Leadership Training

The Business Strategy Simulation management workshop is designed for participants to develop strategic thinking and obtain a clear understanding of how organizational decisions affect firm performance. Through this lively and interesting simulation, the active use of strategic thinking hones the abilities of participants to make responsible, results-oriented decisions in the workplace.

The Business Strategy Simulation game is a computer-based exercise, modeled to reflect the real-world character of a globally competitive industry and structured so that participants run a company in head-to-head competition against companies run by other participants.

This simulation has been designed to allow participants to complete a realistic top-level managerial experience.

Your organization’s strategy is defined by where it invests its capital. That is why progressive companies have clearly defined systems in place to make strategic investment decisions. The Strategic Investment Decision Making workshop helps managers institute a process for developing an effective business case for investment.

The workshop provides the structure, together with associated examples, for the critical elements that should be evaluated. It also provides the skills required for an accurate assessment of required capital expenditure and the associated financial and non-financial returns and benefits.

This workshop starts off by introducing the concepts of strategic management and competitive analysis.

Emphasis is given to understanding your local market conditions and capitalizing on the opportunities while defending against potential competitive threats. The workshop helps you gain an understanding of your organization’s value chain by integrating concepts and ideas from the major functional areas such as sales & marketing, operations, HR and finance to give a global perspective on decision-making and directing modern North American business enterprises.

The workshop introduces strategic management models and is customized to your industry to portray the nature of the process and the dynamics of competition in your specific business environment.  In this context, the workshop also examines the connection between organizational strategy and the physical environment.  We take an in-depth view on developing effective business plans that allow your organization to take advantage of local market opportunities and help you monitor your performance using the balanced scorecard framework.

This workshop provides a practical approach to understanding and developing Strategy Maps and the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) in real-time. A continuation of Strategy Formulation and Business Planning, Strategy Maps and the BSC are a strategic management framework used by over 50% of Fortune 500 companies. Strategy Maps are an effective visualization of an organization’s competitive strategy that introduces causal links between strategic actions and objectives based on the BSC framework. The BSC framework revolves around four perspectives that cover the key areas of success for an organization: Financial, Customer, Internal Processes, and Learning & Growth. The BSC introduces measures, targets and initiatives for each of the four perspectives that help executives align their competitive strategy with quantifiable results, ensuring that they are “doing things right” as well as “doing the right things.”

The workshop introduces a short case scenario that requires an organization – Acme Corp. – to develop a Strategy Map and BSC to achieve its strategic objectives. We facilitate group discussions that lead to the development of Acme Corp’s Strategy Map on the fly, a similar process as that taking place at an executive offsite. The participants also work in small groups to create a matching Balanced Scorecard and present it to their peers for strategic discussions.

The workshop ends with a discussion of advanced topics for Strategy Maps and the BSC, including cascading the strategy throughout all levels of an organization, understanding correlation and causality and how ‘causal’ levers can lead to drastic performance gains.