Business Strategy Game - You will get hooked on it!!!

First time I played this game was way back in 2009. Then was taking a course in Strategic Management and the game was part of our coursework. Was totally blurred at the beginning but I was one who just didn't know how to quit. Started googling for articles on the game and got quite a lot of useful tips. Soon learnt that whatever winning strategy they advise you may not work because the dynamics in your industry is so very different. What works for one company in one industry may not work for a company in another industry. Like the Chinese game of mahjong, the probabilities are endless. You just have to depend on your own analytical skill. Following blindly someone else's strategy may just end up in your company getting a monstrous kick on the backside.

You will tend to make a lot of wrong decisions at the beginning, don't worry, there is time for you to recover. I made a lot of mistakes, recovered quickly, took some risks, and ended up as industry champion. Proud to brag that my sales and profit graphs hit through the roof. LOL!!!! Maybe my competitors that time were too lembik!!!

Most exciting times were waiting for the results of each round of competition - that happened at 11.59 pm - one minute before midnight. And then your heart dropped when you looked at the result and you were way down at the bottom. OMG!! What happened?? And then you realised that you had made a stupid error. Oh well, fortunately still a few more rounds to go, so there was time for remedies. Because the game is being played over 10 rounds, you can consider the first few rounds as being part of the learning curve. Making errors are common. Being at the bottom of the standings is acceptable. Staying there is not. Persevere - that is one of the characteristics of being an entrepreneur.

BSG is a "live" case study of your company. It's different from those "dead" cases that you have to do in your tutorials. In dead cases, you make recommendations but you do not know whether those decisions have been effective or not. You do not know the outcome of your recommendations. You just make decisions based on the assumption that all things remain unchanged. But, the real world is not constant. What is constant in the real world? Change is constant. The environment changes. Your competitors react. What you hope to happen as a result of your decisions do not happen. In BSG, you will be able to see the results of your decisions.

The game will require you to possess many skills - which will stand you in good stead, whether you so decide to become an entrepreneur, accountant, or manager. Accounting students will be quite comfortable with financial statements analysis. Let's see you putting your knowledge into good use!! Marketing students will tend to focus on marketing efforts. Let's see how good you are. Business Administration students will apply a combination of knowledge garnered from various disciplines - social responsibility, logistics, production, foreign exchange, marketing, and finance. Don't worry, your counterparts, the RCA students did very well in this simulation.

There will be more about the game in my future blogs. Meantime, remember to divide yourselves into small groups of 4 - 5 students. Each small group will be called a "company". Nominate a leader (the CEO) of your company. Each company collect RM100 for the BSG playing rights and submit the collection to me ASAP. The distributor will require 2 weeks to deliver the rights. My calculations - if you submit the payment to me next week, it will be Week 5 before we can start the simulation. The sooner we get the payments and registrations done, the sooner we can start. Cheers!!! Tune in for more postings on the BSG!!!