Income/Outcome at NASAGA
eliza hl
Published Date
Last week we were at the NASAGA conference in Washington DC, which is devoted to Simulations and Gaming (and not always in a learning and training context).During the concurrent sessions, we presented a workshop on our visual finance methodology, looking at how we can move from our high touch business simulations (Income/Outcome® and AcuMan™, both used for for learning about business finance ) to a high tech simulation (the Company Board ™ for analyzing business results).
NASAGA is a group that would rather do than listen, so the presentation was highly interactive.
One of the exercises was to have groups analyze 3 company boards for Apple, Delta Airlines, and Google; and see if they could determine which company was which.
This turned out to be a bit tougher than we thought it would be, but it proved to be a good learning experience.(see answers below)
We also had the opportunity to give people a chance to play the Entrepreneurial Challenge (now Better Business Decisions) at Game Night. If we gave prizes for the most interesting company names, it would probably go to Fiona from Learn to Lead in South Africa (who brought her beer to the session) and Skip from the Institute for Peace.
I think they thought it was a workshop on collaboration because the name they came up with was Beer for Peace.
We do award gold business acumen to winners of the business simulation. Congratulations to B4P for their outstanding performance.
Royal 3 was a close second; and if we had kept playing, Financial Geniuses was in a strong strategic position.
answers to visual finance quiz: Delta is the 2nd company, you can identify it because it has no Cost of Sales (the cost of adding another passenger to the flight is very, very low). Additionally, Delta recently went through restructuring, and you might expect some heavy associated exceptional expenses. In this situation, there was a serious impairment charge on the Income Statement; without this expense, Delta would have been slightly profitable last year.
Between Google and Apple, it is tempting to think that Apple is the company with all the fixed assets. Actually, Apple is the company that has inventory (the 1st board), and Google has all the fixed assets (the 3rd board). Both companies have a lot of cash!
