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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 – 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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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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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…
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February 2023 – 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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December 2022 – 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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November 2022 – Never Surveyed a Customer We Didn’t Like
Companies are in business to fulfill their customers’ needs and/or wants, and producing satisfied customers is one of the most important business results that a company can achieve. The best companies strive not only to deeply understand the needs and wants of their target customers – but also to understand how well they are fulfilling…
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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…
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April 2022 – New CEOs – Do Only the Things Only You Can Do
Being a CEO is tough. But…what do they actually do, anyway? Aren’t all of the other people at the company doing all of the actual work? Maybe so, but we still need CEOs. According to a McKinsey study, the things that CEOs do create 45 percent – almost half – of a company’s performance results….