Final Rounds of Global Management Challenge

The final rounds of the Global Management Challenge differ from the basic ones in several cases. From my point of view, apart from the number of the contestants or the venue, there are following differences.

Time for Decisions

The time to enter the decision may differ in various countries. For example the Global Management Challenge in the Czech Republic is played like this:

• 1. Decision – 1.5 hour
• 2. Decision – 1 hour
• 3. Decision – 1 hour
• 4. Decision – 45 minutes
• 5. Decision – 30 minutes

The international final round of the Global Management Challenge 2010/2011 in Macau was played as follows:

• 1. Decision – 1.25 hour
• 2. Decision  – 1 hour
• 3. Decision – 1 hour
• 4. Decision – 45 minutes
• 5. Decision – 30 minutes

The appointed time is indeed very limited. And if you made it to the finals, you are amongst the teams which are able to plan whole 5 quarters of the company’s future during their first decision. To be able to compete with this you need well-prepared tools and a brilliantly organized team. The checklist we prepared for the final round of the contest did it for our team. Here you’ll find how our Global Management Challenge Checklist looks like.

Stress

In the final round of Global Management Challenge there are extremely stressful conditions to deal with. There is no time for big discussions about the problems, no time to do anything else. The contestants are fully concentrated on their work and try to manage as much as possible in the given time.

This on the other side also brings a feeling of a satisfaction. You are able to do in 1 hour the same amount of work that usually takes you 1 day with any other activity. The feelings of stress can thus be later replaced by euphoria.

Each Team Plays Differently

It is quite easy to predict how the market will behave in the basic round. A few companies will make nonsense decisions and they will collapse after a while. Other teams will behave more or less in the same way, they will not risk any big changes and they will not know the details of the simulation‘s variables and mechanics, which they could otherwise use to their advantage.

There can be basically 2 types of situation in the national finals of the Global Management Challenge:

1. Teams will be good, but not on the highest level
2. Teams will be on the highest level

The competition will be pretty much balanced in the first case. The companies will not make silly decisions, but at the same time they will not want to experiment too much. The finalists of GMC already know how to calculate their accounting, know how many employees they need, they can roughly estimate the orders placed for their product, etc. They will not surprise and the market will be stable. The other teams who know more about the simulation may profit from this fact. They can play it safe and still do what they want on the market – it is fairly easy for those to predict their orders.

In the second case it will be very difficult to predict what the teams will do. Everybody mastered all aspects of the Global Management Challenge. The only unknown is the change of the market which is affected by other companies. One company can massively invest into the advertising, another push down the price of its products and another play aggressive distribution politics. Some markets provide huge opportunities, others are very competitive. The winning team will be the one that can predict what its opponents will do in the best possible way and this team will have in reserve better knowledge about how to increase goodwill in the last quarter.

Something Goes Wrong

As the final rounds are full of stress it’s better to accept the fact that something can go wrong. Your tools may fail, a notebook of the team leader can break down, etc. That is what happened to Czech team at the final round of GMC in Macau – our models were not prepared for the 3 shifts operation of the company. But the important thing is, that we managed to handle the situation and created the most important changes during the semifinals and bring the Excel model into perfect condition over the night – read more about how we played in Macau. The team that is able to make the decisions and has a good intuition is the one who can succeed in the situations like these.

If you have additional questions which I did not cover in the article, do not hesitate to ask in the comments.