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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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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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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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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…
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When the Going Gets Tough, Tough Companies Get Investing
What’s scarier than investing in your company in the midst of an economic downturn? Not investing in your company in the midst of an economic downturn. An HBR article describes how well thought-out investments (while biting your nails) during an economic pullback can actually position a company better for the future. But that takes courage…
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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…
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Spiraling Out of Control – Wages and Prices
Unless you’ve been hiding in your basement for the last couple of months (understandable if you were), you’ve probably heard about the dreaded Wage-Price Spiral (WPS) that many economists are predicting. A WPS can occur when prices rise, causing workers to demand higher wages. Companies then raise prices again to cover their now-higher wage expense…
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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….