Author Description

Companies are in business to make money. The paycheck of every employee depends on a company's success. But typically, only a few top managers see, understand, and base their actions on the numbers - the financials - that show how the business is faring. Everyone else is just supposed to do as they're told. Does this make sense? Maybe it did once, argues John Case in this pivotal new book. But in today's competitive and fast-changing marketplace, successful businesses need employees who work smart as well as hard. They need employees who understand how the company makes money and how they themselves can contribute to the bottom line. The key: open-book management. Open-book management is the business revolution that's the logical culmination of TQM, reengineering, teams, and most other management innovations of the past two decades. As companies all over the country are discovering, it gets everyone on the payroll focused on business success. It provides the ingredient - one practitioner calls it the "want-to"--That's been missing from every other how-to approach. Step by step, John Case lays out the logic and the basic ideas of open-book management. He shows how it works in dozens of different companies, from big manufacturers, such as Chesapeake Packaging, to tiny service companies, such as Phelps County Bank. He describes the experience of open-book pioneers - including world-renowned Springfield ReManufacturing Corp., with its "Great Game of Business" - and recent converts, such as Sprint's Government Systems Division.