Great Game of Business:

“An IT company’s commitment to open-book management helps calm anxious employees while boosting revenue.

When Harlan Geiser, CEO of Bloomington, Illinois-based IT company Integrity Technology Solutions (ITS), first read Jack Stack’s book, The Great Game of Business (GGOB), for a book club in the late 90s, he had no idea that the concept would later aid in restructuring his entire company.  Though ITS had been successfully providing outsourced IT and consulting services to its customers since 1993, the recent economic downturn caused many of its clients to postpone technology decisions and become more cautious with their finances. By 2008, that conservatism was impacting the company’s revenue growth and profit, not to mention client acquisition. With 30 anxious employees to consider, Geiser realized that the key to ITS’s further success was open-book management: “We really needed everyone in the company to have an open line of sight in everything they do, and how that affects the success and the failure of company. The only way to do it is with open-book management.”