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September 2023 – New-Customer SOS (Shiny Object Syndrome)
McKinsey & Company has revealed a top-secret competitive advantage for incumbent companies: their existing customers. Customer retention is almost always less expensive than customer acquisition. And the data supporting that common knowledge is striking: McKinsey found that the most effective growth companies produce 80% of their value “from their core business – principally, unlocking new…
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July 2023 – Leadership That’s Legit
Companies give CEOs an enormous amount of authority to lead the people in their organizations. But authority is a blunt instrument and new CEOs and business leaders should ‘resist authority’ from becoming their main leadership tool. And while competence provides a leader with greater influence than simply authority, an article in Harvard Business Review finds…
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June 2023 – SPACs Give Their Goodwill Back
Sometimes companies throw a business-related Hail Mary pass and hope for the best. But many of the pass attempts by companies that went public through the non-traditional IPO process known as SPACs (Special Purpose Acquisition Companies) in the past 2 years have landed incomplete. Including a SPAC from former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, which cost…
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June 2023 – Every Kid (and Simulation Team) Wants Their Own Room
Everyone likes having their own room – but what if the simulation teams in your class have to share? A typical business simulation class has 2 main elements – a group lecture/discussion segment and a simulation segment with the competing teams. A key decision point in your planning is whether you’ll conduct both segments in…
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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…
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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.
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May 2023 – Whatever Floats Your Business Boat…
Timing is everything – and when it comes to financial float it so happens that time actually is money.
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April 2023 – When Companies Buy Back Their Shares and Go Home
It’s never fun when a kid threatens to take their ball and go home. What about when companies do it with their shares of stock? 2023 is shaping up to be a big year for share buybacks, with more than $1 trillion in repurchases expected by the S&P 500 alone. That’s a lot of money…
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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…
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March 2023 – We Are The (Executive) Champions of the World. And of your Business Simulation Class.
With all due respect to the band Queen – we are not ‘the champions of the world’ in which our business simulation classes run. Instead, we need an actual Executive Champion to keep on fighting ‘til the end. And through their participation and influence, to help support our classes. Executive support is valuable for anything…