Contributed by Russ Coff
Contributed by Russ Coff
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
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
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 Russ Coff
Contributed by Russ Coff
Contributed b Russ Coff
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
This exercise focuses on the problems with designing incentives and structures to promote the cooperation across divisions needed to achieve synergies. MicroDesign is a negotiation to transfer a technology between 2 divisions of a corporation in order to take advantage of a market opportunity. Sub-optimal agreements (money left on the table) represent transaction costs and inefficiencies that must be overcome in order to create corporate value.
There are two roles (Gant and Coleman). One division, Household Appliances (HA), has developed a new technology that has value if sold outside of the company. However, the division does not have a charter to sell chips. In order to take advantage, the technology must be transferred to the Chips & components (CC) division. Continue reading
Contributed by Russ Coff
Contributed by Russ Coff
Norman Sheehan has developed an award winning exercise to teach value chain analysis (see the JME paper). 
Here are excepts from the abstract: Despite its ubiquity, many students struggle to understand and apply value chain concepts. JetFighter uses a complex manufacturing process (intricate paper planes) to enhance students’ value chain competencies. Teams are use value chain concepts to develop innovative strategies to fulfill customer requirements and outperform rivals. The exercise involves two production periods with a brief value chain lecture occurring after the first period. Given that teams typically lose money in the first round, their motivation to learn is enhanced as they are immediately provided an opportunity to apply this knowledge in the second period. Here are materials for the exercise:
Contributed by Norman Sheehan
Contributed by Russ Coff
Then, there is this clip with Wally which shows what it is like when such engineers are valuable and rare – they can enjoy tremendous bargaining power…
Contributed by Russ Coff
Contributed by Birgul Arslan
This exercise from Norman Sheehan is based loosely on the Tinkertoy exercise (on this site). 
The main difference is that groups get unequal resource endowments (one group gets tape and paper, while the rest get paper clips, elastic bands and paper) and are asked to build the highest paper tower. The results lead to a discussion of how superior resources (tape) can lead to better performance if they are organized properly. The takeaway is that students need to see if their focal firm has a tape-like resource. If so, they need to make it the cornerstone of their strategy. If the focal case firm lacks a tape-like resource, then it needs to be excellent at execution if it is to have any chance at having above average performance. Students love the exercise and it is a great way to teach students why they should look for VRIO resources when doing a case analysis. A related exercise, the Egg Drop Auction, explores strategic factor markets and the accumulation of heterogeneous resources. Here is the Paperscape Teaching Note (published in JME) and here are Discussion Questions to assist in the debriefing.
Contributed by Norman Sheehan
You may have followed the debate about HBR’s policy prohibiting professors from linking suggested HBR readings 
to their own library’s paid subscriptions (see Joshua Gans’ blog posts on this and his Financial Times article on HBR and their journal list). I have increasingly used McKinsey Quarterly which makes their articles available for free (you need to register but that’s free). Here are some HBR alternatives that seem to work well (often by authors you know well):
Carpenter Strategy Toolbox 