• 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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…

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  • Message in a Bottle from Future Employees

    It’s important that companies listen to their employees.  But what about listening to their future employees?  The ones they don’t even know and who may not even be out of college yet? Companies that don’t listen will have trouble winning the war for talent.  And as we posted last month, the war for talent will…

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  • Training Programs – Good for Employee Engagement (and for robots too)

    Our previous posts on employee engagement have discussed The Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, and the persistent war for talent.  Perhaps the U.S. chairman of PwC has also read our posts – but in his opinion talent has already won the war… If you can’t beat them, join them.  Learning and development training programs, it turns…

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  • Quietly Firing the Quiet Quitters

    Last month we wrote about The Great Resignation and the employee engagement challenges that have arisen post-Covid.  But let’s quit discussing that and start quietly talking about quitting… “Quiet quitting” is a catchy and popular buzz phrase to describe employees who are disengaged from their jobs and who do the least amount of work to…

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  • Did Your Simulation Get the Memos?

    Simulations are high-tech learning solutions – but sometimes you need to get off the digital and get on the paper. Jeff Bezos said that replacing PowerPoint presentations at Amazon with “six-page, narratively-structured” printed paper memos was the smartest thing they ever did. We’ve talked in previous blog posts about adding pen-and-paper exercises to business simulation…

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  • The Great Resignation – Did You Break Off Your Engagement? (with employees)

    Sometimes it’s hard for companies to remember that employees are assets to the company – not expenses. But employees themselves seem to be on a mission to remind companies of that very fact.  The Great Resignation came to be during the chaos of the pandemic as people redefined the meaning of work and their place…

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