Today was the last day of our IMEx business game module in the Vlerick MBA 2011 and as such I would like to reflect a little bit on the experience. I had an immense amount of fun and learning with some of the most amazing people I ever met. But to the point.
The simulation puts you into the shoes of the management of a high-tech toy manufacturer and allows you to lead the company for 12 periods (quarters). During this time you must make decisions ranging from financing the companies activities, marketing expenditure, sales forecasts, manufacturing and a lot more. To make qualified decisions you need to analyze a lot of data provided in the form of reports as you would in a real company. All of this has to be done under reasonable time pressure and as such no single person can manage this alone. This feat requires considerable cooperation amongst the team members and I believe that is exactly one of the success factors for your business to perform well in this game.
But I don't want to talk about the business side of things – go
get an MBA if you want more hardcore business stuff. No, I want to talk about the human aspect. You see, a fundamental part mentioned by the simulation organizers is integration of different functional domains. IMEx actually means Integrated Management Excercise, but what I believe the organizers did not mention is that it requires considerable integration among business/management skills and personal soft skills. You may have the best finance guy and the best operations guy but unless they can talk to each other and are able to agree on something – you will fail. Management in the end is all about people and how to make teams work together.
We were smart in our case. Well maybe smart is a bit over doing it as we just picked our group on the basis of personal preference for the people you want to spend time with and not on our skill portfolio. This led towards a group that had a funny, sarcastic and intelligent character which manifested itself in all our interactions within or outside of the group. One example is the fact that we faced little tension throughout the process. Although we had many back and forth discussions and heated debates I didn't feel too much tension. The few a bit tense situations we had were handled very quickly and we took the time to discuss them directly afterwards. But these were rare – most of the time the humor and mutual respect difused tension before it could manifest itself. According to what I heard from other groups – tension was the name of the game and so I am very happy about our performance.
To enhance our learning experience we also decided to change roles and not take up those in which each of us would be most at home. Those who know me don't laugh – I got finance. While this may seem as a stupid move considering the competitive context this was set in but we believed that we could support each other in the new roles while being competitive with other groups. And you know what, it kind of worked. I had a billion issues with my financial model but my team mate Daniel was always there if I needed to help out. Now I can say at least I have some experience in being a CFO and have some of that perspective.
Last thing I would mention is that we did not win. We were described as the Porsche of the high tech toy industry but we got beaten by the BMWs Toyota. While for my competitive little self this was a little setback my team mates were very happy. We got the most out of the simulation by learning from each other, I got to play CFO for 3 virtual years and we laughed a lot. In the end that is what an experience like this should be all about.
Thank you Marios, Federico, Daniel, Lina and Caroline.
Yesterday I arrived in Belgium after spending the last 2 weeks in China. This was one of the last modules of the Vlerick MBA called International Management in Context led by Prof. Bruce Stenning. As such I believe it was one of the highlights of the MBA program and I have enjoyed it very much. I was thinking about writing one large post to write down the whole experience but I have decided against it. What I will do in the following few weeks instead is to write a number of posts disseminating the experience into a few layers. So, if you are interested in China from different perspectives stay tuned. Feel free to suggest others as well. Topics I am planning to cover at the moment are: