T3 Business Role Play

Two French friends at the Tower of London, looking at a massive ancient cannon and trying to work out how, with the technology available at the time such a piece could have been made, let alone resist the explosive pressures of firing.  Both are engineers (formerly of ENSISA UHA) and run a multi-million Euro turnover engineering business locally.

Although the context of this role play is a type of business with which you may have little familiarity – you certainly have experience of its product: Tourism.  That said, this particular context will not prevent those engineers and ICT specialists amongst you from learning business management and developing a specialised English business vocabularly.

BACKGROUND:

• ColmarCo is my company
• I am your boss
• You are small teams of senior personnel who direct the various divisions of ColmarCo
• I have drawn you away from your desks to a special ‘away-day’ so we can reflect upon how we are doing, where the problems and opportunities lie and address them.

• We will be focused on a number of key issues:

• • BUSINESS PERFORMANCE. A candid analysis and evaluation of our overall performance (in financial and operational terms), and divisional and brand performance.  Some components of our business are clearly failing, whereas others appear to be performing spectacularly.  We perhaps have some unpleasant decisions to make concerning our poorest performers in order to release funds to invest in our success stories…  Other things that might help you: Blending the Business representation.  Boston Consulting Group Matrix: Stars, Cash-cows, Question marks and Dogs … which of our brands’ performance suggests which of these four options and what does it mean?

• • PRODUCT, SERVICE or ‘EXPERIENCE’?  Is ColmarCo losing sight of its customers and why they do or do not buy our products and services?  In fact are we missing the point – are customers actually purchasing products and services at all…. Might they not be seeking to ‘derive’ an experience?  Does that mean we should be conceiving our operations and  our relationship with the customer differently (if we truly believe that company-customer relationships are possible, that is).  Should we be re-thinking the matter of the role of ‘complaints’?  Perhaps we should ‘track’ our own experiences and examine how the experience builds and goes right or goes wrong and develop some principles we can adopt within the business.

• • MARKETING & COMMUNICATIONS.   I get the distinct impression that we are wasting enormous amounts of money trying to get our messages across to our markets.  I have read academic research lately that suggests that up to 50% of marketing budgets may be being totally wasted.  If applied to ColmarCo, this could easily be costing us as much as 20,000,000 Euros per year.  I need us to look at all sorts of advertising together, apply communications theory and our own observations, analyses, evaluations, experience and intuitions to try to generate a far clearer idea of what is going to work and what will not.  I would like to see a set of principles created and adopted company-wide to reduce our expenditures and increase our marketing communications effectiveness.

• • PEOPLE. Unacceptable levels of labour turnover.  Our labour turnover rates are catastrophic. Our hard-earned profits are constantly being ploughed into the gigantic and constant cost-covering exercise of replacing management and operational staff who seem to leave us almost as fast as they arrive. Either we are recruiting and selecting the wrong people OR we are getting the right people but not making their working lives attractive enough for them to want to stay… OR maybe both.  This HAS to be changed TODAY.  How do we turn the situation around?  I am reminded of my old Senior Lecturer’s comment: “Companies don’t make profits – People do!”….  No links or material on this – you need to think it through.

• • PREDICTION & PLANNING. Vision and strategy: where should we be going [Ends] and how can we get there in the mose effective, economic and efficient way [Means]?  …  Strategy = ends + means.  I commissioned a world scenario projection from the world-renowned UHA University Scenarios and Stragegies Think Tank.  Your task will be to envision the future of your divisions and brands within this Scenario and to consider: the degree of threat(s) to each of our brands and whether and how they might be overcome.  Can the brands be maintained as economically viable?  If not, when and how do we dispose of them as painlessly as possible?
  • The opportunities that are presented for:
    • our existing brand portfolio and how we might seize them
    • new product/service/brand development and how we might achieve this

    What might the overall ‘shape’ of ColmarCo look like in 10 years time when cast forward into this scenario?

    • what divisions will we have?
    • what will our brand portfolio look like
    • where in the world will the bulk of our business and profits come from?

ASSESSMENT

As your boss and ColmarCo’s CEO, I will be assessing the quality of your analyses, evaluations and creative solutions….  your career is on the line here: we have our proverbial ‘backs against the wall’ as a company and we cannot afford to ‘carry deadwood‘…..  [Out of role and as Tony the Tutor, I will be assessing all three of the above role play elements.]

MARKING.  I will produce a ‘base’ mark for each team’s work based upon its content and the extent to which you have maintained an analytical and evaluative approach to the question/topic.  I reserve the right to moderate this base mark up or down for ‘conspicuous’ individual performance.   Any written précis will receive a team mark.

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