-
March 2024 – “Discovering” Talent for Your Organization
Most of PriSim’s clients identify themselves as “talent organizations”, where success hinges on the decisions and actions of their people. In these environments, sustainable competitive advantage stems from the ability to identify and retain top talent. Despite being a small business, PriSim has made a few hires over our 25+ years, and we’ve encountered our…
-
Leadership vs. Management
What do you think is most important to succeed at the top of an organization: Leadership or Management? Are they different at all? Is one better than the other? According to Harvard business professor John P. Kotter , leadership and management are two different systems of action, complementary to each other, and both are required…
-
June 2023 – What is competitive advantage?
When competitive advantages start to diminish companies need new ones to carry them forward. Think of BlackBerry vs. Apple. Apple launched the iPod, then the iPhone, then the iPad. However, BlackBerry didn’t anything new in their pipeline. What is competitive advantage? If you ask this question to a group of participants, you’ll hear something like…
-
May 2023 – Ensuring Time to Network
Pre-COVID I placed great emphasis on keeping things moving during a business simulation exercise. I tried to minimize “down-time” knowing how valuable everyone’s time was. Post-COVID I am sensing that participants enjoy this down-time a bit more and tend to make use of it to further network with classmates.
-
March 2023 – The IKEA Effect in Business Simulations
“IKEA” by Rob Olivera is marked with CC BY 2.0. To view the terms, visit [3] According to behavioral scientist Troy Campbell [1], higher engagement comes when an activity provides “constrained creativity”[2]. That is, “First, the activity has enough freedom for consumers to be creative. Second, and importantly, the activity has enough structure to guide…
-
December 2022 – Business Simulations as a Teaching Laboratory
“Edison’s Lab” by Elfboy is marked with CC BY 2.0. To view the terms, visit [1] I like to think of a PriSim course as a business laboratory in which students learn by doing; but also, as a teaching laboratory in which instructors improve the learnings with small but valuable adjustments. One such small adjustment…
-
October 2022 – What is the ROI of a PriSim Business Simulation?
PriSim exercises build business acumen, financial acumen, leadership and team decision-making skills. Our learning laboratories provide participants with a “practice makes perfect” opportunity to learn. Participants have fun during our courses and consistently report that their PriSim learning experience was one of the best they’ve ever had. But… what is the potential ROI of their…
-
September 2022 – “Intentional” Tips & Tricks – Chunking and the Segmenting Principle
Going through a business simulation can be overwhelming. There is a lot of content to be covered in a limited amount of time. An experience like this can overload participants’ working memory[1] making it difficult to retain and understand all the information. At PriSim, we have applied the Segmenting Principle[1] to help participants better digest…
-
August 2022 – Hard, Valuable, Fun (HVF) Business Simulations
I recently listened to a How I Built This podcast featuring Max Levchin (founder of Paypal and Affirm). In the podcast Max discusses the acronym HVF. An interview with Eric Scott, one of Levchin’s colleagues, provides us with the following background/description of HVF: Max was working on an incredibly technically hard problem (at PayPal) and…
-
June 2022 – The First Business Simulation
I’m guessing you will be as surprised as I am to learn that one of the first text games with “back-and-forth natural language interaction between a human and computer” was Top Management Decision Simulation[1], the first business simulation. Top Management Decision Simulation was developed in 1957 by the American Management Association (AMA). Its goal was…