Why We Lost the Game

“I helped lead the company into five out of seven of the most unprofitable years we’d ever experienced,” Jenkins Diesel’s Joe Jenkins says at the outset of this presentation. At the time, Jenkins was a business newbie fresh out of the Army. So he turned to the legendary business consultant Jack Stack for advice, implementing Stack’s principle of open-book management: the idea that when employees and not just management are taught the rules of business, given a clear scoreboard on company performance and provided a stake in the outcome, everyone will contribute to the short term and long term success of the business—in often unexpected, powerful ways.

Alternating hard-earned business advice and homespun wisdom, Jenkins demonstrates in this video the importance of Evergreen values like Perseverance — you’ve got to be able to take a few hits, and then you’ve got to learn from them — and People First. Businesses succeed when everyone has a stake.