“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation” – this quote, voices the opinion of the entire batch on the Management Games conducted by Mantis. The only thing is that instead of an hour, it stretched over a day. We were promised an entire day of absolutely not having to study or sit with books, a day when all that we had to do was to interact with each other and have fun and most importantly a day that would dispel our fear of numbers and calculation.....and Dr. Vinod Dumblekar made sure that this promise was kept.
Mantis is the country’s only organisation devoted solely to non-formal learning including simulation games for management and other education. Mantis is managed and led by Dr. Vinod in partnership, association and networks with other professionals, academia and researchers in India and abroad. Dr. Vinod put us through a stimulating session of simulation where we had to assume roles of a CFO, CMO or COO and play our part. It was challenging and a wonderful learning experience as we were exposed to various harsh realities of the business environment. We were provided a Quarterly Report of a manufacturing company that we had to manage for the next two quarters. We had to plan and strategise various aspects such as production of the plant, pricing of raw materials, selling price, advertisement cost and dealer commission in about 45 minutes. At the end of it, the quarterly result of each team was published and we were able to see and analyse the implications of our decisions. It was highly competitive and exciting as eight teams were vying against one another in terms of production capacity and market share.
Planning for the second quarter gave us an opportunity to learn from our mistakes that we committed in the first quarter. Dr. Vinod made things tougher for us in the second quarter by introducing another product to the existing product line. We prepared the Quarterly Report for the second quarter and the reports of all the teams were analysed. The game helped us understand the concepts of balance sheet, income statements and cash statements better. Furthermore, it emphasised the importance of communication and decision making within a cross functional team.
On the whole, the session was interesting and informative and delivered what CBS truly believes in – “Learning for the real world”
Contributed by Meena Ganesh Ram, HR Varsity, CBS Batch 4, 2009-10.
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