The Business Strategy Simulation:New University, Udayagiri, TN. Dates: 7, 8.11.12 August 2009, 9 AM- 5.00 PM

Number of participants - 61 including Facilitators, MKR, NP, Sri, San, JM

The System of Profound Knowledge, (Deming) helps us to see how complex organisations work.   Organisations   guided by SPK will be more effective and successful. We demonstrate this using the First Discipline Framework.

We tell stories, about 15 of them. Every community need to tell its own stories and recreate old stories.

We reflect every now and then and the participants develop the game.

Harvard is in agreement with what we do. See  http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6119.html

The Simulation

• How do we fix the true north ( true point)
• The business, transformation of the crowd to a sustained high performance community
• Choose the CEO , prescribe a process, Position him so that he positions the community and make sure that the community is on a path of continuous improvement - sustained high performance
• The CEO selects a custodian of maps, CTO, Facilities Manager, other additional positions as required
• Selection of VPs Marketing, HR , Finance, Learning and Development , timelines
• Position them in the appropriate quadrant by consensus of the group
• The CEO fixes the true north , describes his compass function
• The VP marketing outlines the market potential, BDP and personnel requirements / product/market mix, pricing, targets
• VP HR - translates the business plan and organize the human component
• VP Fin - the controller of weights and measures - Metrics
• VP L&D - his/her business is that we learn continuously
• Other roles: Regulators/industry associations/venture capitalists , external public

In the mornings we recollect our dreams to check whether our unconscious is aligned with our conscious. The process goes on for six days from the beginning to the 12^th evening. Everyone worked on their own during the two holidays in between and continued to add value.  We climbed peaks and took glimpses of the blue ocean space and at times fell down to the valleys like humpty dumpty but managed to gather ourselves together and continue on the journey.

The game continues... but we are back to our respective places of work. Are we back to the same place? Certainly not, we have moved ahead towards true north, 61 of us ... a learning community.

The journey/process is on.  
We hope to meet again

(IITs, Indian Institutes of Technology. IIMs, Indian Institutes of Management) 

Shillong, 25, 26, 27 August 2009.

I am anchoring a workshop on Accelerated Learning in one of the b- schools when the reports appear in the media.

Toyota recently announced the recall of 688,314 vehicles produced in China though no injuries or accidents have been linked to the recall. The recall amounts to more than a year's sale of vehicles.  

Dream:  I am waiting in front of my b-school which I graduated from in 1981. There is a huge crowd of alumni waiting for registration. The b school has a great reputation and have discovered that there have been some major glitches in all their graduates throughout the school's history. The graduates have been responsible for systemic failures of grave dimensions affecting the very survival of the planet. They  are waiting to register for a remedial programme. Their licences to practice have been revoked.  I wake up from the dream with the fear of losing my job to realise that I do not have a job to lose. Thank god, it is only a dream.

We share our dreams and news in the morning. The general consensus is that we need to have rewards as well as punishments. The Toyota quality issue is insignificant in comparison to what the top of the pyramid does to the bottom. (It is part of their programming to think of the world in terms of pyramids, or sometimes as a flat one reflecting their own inner landscapes. They perceive themselves to stand on the apex of the pyramid and from where they are rest of humanity is down there). They don't just leave it at that. More questions follow: What is Indian about the Indian institutes of Management? Are they B-schools or M- schools? If they are catering only to business why are they called management institutes? Is business not capable of meeting their own demand for managerial talent or otherwise?  Why should government indulge in this business where it has no competence to talk about? Do US seeds germinate and take root in the Indian soil? Can copies be better than the original? Which Indian academic in management working in India has the highest recall rate? Why is it that we don't even have a single technology or management breakthrough of world class scale and size in proportion to the scale and size of the country? Why are we so hung up on numbers and blissfully unaware of quality? You said quality, quantity and time goes into setting of standards and that standards though essential can also breed conformity and compromise on outstanding achievements when you don't have any standards of your own?

Is there a moral to the story? Accelerated learning and making people to ask questions is a tightrope walk? One cannot indulge in it without taking a position on some of these issues.