Tom added, “We’ve found that our people became more and more curious about the company’s market, its strategy, its competitive advantages, and where the company is headed and how we plan to get there. They want to know what’s in store for them. In fact, without that context, they won’t have any reason to keep caring about the numbers.”

YoYo Company Formal Training and Literacy Bites: www.greatgame.com/gigguide

“Once we established our Huddle rhythm, it was a steady diet of business and financial literacy. Although we didn’t call it financial literacy training. We called it ‘Path to Achieving Your Stake in the Outcome,’ PAYSIO for short. We did it through formal ‘classroom’ training and backed it up with constant literacy ‘bites’ in the Huddles … small, ‘

“As we get better at this, you guys will be watching and building your own departmental, team, and individual scorecards. Your own operational numbers will help you get a better sense of what your forecast should be. This will allow you to get more of your people involved, because operational numbers come from where?”

Randy jumped in. “Exactly. Now you know the difference. With our financial scoreboard, we’ll be forecasting how the month will end … and we’ll do it every single week. That’s how the Great Game of Business helps us control our destiny. If something’s going right, we can leverage it. And if something’s going wrong, we have time to fix it.”

Sam added, “Having company scoreboards that only track operational numbers or key performance indicators is like going to a baseball game and the scoreboard only shows errors and the number of outs but doesn’t report runs scored.”

“There are three steps in designing a good scoreboard. First, what do we think is important to score? Second, who’s going to ‘own’ the score? And third, how do we make the scoreboards forward looking?

“Okay, I get it. What is our threshold?” asked Dan. “Sam and I worked through the plan and determined what cash ‘buckets’ need to be filled next year. Aside from tax, there’s accounts receivable, or money we’ve earned, but customers haven’t sent us the check. Another bucket is debt. In our case, we have to pay off some of the loan I took out to buy

“We’d like to provide our people an opportunity to earn up to 20 percent of their wages in a bonus. Half the bonus, or 10 percent of their wages, will be tied to the company’s overall profit. The other half will be tied to us improving our Non-Code-Blue Gross Margin. This way we’re keeping people focused on how this business makes money, and what t