Contributed by Russ Coff
This TED talk describes the marshmallow challenge exercise. This discussion has a nice twist to focus on team dynamics and the decision process. Interestingly, kindergarten students tend to do best on the exercise because they are more likely to iterate and prototype rather than separate planning and execution (as MBA students tend to do). Of course, this is similar to the Tinkertoy exercise but the team dynamics and decision-making message is quite distinct. You may also recognize this as a slightly altered version of the spaghetti challenge exercise that has been around for quite some time.
Contributed by Darren Dahl and Joann Peck
Stanford’s Tina Seelig describes a classroom experiment (below) where students were given $5 of “seed” funding and 2 hours to make as much money as possible. The best teams made money by working outside of the stated constraints (e.g., ignoring the seed funding & timeframe). Understanding their human capital and unique resources was critical. This really simple exercise gets at the crux of entrepreneurial opportunity.
Contributed by Russ Coff
Contributed by Russ Coff
Contributed by Russ Coff
Gourmet adventures is a very nice exercise to demonstrate the Winner’s curse in class. The key takeaway there is that decision-makers need to try to understand how certain they are in order to figure out how much to shade their bids — something that few managers actually do. If you have an online course or don’t have time to do this in class, you might consider this simple winner’s curse online simulation (by Mike Shor). The Java applet works nicely to simulate bidding competition over a target including an estimate of the private synergies. Note that you may have to turn off popup blockers and lower security settings for the web page to run properly.
Contributed by Russ Coff
suggesting that the public is ok with large incomes of sports stars or actors (like Robert Downey Jr in Iron Man) because they understand how these people contribute. In contrast, understanding what executives add is much more complex. Paul Krugman responds, with an angry rant arguing that few of the top earners are stars or athletes and maintaining his position that executives are greedy and overpaid. This seems like a nice point to debate in a strategy classroom. Are executives overpaid? You might want to conclude the discussion with Alison Mackey’s SMJ article that applies actual data analysis to the question (instead of angry rhetoric). She found that “in certain settings the ‘CEO effect’ on corporate-parent performance is substantially more important than that of industry and firm effects, but only moderately more important than industry and firm effects on business-segment performance.” That is, in some cases, up to 29% of the variance in firm performance can be attributed to the CEO. In the case of a Fortune 500 firm, that could easily amount to billions.Contributed by Peter Klein and Russ Coff
We teach strategy formulation in a dynamic world and yet many of our analytic tools may seem more static if we aren’t careful. For example, 5 forces offers an industry snapshot unless students know to explore how the forces evolve. I tend to introduce scenario planning, decision trees, and monte carlo simulations to incorporate the qualitative and quantitative dimensions of strategy formulation under uncertainty. This brief video provides a fairly graphic view of how it feels to managers. Of course, the seascape metaphor is a play on Levinthal’s classic article (adaptation on rugged landscapes)…
Contributed by Russ Coff
Contributed by Melissa Schilling
Contributed by Russ Coff
Dogbert writes a new management text and defines bureaucracy as when “a hundred people think ‘A’ but compromise on ‘B’.” One wonders how firms can create any value at all. This might spur a strategy process discussion of how satisficing results in suboptimal outcomes.
Contributed by Russ Coff
Contributed by Andrew Shipilov
Contributed by Russ Coff
Contributed by Russ Coff
Contributed b Russ Coff
Similarly, here is a Pantene ad that highlights how labels for men and women tend to differ in the workplace. Continue reading
Having a paper fight in class can really shake things up. It also allows you to demonstrate some simple competitive dynamics principles in a very short exercise. I use this with evening, executive and BBA students — generally on the first day of class to shake things up and introduce the topic.
Contributed by Russ Coff
Carpenter Strategy Toolbox 