Dear younger colleagues

Every year, we prepare for you a course on management and we think again and again about how to convey the information on control and management, working with people - your future colleagues – in forms most effective for your future work as managers. During last two decades, we became convinced that this can only be achieved in cooperation with you. The condition is to create an environment in the school that you will find interesting, exciting, thrilling, and full of surprises, creative energy and cooperation. Existing experience acquired in teaching management at the Department of Corporate Economy of the Faculty of Economics and Administration of Masaryk University in Brno shows that apart from case studies, these requirements are met mainly by methods of simulation manager games.

We believe that we are smoothing the way for one of the non-traditional approaches where knowledge is only the first step towards the success in business. Should you take this path, from the very beginning you will face challenges similar to those that managers face in the market environment in competitors´ fight. You will become convinced that apart from your knowledge, you will have to mobilize all your experience acquired in occasional practice in corporations. You will be faced with situations in which the main stress factor for you will be the feeling of responsibility for the common success of the whole team. You will learn to overcome threats that bring incorrect decisions into your team. You will gradually acquire skills that will allow you to find opportunities leading to a common success of your team and to eliminate risks of the collective failure. You will experience the joy of a success of your own, acquired through cooperation with others, and the pride that you are a part of a quality team, a warming feeling of your colleagues when you contribute significantly to the overall success of the team. In some time, you will catch yourself perceiving possible threats to the team prior to threats to your person, assessing the situation on the market, preparing decisions and selecting approaches of your work with much more attention and effort that you were before able to make within your own individual work with your goals individually set and achieved.

And what exactly are we talking about?

Apart from traditional approaches, modern education also offers methods with the aforementioned features which emphasize the development of active thinking and innovative attitudes characteristic for work in management. The aim of enforcing those methods in teaching is to contribute to creation of new habits and strengthening of special abilities such as more flexible reactions to faster changing conditions and situation on the real markets for future managers.

In this management game, you will contribute to creation of an environment which is, in its nature, similar to real conditions of management of economical entities. You will decide to accept a certain role on the principle of voluntariness and on condition of interest in active cooperation. By that, you take responsibility for the creative approach and fulfilment towards both – your team who is a market player on its own and also towards to yourself as an individual market player. That prepares you to participate in preparations and enforcing mutually competitive strategies. In roles of investors, bankers and managers, it is in your interest to apply the acquired theoretical knowledge in the game as creatively as possible and to exploit them in enforcement of collective as well as individual economic interests in the competitive fight.

The game uses computer technology to simulate behaviour of the product market and assessment economical situation of enterprises, but the essence of the game is not communication with a computer, but in the communication of its individual and collective participants.

The core of the game is to evoke the atmosphere of competition and student cooperation, their abilities to organize work in a team, to formulate visions of fictitious entities and to concentrate the efforts of their colleagues to share common values, acquire and process information, make decisions, assign tasks and motivate, act and negotiate etc. The condition of work activity and full work dedication of all students is coming forward more and more pressingly. The students are active from the individual point of view and from the point of view of work within their teams.

The experience of management games realization so far shows the fact that one of the biggest problems you will probably face in the roles of top managers is imbalanced distribution of work tasks and responsibility for their fulfilment among the members of your work team. That is why the influence of stimulation and motivation tools for development of interest of the actors in the mutual cooperation within the groups and work teams of bigger collectives is emphasized as an important prerequisite of success of their future activity under conditions of the real market.

The game is guided by a teacher and his/her consulting group of students – expert assistants of the department qualified in the field of management games. Work distribution within the consulting group, instructive activity of the teacher at seminars and continuous personal and electronic contact of the consulting group with the participants of the management game guarantee following the rules of the game and allow operative solutions to all unpredictable situations occurring among the actors of the game when enforcing their competitive interests.

The game is rightfully classified among different, mostly theoretical classes. Above all, it is designed to facilitate your entrance into management practice for you, to prepare you for the significant change between the greenhouse environment of the school and necessary establishment of yourself in the market condition practice. Of course, it is obvious that conditions awaiting for you behind the faculty doors cannot be completely simulated in the school environment, that is why the game is only a simulation. The behaviour of the market towards fictitious entities lead by you is simplified as well as your formal relationships within the company management and between companies, banks and other entities.

What will not be simplified and yet completely essential for you to finish the game successfully, is application of your inventiveness, creativity and effort to establish our own personality, effort for your own self-realisation. At the same time, it is going to be a test of assertion of all of your positive character qualities, a test of mobilization of all of your creative abilities.

In order to develop and assert those qualities properly, first you have to free yourself from a whole range of negative habits, mainly dependence on external conditions that prevent you from free and responsible decision-making. In short, you have to start working on yourself intensely towards your own liberation, acceptance of your own unconditional responsibility for your actions and results of your own work, you have to start acting pro-active. Above all, a life is at stake in this game, even when you can not even fully imagine the exigency of some of the aforementioned requirements.

And really; your biggest and most important task will be to create efficient work teams within companies´ top managements, banks and other entities in the game; only those teams as cooperating wholes of free and responsible individuals can be able to deal with complex tasks of development of the individual legal entities in the game. Only here you will verify what are your character predispositions for a managerial position, what guarantee of responsibility do you make for others – for your co-workers. Only your personal contribution towards creativity, activity and results of work teams will form a valuable assessment of your work and personal qualities necessary for modern managerial work for you.

Without wanting to repeat what has already been said, we have to state that not even that would be enough so that you have a real chance for a good job in the contemporary and much less in the future economic crisis. Not only in the efficient work teams, but mainly in necessary ponderings on global approach of entire businesses, banks and other entities whose interests you represent towards other subjects on the market you will be posed into a position in which you have to estimate the future approach and behaviour of competitive companies, estimate interest and efficiency of offers from banks, developments of stocks at stock exchange and many other phenomena exceeding the company you work in. You will experience on your on the responsibility for the quality of preparatory information as well as of final decisions because also in the real conditions of the real market, every of your attitudes, opinions, thoughts, base reports or other information as well as your behaviour towards your colleagues in the company management influences the overall management success of the company, will support or harm its image in the minds of the public.

Now you know at least the rough contours of what the management game you are entering is about. The results of all of your activities will be mainly assessed by the market. I will only assume my role of the teacher of the game responsibly, objectively and rightly when assessing the results of those of your activities that were impossible to make a part of the market model for the reasons unavoidable in the market model simplification. Believe that many years of experience in using management games in the management teaching have created appropriate qualification for me.

We know that for many of you, the knowledge acquired in the management course will not be entirely new, but they will form an opportunity for comparing your own experience from the field of people organization and management asserted in sharing and achieving common goals both in profit and non-profit oriented companies and institutions.

Maybe your experience will be affirmed by reactions of successful company managements which mostly bring forward the turbulent character of the contemporary economic crisis, the faster-changing conditions at local and foreign markets and more demanding challenges that have to be faced in their work.

It is therefore not surprising that it is them who emphasize balance of all factors of readiness of fresh university graduates entering practice. They will expect handling and practical use of the latest knowledge, ability to lead and motivate your co-workers, assert practical skills in creation of efficient teams and active and creative approach in dealing with new and usually unexpected problem situations.

In the course of the game, our task is to create conditions for development and assertion of new personal qualities and habits for your efficient work in the work teams. This is also the main meaning of your active participation in the management game. We wish you success and acquisition of a whole range of new habits and experience usable in your future managerial work.

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