SRC taught workers to read the P&L to survive 89:1 debt

In 1983 International Harvester was collapsing, and plant manager Jack Stack with 12 colleagues bought its Springfield, Missouri engine-remanufacturing works to save 119 jobs — with $100,000 of their own money and $8.9 million of debt, an 89-to-1 leverage ratio with essentially no room for a single operational mistake. Conventional management information flow — financials for executives, work orders for workers — was built for exactly the situation SRC was not in: one where the company could survive its employees not knowing the score.

Stack's diagnosis was that secrecy itself was the risk: a machinist who doesn't know what a day of rework costs, or that the covenant breaks at a given cash number, cannot possibly act on it. If the margin for error is zero, the only configuration that works is one where all 119 people can see the same dials the bankers see.

SRC opened its books completely and taught the whole workforce to read them: income statement, balance sheet, cash flow, line by line, with supervisors trained first and hourly workers through them. Weekly 'huddles' walked every department through the live numbers each person's work fed; bonuses and an employee stock plan tied outcomes to the same figures, and Stack framed the whole thing as 'The Great Game of Business' — financials as scoreboard, everyone on the field.

Opened the books and taught every worker to read the P&L, turning financial literacy into a production skill so cash awareness on the shop floor became risk management.

Open books turn vague exhortations into legible cause and effect, so workers self-correct without supervision.

The game frame and ESOP supply motivation and make alignment real, not rhetorical.

Transparency disciplines management: you can't open the books and then make decisions the books don't support.

When survival hinges on many small decisions, teach everyone to read the real numbers and tie upside to them; comprehension scales judgment without scaling supervision.

Revenues grew from $16M (1983) to $83M (1992) as company value went from $100k to ~$25M; SRC survived, diversified, and made long-tenured hourly workers wealthy through the ESOP. 'Open-book management' became a named movement — The Great Game of Business spread the practice to thousands of firms, and SRC turned teaching it into a business of its own.