![]() On the contrary, participants are eager to re-litigate their battles. It doesn't come across like a television re-run. The next day, we turn the clock back and re-run Car Wars. It's much better than learning about surprises in a lecture, in the same sense that riding a bicycle is much better than lectures about riding a bicycle. One of the great benefits of business war games is that people surprise themselves. We debrief to discuss the surprises people experience. It's humbling, exciting, and enlightening. That's what makes business war gaming more engaging (and more insightful) than a detached, intellectual analysis of a case study, and that's why I use a war game in this program. Even in this simple case, though, people get to experience dilemmas and tough decisions. Viewed from afar, many industries look simple or obvious. It's hard to get them to stop, especially since the alternative is to listen to me. (See " Honey, We Shrunk the Industry" from Competitive Intelligence magazine.) Program participants strategize and compete. In the sample program it's my Car Wars case, based on the automobile industry, but it doesn't have to be. Then we start an actual business war game. It's more fun to talk about what Lamborghinis can teach us. It's not so much fun to parse a definition of market segmentation. This session is not a dictionary reading. They're usually just different experiences: one person is from finance and another is from marketing one person has a recent MBA and another got an MBA long ago and far away and so on. Those quiet disconnects aren't disagreements. Another person says "competitive advantage" and refers to the whole experience, including reputation, trust, ease of use, and so on. One person says "competitive advantage" and means the product or service itself. In my experience, people often aren't on the same page when they discuss concepts like competitive advantage, market segmentation, customer loyalty, and cost structure. Next, we cover principles of competition. Another reason for the interactive exercises is that I don't want to hear my voice for two days any more than you do. I use interactive exercises and humor to establish the program's tone and to show quick solutions to a couple of problems. No one likes to talk about those things but everyone fears them. We're talking about debacles, disasters, and bankruptcies. This session comes first so we can start with a bang: we're not talking about minor disappointments. The two things that companies with failed strategies have in common: There's plenty of conventional wisdom on that subject, but it's often vague and it can leave people thinking "well, I would never do such foolish things." But the people with the failed strategies knew the conventional wisdom, and they, too, would never do such foolish things. The first section is about why strategies fail. Here's why I run my programs the way I do. Here's a sample program (commercial content), suitable for in-house management development or executive education at business schools. I conduct business war games and workshops on strategic thinking. ![]()
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