Michael Lissack
then, the most important innovation: if people are go- ing to see themselves as partners in a business, if they're empowered to help run things, they have to understand what the business is all about. They need information—a ton of it, and on a regular basis, just as a manager does. They need a basic understanding of the financials, so they can evaluate and act on all that information. Without in- formation and understanding, the pioneering companies believe, empowerment is just an empty word. Ignorant employees are always dependent on someone else to tell them what to do. Without information and understand- ing, profit sharing or stock ownership is at best no more than a nice extra benefit. Unless you act and think like an owner, you don't feel like an owner."
This open approach has been further amplified in the digital age, where organizations like Gitlab maintain a completely public handbook detailing their operating procedures, compensation philosophy, and decision-making frameworks. This radical transparency creates a context where building blocks—whether code, business processes, or organiza- tional practices—are visible to all and available for recombination. So at the GM of the 1980s you did what you were told, stayed within your narrow niche, learned not to ask questions, and never to volunteer information unless it was needed as part of a command. In the open book companies, by contrast, information sharing is the guiding principle. People are free in the open book context both to make use of the building blocks they have and to acquire new ones. In the GM context that Pascale described, such behavior was risking serious bodily injury, at least at a metaphoric level if not in reality. What gives these corporate contexts their insidious power is that we generally do not distinguish between what's being thought and the context in which it's being thought through. Thus it is worth delineating some of the differences in context so as to highlight their very existence. We can
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