My Capsim team met for over three hours last week from Tuesday through Saturday. We took Sunday off and then met Monday for another three hours. Last Saturday we decided to back off our Niche Cost Leader strategy and tried out the Broad Cost Leader strategy. We ran through Round 4 and scored in the 98th percentile. We scheduled our debrief call for today and parted ways until Monday. On Monday the Finance manager could not meet so the rest of the team completed rounds 5 through 8 without him. We learned a number of valuable insights and completed the practice simulation with an overall percentile score of 94. We even absorbed some hits to our scorecard during the last four rounds and scored well. I documented a number of those key learnings in a document on the team shared drive. In our phone call tonight, the Capsim Debrief, we gathered a number of helpful hints and tips. We also asked some very specific questions and received some great answers. Again, those were documented in the meeting notes I’ve kept in the team shared drive. Our team is now armed with a strategy that is practiced precisely through Round 8 and a solid page of notes and ideas to guide us in decision making through the Capsim competition rounds. Honestly, I’m excited about it and think we could score in the top ten percentile and thus receive the top performance award. I hope my confidence is not misplaced due to the number of times we hit undo and reworked our practice rounds. Every time we hit undo and tried something new, we learned valuable lessons about the simulation and the relationships between the different parts of the company. Also, spending more than 20 hours last week as a team talking it out was a very productive learning method. We kicked ideas around very quickly and then tested them. We failed quickly and moved on to learn and succeed. At the end of every practice session I felt more informed, prepared, and positive about the experience. I will concede that our Friday night session started later and ended well after midnight. As a team we agreed that this was a bad strategy and the time became less productive due to exhaustion. Even then, we learned some important things for the team and our company. This week other than our Monday night session and the debrief, we have had much less team time. I’ve used the time to push anything forward that I can. Last night I stayed up until midnight completing the PowerPoint template for the team to use for our Capsim presentation. I also completed the Assignment Designation Form that is necessary for everyone to submit as part of Task 2. By the end of the night I had delivered updated meeting notes, a required form, and a substantial Ppt template with multiple emails to the team that will help speed us to the end. Tonight, after the debrief, emails were exchanged that made it clear we won’t make any team progress until at least Monday. With three days between now and then I do not want to simply wait. One guy has family stuff all day Saturday. One guy informed us that he’s in the hospital until Monday. What? Is he ok? I have no idea and I really hope he is. Since that is completely personal for him I won’t even ask why or whether it’s an emergency. I’m assuming that if he can email then he is reasonably ok. We have to meet on Monday and complete the simulation to meet the two week timeline we agreed on in our first meeting. I’m disappointed to lose the entire weekend, but I have a backup plan.
My dad got back to me and confirmed that I can use the company he works at for my Capstone business review. This will give me easy, quick, and complete access to all the details. I won’t have to deal with trust issues in dealing with a stranger and I already know a fair amount about the business because I worked there for a few months many years ago and grew up with the business owners’ kids. However, as a family business, it is ripe for identifying problem statements and making suggestions. These are two key points required in the final paper of this MBA. The Task 4 requirements provided a very good Word template for the paper. All I have to do is get the content from my dad, do the analysis, and fill in the paper. I’ve already proven I can string words together at length. My dad has already provided some solid ideas around the problem statement. I’m confident I can get the info I need and write this paper to substantial completion this weekend if my family permits.
Speaking of family permission, I’ve run into another obstacle. I know I previously wrote about finally arranging my schedule to finish the MBA and negotiated for no interruptions. Guess what? My spouse’s family decided to schedule a three day gathering next weekend. It is all I could do to keep my mouth shut. I did everything I was supposed to do to communicate the need to finish this degree and obtain uninterrupted time until the end of the program to hammer this out. Nobody negotiated or apologized to me for stepping over the boundaries I communicated and agreed on. One day I was simply told that I was expected to give up three days and take time off work in the heat of the Capstone. I haven’t decided yet how to address this. It’s interesting that no matter what I choose to do about this, I lose. Either I don’t meet my goals and keep to the plans I set, or I catch a ton of grief from family who showed no respect for my prior-arranged plans. This is interesting because managers do this stuff all the time. They show up and slam some huge request down on you without regard for any of the plans or arrangements already in place. In both cases, the impacted individual may have done everything they were supposed to do to align expectations. It is wrong of the other party to suddenly change expectations without communicating or helping ease the burden. But should the impacted individual fail to do what the family or boss want, they WILL be punished. Whether it is work, life, or school I’ve learned much about a key component to solving this conundrum. Communication. Communication is essential and it seems the impacted party is the one that must always take the higher path and initiate the hard conversations.