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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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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 – 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 – 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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May 2022 – 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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March 2022 – Sim Tips Videos – Seeing (a business simulation) is Believing
When you have a question about PowerPoint or Excel, or even about how to change the oil in your car, where do you go to get the answer – YouTube, or to the 100-page user manual in 8-point font sitting on your bookshelf? If you’re like most people, you’re a visual learner and you go…
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Teaching a Business Simulation Class – Team or Solo Sport?
It’s been said that there is no ‘I’ in Team, but that there is an ‘m’ and an ‘e’. Given that dichotomy, when it comes to teaching a business simulation class, what’s better – a Team or a ‘me’ approach? Like deciding whether to turn a car right or left at an intersection, it depends…