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Photo courtesy Gary Kuwahara |
| Instructors David Hoopes (left), Xia Zhao (right), and Marcella McGee (not pictured) had student groups within their Management 490 classes ranked in the top 25 worldwide. |
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Student Groups
Rank in Top 25 in Business Simulations
Over
the spring and summer sessions, students in three different sections
of Management 490, Strategic Management, were ranked in the top 25
in several different categories of the business simulations in which
they were competing. While the overall goal was to make sure they
understood all of the concepts and could apply them together in this
capstone class of the undergraduate program, their global rankings
served as proof positive for their teachers that they were doing
just that. Providing a hands-on and dynamic environment where student groups had to continuously manage their hypothetical company within an industry, the simulations required students to bring all of the concepts they had learned in their undergraduate program together. It was a constantly changing environment where they were forced to react and adapt to changes in the marketplace in disciplines as wide ranging as R&D, product line breadth, production and operations, pricing, sales and marketing, and finance. They were not directly competing against other teams outside of their class, but the rankings still came as a welcome surprise for their teachers. “I didn’t even know the simulation would post comparative rankings, but I was delighted so see our students were so competitive,” says Marcella McGee, lecturer in management. “It came as affirmation that our students had good, solid preparation and were recognized for their ability to achieve in this complex environment.” Two groups in McGee’s classes ranked in the top 25 in the GLO-BUS simulation in various categories. Seniors Cesar Chavez, Nancy Gomez, and Melody Montano earned the third best “Return on Average Equity” performance overall worldwide. In the last week of the simulation more than 600 teams from 43 colleges and universities worldwide were participating in the simulation. Another group, consisting of seniors Matthew Chambers, Michelle Cole, and Emilio Velasquez ranked in the Global Top 25 for “Overall Game-to-Date Score,” “Earnings per Share,” and “Stock Price” at various points in the simulation. “It was incredibly gratifying. It makes you say, ‘wow, they’re really getting it,’” says David Hoopes, assistant professor of management, whose teams dominated the GLO-BUS simulation rankings run during the summer session. Hoopes had two student groups that ranked second and seventh overall worldwide, with a total of 162 teams from 17 colleges and universities involved. This same class produced the top four and nine of the top 12 ranking teams in “Earnings Per Share,” the top three and seven of the top 10 teams in “Return on Average Equity,” and nine out of the top 10 teams in “Stock Price.” The third class, led by Xia Zhao, assistant professor of management, had two groups who finished ranked in the Top 25 in a different simulation, the Business Strategy Game (BSG-Online). Team B, consisting of Phung Huynh, Maria Araujo, Lucy Hong, and Claudia Ramirez, finished ninth overall worldwide. Team H, comprised of Alvin Yip, Annette Aoyama, Maurice Perkins, and Pamela Green, finished 22nd best worldwide. These results came amid a field of 2,084 teams from 142 colleges and universities participating in the simulation worldwide. Despite the impressive results, the teachers echoed Dean James Strong’s view that the primary goal was to give students a dynamic and hands-on test of the concepts they had learned. It’s why they are all big proponents of using simulations in upper-level classes. “A simulation game is as close to the real world as you can get,” says Strong. “It’s an opportunity to put the concepts and principles they’ve learned to work. Plus, it puts them in teams and forces them to make decisions over a long period of time amid competition and uncertainty.” In these simulation games, what the groups opt to do one week directly impacts their company’s standing in the weeks to follow. This long-term application, where weeks in the class setting represent years in the simulation, is just one of the reasons why Hoopes values simulations over case studies. “The hardest part of strategy is figuring out what the question is – if a company isn’t doing well in the simulation, it’s not immediately obvious why it’s not doing well. That means it requires much more analysis than a case study when the problem is handed to you,” says Hoopes. “There’s much more going on than simply having a canned case and set of questions to evaluate the business against,” reiterates McGee. Yet for all of the longitudinal analysis and dynamic competitive environment of the simulations, arguably the biggest challenge (and reward) of completing a simulation successfully is the teamwork required to do so. It’s one thing to work on a group project; another entirely to recognize the different types of decision-making and make those personalities work over the long term. In this way, simulations give students a glimpse of the interpersonal challenges they’ll face in the working world. “They have to deal with the real interpersonal issues of the working world,” says McGee. “How do you manage internal conflict? Who makes the decisions when you’re under a time crunch? There’s no luxury of missing a deadline. Just like in the real world, there are consequences.” And for all of the rewards of simulations, these three classes’ impressive results suggest that CSUDH students are on the right track to turn their simulated success into the real thing once they move on with their degrees. |
