Loren, I really enjoyed this week's podcast "Should I Open My Books to My Employees?" and thought the discussion was very relevant as as it is an issue I am considering as I search for a business to buy (I am an Acquisition Entrepreneur).
I think the conversation became a little convoluted because there was some confusion between between the operating system (OS) The Great Game of Business and the idea of Open Books. These are actually 2 entirely separate things: Open Books is the concept of making a company's finances transparent to its employees and The Great Game of Business is and business operating system that happens to employ the practice of open books among many other management and operational best practices. I think it is important to distinguish between the 2 because there are many different OS's (Gino Wickman's EOS is another that comes to mind) and there are also different levels of employing open books. You can implement a business operating system without implementing open books and vice versa.
One of the interesting results of the conversation is that most, if not all your guests agreed that some level of transparency with the books is beneficial to the company (even Jay! 😱). The real debate was to what granularity the open books were applied. The big question is whether or not employees should know the salary of the CEO/business owner and all the other employees. This seemed to be a major sticking point for those who were resistant to the open books idea.
However, if I'm not mistaken, NONE of the open books implementers took the concept down to that level of detail. The closest thing to 100% transparency was ranges of salaries for each department - none of these companies had a system in place where every employee's salary was revealed.
Excellent topic and discussion as usual.
Also, as I mentioned to you privately, thank you for hosting a podcast which deals with real-life issues for real-life business owners and not just a bunch of tired, overused rah rah motivation or "get rich with digital businesses" content that seems to be so prevalent in the podcast world.
Thanks, Buzz. Appreciate the kind words. And yes, you are right that the lines blurred here and there. It's tricky trying to blend six different perspectives in one conversation but I hope that's also what makes it worth listening to. Thanks for taking the time to weigh in!
Loren, I really enjoyed this week's podcast "Should I Open My Books to My Employees?" and thought the discussion was very relevant as as it is an issue I am considering as I search for a business to buy (I am an Acquisition Entrepreneur).
I think the conversation became a little convoluted because there was some confusion between between the operating system (OS) The Great Game of Business and the idea of Open Books. These are actually 2 entirely separate things: Open Books is the concept of making a company's finances transparent to its employees and The Great Game of Business is and business operating system that happens to employ the practice of open books among many other management and operational best practices. I think it is important to distinguish between the 2 because there are many different OS's (Gino Wickman's EOS is another that comes to mind) and there are also different levels of employing open books. You can implement a business operating system without implementing open books and vice versa.
One of the interesting results of the conversation is that most, if not all your guests agreed that some level of transparency with the books is beneficial to the company (even Jay! 😱). The real debate was to what granularity the open books were applied. The big question is whether or not employees should know the salary of the CEO/business owner and all the other employees. This seemed to be a major sticking point for those who were resistant to the open books idea.
However, if I'm not mistaken, NONE of the open books implementers took the concept down to that level of detail. The closest thing to 100% transparency was ranges of salaries for each department - none of these companies had a system in place where every employee's salary was revealed.
Excellent topic and discussion as usual.
Also, as I mentioned to you privately, thank you for hosting a podcast which deals with real-life issues for real-life business owners and not just a bunch of tired, overused rah rah motivation or "get rich with digital businesses" content that seems to be so prevalent in the podcast world.
Thanks, Buzz. Appreciate the kind words. And yes, you are right that the lines blurred here and there. It's tricky trying to blend six different perspectives in one conversation but I hope that's also what makes it worth listening to. Thanks for taking the time to weigh in!