SRC Holdings: Winning the Game while Sharing the Prize

Abstract

In 1981 Jack Stack, SRC’s current chief executive officer (CEO), was sent to Springfield, Missouri, by his employer, International Harvester (IH), to see if there was any hope of saving the small remanufacturing plant located there. Increased global competition, particularly from Japan, and the poor performance of the US economy had wreaked havoc on many US manufacturing firms across a wide range of industries. IH had been particularly hard-hit, laying off thousands of employees and closing plants all over the United States. As Stack recalls “We [IH] closed 17 factories in a two-year period of time. We laid off 1000 people a week for two years … we went from 115,000 people down to 11,000 people in 1981-82.”