The Art of Strategic Management
Daniels Students Lead Nationwide Capsim Capstone® Business Simulation
How does one think strategically? Manage strategically? Formulate and implement a strategic plan? In Management Professor Vijaya Narapareddy's undergraduate capstone, Business Policy and Strategy, students strive to answer those and many other questions--but not by reading about strategy in a textbook. "All quarter, students learn business strategy by practicing it hands-on," says Dr. Narapareddy. "This is where it all comes together. This class is the 'finale' of the undergraduate experience at Daniels."
Business Policy and Strategy students spend the quarter entrenched in the Capsim Capstone® Business Simulation, a program used by hundreds of universities around the world. Interdisciplinary teams manage their own startup company, making decisions once a "year" (once a week in real time). "Students introduce products, make marketing and financing decisions, and wrestle with the challenges of positioning and re-positioning their companies," says Dr. Narapareddy. "Each week, they review. Did they gain market share or lose it? Did they sell the products they produced? What happened to their stock price? What happened to their costs? And how did they perform compared to their competition?"
Not only do students compete against their classmates, they compete with students around the world--from colleges of business at Indiana University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California at Berkeley and others. Whether it was good strategy and implementation, strong leadership, or a little bit of both, in the Spring 2010 quarter, two of Dr. Narapareddy's teams led their peers week after week. Team Chester (Cameron Dawkins and Ben Henderson) and Team Ferris (Robert Brewer and Alexandra Ruff), placed in the 91st and 99th percentile in the final round of the simulation--and in the 81st and 89th overall--against more than 3,000 qualified teams.
For Bo Brewer, BAcc '10 (and MBA candidate), the experience not only "tied together all of my previous classes," it prepared him well for his summer internship with Denver-based startup, Titan LED. "This course taught me the importance of paying attention to all aspects of a business--no matter how insignificant," he says. "I went immediately from starting up a company in a simulated environment to working at a startup company, and I think I'm already able to carry over a lot of what we learned."
"This was the first time I've ever done anything like this and it was a great opportunity to use all of the skills I learned throughout my undergraduate education," says Cameron Dawkins, BSBA '10, who will enter the Daniels One-year MBA program in the fall. "The best part was taking all of our decisions into account and pitching to investors at the end of the quarter--convincing them to invest in our company."
At the end of the simulation, students presented to a panel of Denver-area executives, fielding questions about their companies and why they made the decisions they did. Daniels is one of the few schools in the nation to hold mock investor meetings, according to Capsim Management Simulations. "I think it enhances the experience to have students take ownership of their work, present to experienced business professionals and reflect on what they've done," says Dr. Narapareddy.
This quarter, those mock investors included Robert Maxon, an economist for the U.S. Department of Treasury, Rob Unger, CEO of Rachel's Challenge, Adil Khan, CEO of Amplidyne, David O'Brien and Kevin Johansen, CEO and founder, respectively, of Business Catapult, Arvind Niranjan, founder and CEO of Manas Consulting, several Qwest executives, Daniels Management Professor Gordon Von Stroh and other professionals.
Teams Chester and Ferris aren't the first to have achieved great success in the Capsim Capstone. According to Dr. Narapareddy, at least one team every quarter consistently places in the high-90th percentile the entire seven-week simulation. "I believe Daniels has some outstanding undergraduates who use this as an opportunity to understand how to manage a company from inception to high growth," she says. "These four amazed me. If I had a company, I would hire them on the spot."
