An Open Letter to MBA and EMBA Faculty and Administrators:
Your students make a significant financial investment to attend your program. But even more importantly, they are investing their time during the most crucial point of their careers. They want to be sure they are learning as much as possible in that time, and that the learning is both broad and deep. The learning needs to be useful to their careers, permanently remembered, and – preferably – enjoyable.
We have a way to help in all those aspects.
With the investment of a day – or even half a day – at the beginning of your program, you can create a clear foundation for business thinking that will strengthen and speed your teaching by a full month. As one of our enthusiastic users says, “When I realized that the game of Income/Outcome explained the underlying concepts of depreciation in ten minutes and saved me two lecture periods – that’s when I was sold!” (Dr. Helmut H. Hergeth, Associate Professor, College of Textiles, North Carolina State University.)
Like business, the game is a competition between teams to make profitable sales to customers with varying needs. Like business, the way to understand the health and success of your business is by understanding your financial statements – Income Statement, Balance Sheet, ratios, etc. But in addition, the game is an icebreaker for students and faculty – it’s a team-builder in itself – it’s so engaging that your students will always remember it – and it is so realistic that the game modeling can be used to visualize the health of any real-world company.
Above all, it presents a simple but complete big picture of how all aspects of business fit together – all your subsequent teaching will be seen in context – marketing, sales, accounting, finance, all will be understood as parts of the same whole – and speed of learning, relevance, and memory are all enhanced.
As Dr. Hergeth discovered, when faculty can cover fundamentals more quickly, it provides extra time for enhanced lessons throughout the program. The school gains an important advantage.