Monday, April 12, 2010

Business is a Bust!

In my capstone business graduate class, I have been working on a business simulation with 4 other individuals. We have owned a laptop company for the past 10 weeks with each week being a quarter in the life cycle of the company.

We spent a TREMENDOUS amount of time on the simulation. Each week we would spend on average of over 5 hours making decisions. We put a lot of time into our decisions.

The REALLY sad part:
Our business was a bust! Compared to the other teams in the class we came in last place with two emergency loans throughout the past 10 weeks. I feel like I waisted a great deal of time in the past weeks because none of our decisions paid off. We will be getting a worse grade because the business did poorly financially (even though I put more effort into that class than most). But more aggravating is just the time put into the simulation with no results to show for it.

The Positive:
I learned a GREAT deal from the simulation. I never realized how much goes into owning, running and working a company. The amount of decisions that need to be made is overwhelming and trying to make all the decisions with 4 other owners makes it five times harder. The whole experience taught me a lot about working on a team. We got into fights but we also had fun. I also learned about flexibility and the need to 'roll with the punches'. Each week results never turned out the way we expected but the important part was what we did with those results. At points I felt like giving up but my team mates would think of good ideas of how to change things around. It showed me that even in bad situations you can make them productive by being creative with problem solving.

I think I will appreciate the experience of the simulation once I finish school and am able to apply these lessons. Right now I am still upset that the business went,
KABOOM!

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