The Business Strategy Game

Competing in a Global Marketplace

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The Merits of Having Co-Managers Make a Presentation

A particularly effective way to wind upThe Business Strategy Gameexperience and reinforce the learning that has taken place is to have the co-managers of each company prepare a presentation either to their Board of Directors or their shareholders. The class, the instructor, and perhaps invited guests from the business community can serve as board members and/or shareholders. Depending on the number of companies and the amount of time you want to allocate to company presentations (our suggestion is one 75-minute class period), the company presentations can be 5 to 15 minutes in length, with perhaps 5 minutes for Q&A. In our classes, we have all companies prepare a PowerPoint presentation and submit their files to the instructor for grading, but we call on several companies at "random" to make their presentations in class (just enough companies to fill out the class period). In an industry of 10-12 companies, having 4-5 companies make a presentation is usually sufficient, and it allows time for the instructor to sum up the "lessons learned" and obtain feedback on what class members think about their simulation experience.

What the Company Presentation Should Cover.The Company Presentation link that appears on the Assignments menu near the top of each company co-manager's Corporate Lobby screen directs the management team to prepare a presentation that covers (1) their company's performance for all decision rounds, (2) their strategic vision for the company, (3) performance targets for the next year or two, assuming the simulation continued on, (4) their company's present strategy and how it has evolved, (5) which companies they consider to be their closest competitors, (6) the moves they would make over the next several years to win out over their close competitors and improve their company's performance and market standing, and (7) lessons learned.

Company co-managers are given the following directions in putting together their presentation:

Unless otherwise instructed, your presentation should include the following topics and slides:

• A brief review of the financial and strategic performance of your company during the time you and your co-managers have run the company.
• This review should consist of charts showing the following:
• Trends in the company's annual total revenues
• Trends in the company's annual earnings per share (EPS)
• Trends in the company's annual return on equity investment (ROE)
• Trends in the company's annual credit rating
• Trends in the company's year-end stock price
• Trends in the company's annual image rating
• Trends in global unit sales (both branded and private-label footwear)
• Trends in the company's global market share
• As you know, when you launch the Decisions / Reports Program, there is a performance summary containing bar graphs showing your company's performance on each of the above six performance indicators. These graphs for the final year of the simulation can be saved to your local storage device and then inserted into a PowerPoint presentation or Word document. Double-click on the graph that you want to download and (depending on the web browser you are using) you will be prompted to save the graph to a PNG file. Once you have named and saved a picture file of a graph, you can insert the picture into a PowerPoint slide or Word document using the Insert tab at the top of the MS Office program.
• Double-click on a graph
• to save it to as an image.
• If you wish to create additional performance graphs, you can do so, but the above six bar graphs tell an adequate story about your company's historical performance.
• A slide describing your strategic vision for the company.
• A slide that shows what performance targets for EPS, ROE, credit rating, and image rating you and your co-managers would set for each of the next two years (assuming the simulation were to continue). You may also want to include global market share and/or stock price targets as well.
• A slide that sets forth your company's competitive strategy in branded footwear in some detail and how that strategy has evolved over the years you have managed the company. You may need to have more than one slide here if your company's strategy in branded footwear varies markedly from geographic region to geographic region or if your strategy for branded sales to retailers differs in important ways from your strategy for Internet sales.
• A slide that sets forth your company's competitive strategy in private-label in some detail and how that strategy has evolved over the years. Again, more than one slide may be needed if your company's strategy in private-label footwear varies markedly from one geographic region to another.
• A slide showing your company's production strategy and work force compensation strategy
• A slide describing your company's finance strategy (as concerns dividends, use of debt versus equity, stock issues/repurchases, actions to achieve/maintain a strong credit rating, etc.) You should clearly describe your company's dividend policy during the period you have managed the company. Here, you should also set forth what sort of dividend increases, if any, you would likely consider paying out in the next two upcoming years (given the EPS targets you have established).
• A slide showing (1) those companies you consider to be your strongest/closest competitors in branded footwear as of the last year or two of the simulation and (2) those companies that are your strongest/closest competitors in the private-label segment of the marketplace.
• One or more slides detailing the actions you would take to out-compete these close rivals in the next two years (assuming the simulation continues for several more years). Since the actions may differ as between branded and private-label footwear, you may well need 2 slides here.
• A set of slides detailing the "lessons learned" about crafting a winning strategy and about what the managers of a company should or should not do for a company to be financially and competitively successful in a head-to-head battle against shrewdly-managed rival companies.

You should, of course, adjust the content of your presentation to conform to whatever topical outline that your instructor specifies. Thus, depending on what your instructor tells you about what items to address in your presentation, you may need to add slides covering other topics or delete coverage of some of the above suggested topics.

It is a fairly simple matter for you to provide company co-managers with a different set of instructions and adjust the content of the presentation to suit your preferences.

If you elect to require a company presentation, you will have to specify a "deadline" time on the Decision Schedule for having the presentation ready (probably no later than the class period when the presentations are to be given or perhaps even a few hours before).

As indicated above, we suggest having each company either provide you with a printout of their slides (at the time of the class presentations) or else e-mail you their PowerPoint presentation file (at whatever time you specify).

You will need to grade the presentationthis is the only downside of having company presentations and the only BSG assignment that is not automatically graded. But, understandably, this is not an exercise that can be automatically graded. A space is provided in your online "BSG Simulation Grade Book" to enter Company Presentation grades for each company co-manager

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The Business Strategy Game

Author Team:

• Arthur A. Thompson, Jr.
• John R. Miller Professor Emeritus
• of Business Administration
• The University of Alabama
• Gregory J. Stappenbeck
• GLO-BUS Software, Inc.
• Mark A. Reidenbach
• GLO-BUS Software, Inc.
• Ira F. Thrasher
• GLO-BUS Software, Inc.
• Christopher C. Harms
• GLO-BUS Software, Inc.

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