Management games

Back in 1988, Lucas Industries, my employer thought that we all needed 'Strategic Leadership' training. The top brass were sent on a course to INSEAD at Fontainebleu in France, allegedly Europe's top business school. It consisted of daily lectures and practicals plus a management game after dinner. (Not exactly the best time or situation to manage a business but we'll let that go. After all Churchill once said that he had taken more out of alcohol, than alcohol had taken out of him. All he ever did was manage a war on brandy and cigars. Try that INSEAD.)

My boss enjoyed it although he was well pissed when two of his team got so bored with it all that they buggered off home on the pretext that they had real businesses to run. They were French of course and you know they are far more interested in wine and women.

We lesser beings, aka middle management, were despatched to a hotel in Telford, Shropshire in the middle of bloody nowhere. (Telford is like Milton Keynes. You know, 'Happiness is Milton Keynes in your rear view mirror.) Same format though and lecturers from INSEAD. When the lectures were over, we repaired to the bar and then to dinner. Then around 8pm (well oiled) teams of abt 6 of us retired to hotel bedrooms to play the game. Think we had to quit at 10 pm which was OK cus we could go back to the bar.

The game was driven by Lotus 123 and you were given data on the company you were supposed to be managing. You then had to make the usual decisions on revenue and capital expenditure and things to grow the company profitably. At the end of the session, you saved all your data to disc and handed it in to the supervisors for analysis and then you got an outcome disc the next day.

It was fiercely competitive and even the lecturers warned us that we may have been taking it too seriously. As ever, the academics missed the bloody point; real life is fucking competitive. But I digress.

Our team decided, first night, that the game was a load of bollocks and we set about discovering the algorithms that drove it. Hard work for they were well hidden. No hitting F2 to discover the formula. We took about 1hr 45 on this each night so we only got 15 mins to enter our data. It was of course complete guesswork and we were last of the lot on the first and subsequent nights.

Things went from bad to worse for us but we finally cracked it on the penultimate night. On the final night we did what we knew what we had to do. Not quickly enough though. On the final day we rose from bottom to 2nd. Given another day (which you would get in real life) we would have thrashed their arses.

I should point out that each session represented a year in the life of the fictitious company we were managing. Fair enough in itself but you cannot realistically compress a year's decision making into 2 hours. Add to that the fact that the way we played it would have put us in liquidation in year 3 and you can see how unreal the whole thing was.

As I have said before, nothing in this world fits you for running a business, like actually running one. That's 'cock on the block' time.