The Revenue Canon · Performance
Your Best People Keep Score Every Weekend. Just Not for You.
Ask them the score on Friday and you will get a number. Ask them the score at work and you will get a pause. Charles Coonradt found that gap forty years ago and it is wider now, sitting on your payroll every week.
In the 1980s, a consultant named Charles Coonradt noticed something strange.
Companies had to fight to get people to work in frozen food warehouses. Insulated suits. Hot drinks by law. A break every hour. Nobody wanted the cold.
Then a snowstorm would hit. The next morning, absenteeism jumped. The same people who wouldn’t work at zero degrees drove up a mountain, paid for a lift ticket, and spent all day in it.
Same cold. Different game.
Coonradt built a career on that gap. His book, The Game of Work, put it in one line: people will pay to work harder at play than they will work for pay.
Forty years later, that gap is wider than ever. And it’s costing owners more than they think.
20%
of employees worldwide are engaged, down two years in a row, the first back-to-back decline since Gallup started counting.
~$10T
a year in lost productivity, roughly 9% of global GDP, is what Gallup prices the damage at.
69%
of your payroll, even in the world-leading US–Canada region (31% engaged), shows up, does the minimum, and saves their real effort for the weekend league.
Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026 (released April 2026).
You already pay for 100% of their hours. You collect maybe a third of their attention. On a good day.
For a $5M professional services firm, that gap isn’t a culture problem. It’s a valuation problem. A buyer looking at your business sees revenue that depends on you pushing, chasing, and re-explaining. That business sells at a discount, if it sells at all.
Here’s the question I ask owners: your controller coaches minor hockey. Your ops lead runs a fantasy league with a 40-page rulebook. Your best estimator tracks his golf handicap to the decimal.
These people are not disengaged. They are disengaged at work. The scoreboard they care about is somewhere else.
Recreation Is a Better-Designed System Than Most Businesses
Not more fun. Better designed. Coonradt found five differences:
The goals are clear.
Every player on a rink knows what winning looks like tonight. In business, he wrote, when goals aren’t clear, people default to activity and get buried in it. Busy replaces winning.
The scorekeeping is better.
In sports, the score is objective, kept by the players themselves, and checked by peers. A golf tournament with 140 pros has three official scorekeepers, and they never see a stroke. The players keep score. In business, the numbers live in a report the employee never sees, built on rules they don’t understand, compared against a standard someone else picked.
Feedback is frequent.
Imagine the Super Bowl with no scoreboard. The league watches the game, meets privately, and announces the winner in three months. That’s an annual performance review. Coonradt’s rule: if performance is a problem, increase the frequency of feedback. Quarterly becomes monthly. Monthly becomes weekly. Problems get caught while they’re still small.
Players choose.
Nobody says “I have to go play tennis.” Choice is half the fuel. In business, we hand out assignments the way an army hands out postings, then wonder why the baker resents driving the truck.
Nobody changes the rules mid-game.
If a referee announced after a touchdown that it only counted for four points, there would be a riot. In business, we do it every quarter. Coonradt tells of a sales team whose points got devalued whenever the whole company beat quota. Management called it an adjustment. The salespeople called it proof that a stroke isn’t a stroke.
Five principles. No software required. That matters, and I’ll come back to it.
What Happened When Ordinary Businesses Kept Score
Coonradt’s clients ran the experiment across dozens of ordinary businesses. A few results from the book:
| Business | The one measure | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Wholesale lumberyard | Man-hours per invoice | 4 → 1.9 · $147K/yr saved |
| Beverage distributor | Cases delivered per gallon of fuel | Delivery costs −22% |
| Materials handling co. | Days to process an invoice | 22 → 4.5 days |
| Charity telethon | Dollars raised, updated hourly (was: calls made) | $78K → $110K in 1 yr · $200K+ by yr 3 |
| Building supply co. | Inventory dollars vs. fill speed | $290K → $165K · $115K freed |
Cases reported in Charles Coonradt, The Game of Work.
Notice what changed in every case. Not the people. Not the pay. Not the technology, and most of this predates the spreadsheet. What changed was the measure: one clear number, tied to results per resource, visible to the person doing the work, often enough to matter.
That is a scoreboard. And people play harder when they can see the score.
The Honest Problem: This Book Was Written for a Different World
Here’s where I part ways with simply reciting the classics.
Coonradt wrote for a workforce that mostly trusted management. That workforce is gone. Since then we’ve had a pandemic that scattered teams, waves of layoffs announced by email, an AI bubble that tells your best people they might be redundant, and tariff whiplash that rewrites the forecast every quarter.
Today’s employees have seen the rules change mid-game so many times that they assume it’s the game. And “measurement” now often means monitoring software that counts keystrokes. That is scorekeeping used exactly the way Coonradt warned against: as surveillance and punishment, not as feedback the player owns.
So the principles hold. The application has to change. Three translations for 2026:
Trust is now the entry fee.
A scoreboard only works if the player believes the numbers and keeps them personally. If the score lives in management’s dashboard and gets quoted at people, you’ve built an audit, not a game. The measure must be self-administered and peer-checked, exactly as Coonradt specified, and doubly so now.
Fewer numbers, not more.
Your people are drowning in dashboards, pings, and metrics nobody reads. The 1980s problem was no feedback. The 2026 problem is noise. One results-to-resources number per role beats fifteen KPIs every time.
Rule stability is a competitive weapon.
In an economy where everything moves, the owner who can honestly say “the way we keep score here has not changed in two years” is offering something rare. Certainty. Coonradt saw certainty as good management. Today it’s a retention strategy and, when a buyer looks at your books, a valuation multiple.
The Operator Move
Strategy, Operations, Scoreboard
This is where The Game of Work plugs into Engagement Economics, and where I do my work as an operator.
Strategy is the game worth playing
Before anyone keeps score, they need to know why the game matters. What does winning look like for this business, in numbers, this year? If the owner can’t say it in one sentence, no employee can play toward it.
Operations is the field and the rules
A game needs boundaries, positions, and rules set before play starts. In a business, that means mapped processes: who does what, hand-off to hand-off, written down. This is also the unglamorous truth about AI. AI performs on mapped processes and flails on tribal knowledge. You can’t automate a game nobody has defined. Field first, then technology.
Performance is the scoreboard
One clear measure per role. Results over resources. Kept by the player, checked by peers, updated at least weekly. Reviewed as coaching, never as an ambush.
Strategy tells people why. Operations makes it easy to play. The scoreboard tells them, every day, whether they’re winning. Miss any one of the three and you’re back to paying for attendance.
Where the Margin Went
Busy quarter, thin margin. The three places money leaks between the price you agree and the cash you keep, and three comparisons you can run this week.
Test It in Your Own Business This Week
Most owners I meet believe their people problem is a motivation problem. Then we look at the scoreboard together and find there isn’t one. There’s a budget, a dashboard the staff never sees, and an annual review everyone dreads.
One Question for Your Next Management Meeting
Can every person on the team state, without looking anything up, whether they won or lost last week?
If the room goes quiet, the game isn’t defined yet. That’s fixable, and it’s usually the fastest engagement gain available: no software, no consultants’ binder, no pizza party.
The Revenue Blueprint Conversation is where I walk an owner through exactly this: the game, the field, and the scoreboard, mapped onto your revenue engine. In the related working session everything becomes visible.
One more question worth sitting with: If your best employee tracks their golf handicap more precisely than their contribution to your revenue, that is a design problem, not a motivation problem.
Q&A
Questions Owners Ask About the Scoreboard
What is The Game of Work?
A management book by Charles Coonradt built on one observation: people will pay to work harder at play than they will work for pay. The reason is design, not motivation: games have clear goals, better scorekeeping, frequent feedback, player choice, and stable rules. Most jobs have none of the five.
What is an engagement scoreboard?
One clear measure per role (results over resources), kept by the person doing the work, checked by peers, and updated at least weekly. Not a management report. A score the player owns.
How is this different from the KPIs we already track?
Direction. A dashboard faces management and reports what already happened. A scoreboard faces the player and shows the game while it is still being played. If the person doing the work never sees the number, you have an audit, not a game.
Doesn't keeping score feel like surveillance?
Only when someone else owns the score. Nobody feels watched by their own golf handicap. The measure must be self-administered and peer-checked, the opposite of monitoring software that counts keystrokes, which is scorekeeping used as punishment.
What is engagement worth in dollars?
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 (released April 2026) prices lost productivity at roughly $10 trillion a year, about 9% of global GDP. Its Q12 Meta-Analysis, 11th edition (May 2024), across 183,806 business units, shows the top quartile of engaged business units deliver 23% higher profitability than the bottom quartile in the same industry. The same study reports 18% higher sales and 14% higher productivity, and those two do not get added to the 23%, because both flow into profitability and counting them separately counts the same money twice. The full argument, and the arithmetic you can run on your own numbers, is in Engagement Economics.
Where do managers fit?
Ahead of the scoreboard. Gallup attributes at least 70% of the variance in engagement between one business unit and the next to the manager, and finds companies pick a manager without the talent for the job 82% of the time. Both are from State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders (April 2015), which is eleven years old and American, and the 70% describes variation between business units rather than the effect of any one manager. A scoreboard run as an ambush becomes a weapon. Part of the install is making sure the person running the game knows how to coach it.
How does a scoreboard get installed?
Through the Performance pillar of the 100-day Build, after the Blueprint maps the money-path, so the score measures work that produces revenue, not activity. Measures are chosen with the team, made visible, and reviewed weekly as coaching. And the rules do not change mid-game.
The Game, the Field, the Scoreboard
Ask the room the question, then bring me the answer.
Section eight gives you one question for your next management meeting. Can every person state, without looking anything up, whether they won or lost last week? Ask it out loud, count how many can answer, and write the number down. That is the whole of the preparation and it costs you nothing.
- What you leave with: which of the five conditions your team is missing, where the missing one sits in your revenue engine, and the single measure that would tell you next month whether it changed. In writing.
- How long it takes: thirty minutes, and it ends at thirty minutes.
- What it is not: no deck, no proposal, no engagement survey, no software recommendation. If you want any of those afterwards you can ask.
- What we do first: we read your sector's turnover benchmark and filed margin before the call, so the time goes on your team rather than on our background.
- When not to book it: if you have not asked the room, there is nothing to work from and the thirty minutes becomes a conversation about engagement in general. Ask it first, or leave this alone.
30 min, the Pressure Test surfaces the leak · 2 to 4 weeks, the Blueprint maps and prices it · 100 days, the Build wires the scoreboard into daily operations