Jack Stack – Author Biography
Early Life
Jack Stack is an American businessman and author from the Midwest. He rose through the ranks of manufacturing management in the 1970s, learning the business from the shop floor up — an experience that shaped his conviction that ordinary workers can run companies if they’re given the numbers.
Career
In 1983, Stack led a leveraged buyout of a failing International Harvester plant in Springfield, Missouri, renaming it Springfield ReManufacturing Corporation (SRC). The company was drowning in debt — $8 in debt for every $1 in equity — and conventional wisdom said it would fail. Instead, Stack bet on a radical idea: open-book management. He taught every employee to read financial statements, shared all the numbers, and gave workers a stake in the outcome through an employee stock ownership plan. SRC survived and thrived, growing into SRC Holdings Corporation, a collection of dozens of companies. He codified the approach in The Great Game of Business (1992; expanded 2013), which became a management classic.
Major Works
The Great Game of Business: The Only Sensible Way to Run a Company (1992) and A Stake in the Outcome (2002, with Bo Burlingham).
Writing Style and Themes
Stack writes plainspoken, story-driven business memoir: the narrative of SRC’s near-death and rebirth carries the lessons. His core principles — know and teach the rules, follow the action and keep score, provide a stake in the outcome — treat business as a game everyone can learn to play. His themes are transparency, financial literacy for all employees, and ownership as motivation.
Legacy
Stack is the father of the open-book management movement, practiced by thousands of companies worldwide. SRC became one of America’s most admired mid-sized companies and a model for employee ownership. The Great Game of Business remains a staple of the management canon.
