Week 14 Day 7: Assignment: Hold an Open-Books Meeting With Your Team

Schedule a 30-minute meeting with your team this week. Bring real numbers -- not summaries, not ranges, not 'we are doing okay.' Bring the actual revenue figure, the actual cost breakdown, and the actual margin. Then walk through them together. This is where the Value Pyramid from Week 11, the business metric from Week 12, and the value frameworks from Week 13 become real.

Here is the meeting structure. First five minutes: frame the purpose. 'I want to share our business numbers with you because I believe you will make better decisions with this information. This is not a crisis meeting. This is a trust meeting.' Next fifteen minutes: walk through the numbers. Use the Value Pyramid as the visual framework. Revenue at the top -- show the actual figure and the trend. Margin in the middle -- show what it costs to serve each customer and where those costs are growing. Overhead at the bottom -- show team costs, tool costs, and infrastructure costs. Be specific. 'Our monthly recurring revenue is one hundred forty-two thousand dollars. Our customer acquisition cost is eighty-seven dollars. Our monthly churn rate is 5.4%. Our infrastructure costs are growing at 8% per quarter while revenue is growing at 3%.' Next ten minutes: open the floor. 'What surprises you? What concerns you? What ideas do you have?' Write down every suggestion without evaluating it in real time. Close with a commitment: 'I will share updated numbers every month. If anything significant changes between updates, I will tell you immediately.' The first time you do this, it will feel vulnerable. The second time, it will feel normal. By the third time, your team will be asking for the numbers before you share them.

The open-books meeting format draws directly on Stack's (1992) Great Game of Business methodology, which has been implemented in over 5,000 companies since its development at Springfield ReManufacturing Corporation. Stack's research demonstrated that open-book management produces measurable improvements across four dimensions: financial literacy (employees understand the business), engagement (employees care about outcomes), accountability (employees track their own impact), and innovation (employees identify cost savings and revenue opportunities). The meeting structure prescribed here follows what Schein (2013) calls 'humble inquiry' -- asking questions from a position of genuine curiosity rather than testing or evaluating. The instruction to write down suggestions without evaluation follows Osborn's (1953) brainstorming principles, specifically the 'defer judgment' rule, which research by Paulus and Yang (2000) confirmed increases both the quantity and quality of ideas generated. The monthly commitment creates what Cialdini (2001) calls 'consistency pressure' -- once the leader has publicly committed to recurring transparency, the social cost of reverting to secrecy is prohibitively high, which protects the initiative from backsliding. This connects to the systems-thinking principles from Week 10: the recurring meeting is a structural commitment that compensates for the natural tendency to retreat from transparency under stress.