Harvard Business School

Transcript

This—the business game started with teams of four competing against six other teams of four.  And that each quarter you put in a production schedule,   a hiring forecast,  money to be spent on marketing plans,  and whether you needed to go out and raise money for debt.  And it was a very powerful way,  for over a period of twelve periods,  of seeing how the interplay took place between production,  marketing,  and finance in a very intuitive kind of way.  And this made a lot of sense to the students.  It not only was competitive,  but there was a real learning process.

Then when we went on in timesharing to provide the planning models,  then it deepened them,  as they could see how computer-based planning models could help them,  in an online basis,  be able to manage an organization going forward.  …

Now—and then to take the thing going forward is that this reached its culmination in a course called Laboratory in Organizational Behavior,  in which we grafted together a group of six teams,  so that the entire first year was divided into 21 teams in a graded course.  They competed against each other for a two week,  continuous period.  Half the grade of the course was the performance of the team vis a vis the others.  The other part was some written reports that they did concerning the organization behavior.  This meant that each team of students had to somehow organize itself to do a very complex task.   They had to pick out a President,  Vice President of Finance,  plant managers.  And it was an enormously exciting and competitive kind of activity.  And again,  this was again linked on the educational message.  So this is sort of how information technology began to come in to support the learning process.

We then went on through the timesharing terminals,  and we were able be able to use more sophisticated models to help people move forward.  It became a tool for teaching simulation.  And it became a foundation of the Managerial Economics (real) course.