Purchase Solution

Jack Stack and Participative Leadership

Not what you're looking for?

Ask Custom Question

The article on Jack Stack

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20040401/25stack.html

Questions:

What type of leadership style does he exhibit?

What are the characteristics of his leadership style?

What leadership qualities does he demonstrate?

Could you work for an individual like this and would you thrive in this type of environment? If yes why do you feel you would be a valuable member of the team?

If no, why do you feel you wouldn't fit in?

Either cases be specific and / or give examples to back up your decision.

Attachments
Purchase this Solution

Solution Summary

The solution discusses Jack Stack and participative leadership. An article is reviewed and questions answered. The text contains 2057 words.

Solution Preview

Please find the attached solutions to your questions. I also provided the copy of the article. You will find the questions and the corresponding answers following it.

Thank you for using Brainmass.

Jack Stack, SRC Holdings
Bo Burlingham |
The first time I met Jack Stack, in May 1988, he was doing a presentation at an Inc. 500 conference in Cleveland. His topic was "The Great Game of Business," which was the name he'd given to the management system he'd developed with his colleagues at the Springfield Remanufacturing Corp. (SRC) in Springfield, Mo. The system involved teaching employees the basics of finance and then providing them with all the information they needed to monitor the company's--and their own--performance. The term "open-book management" had not yet been coined to describe such practices, but that didn't keep the conference attendees from recognizing the radical implications of Stack's approach. Judging by the comments, a lot of them thought he was out of his mind.
Stack did not, in fact, look the part of a business revolutionary, or even an experienced entrepreneur. He was 39 years old at the time and appeared 10 years younger, with a mop of reddish-brown hair and the map of Ireland on his face. The son of a former baseball player turned industrial engineer, he'd gotten his business education while working his way up from mail boy at International Harvester's Melrose Park plant, outside Chicago. In person, he didn't have any of the larger-than-life qualities you might expect in a visionary CEO. Not that he seemed smaller than life. Rather, he was just about life-size, the sort of guy you'd meet in a bar or at your kid's Little League game--a regular Joe or, in this case, a regular Jack.
And yet he was clearly on to something with his new management system. In five years, SRC's "game" had turned the company from a nearly brain-dead start-up with an 89-to-1 debt-to-equity ratio into a steadily profitable $43 million enterprise with a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.8 to 1. Meanwhile, the appraised value of SRC stock had soared to $13.06 per share from 10 cents per share at the company's founding--an increase of almost 13,000%.
Following the conference, I decided I had to see for myself how the Great Game of Business worked. That fall, I paid my first visit to SRC and took my first tour of its main facility. There I found the most highly motivated and business-savvy work force I had ever encountered. I met fuel-injection-pump rebuilders who knew the gross margins of every nozzle and pump they produced. I met crankshaft grinders and engine assemblers who could discuss the ROI of their machine tools. I met a guy who worked on turbochargers and ran his area as if it were his own small business. Then again, why shouldn't he? Like the other employees, he was an owner of SRC.
I returned home convinced that I had seen the future of business. Somehow Stack had figured out how to tap into the most underutilized resource available to a company--namely, the intelligence of the people who work for it--and the results were breathtaking. When Inc. staff members were asked to ...

Purchase this Solution


Free BrainMass Quizzes
Managing the Older Worker

This quiz will let you know some of the basics of dealing with older workers. This is increasingly important for managers and human resource workers as many countries are facing an increase in older people in the workforce

Business Ethics Awareness Strategy

This quiz is designed to assess your current ability for determining the characteristics of ethical behavior. It is essential that leaders, managers, and employees are able to distinguish between positive and negative ethical behavior. The quicker you assess a person's ethical tendency, the awareness empowers you to develop a strategy on how to interact with them.

Basic Social Media Concepts

The quiz will test your knowledge on basic social media concepts.

SWOT

This quiz will test your understanding of the SWOT analysis, including terms, concepts, uses, advantages, and process.

Marketing Research and Forecasting

The following quiz will assess your ability to identify steps in the marketing research process. Understanding this information will provide fundamental knowledge related to marketing research.