CAPSIM Team Ferris has not been overly successful thus far in our work, as reflecting in our current operating statistics. We have a negative return on sales, return on assets, return on equity and free cash flow, indicating that at present our company is not profitable. Asset turnover is a particular problem and leverage also contributes in our DuPont ratio to the negative ROE. But there is no one area where our company can be said to have excelled at the present time.

Of our five products, only one is profitable. This is the Feat product, which also happens to be far and away the leading generator of revenue. Our company has been forced to take an emergency loan in order to remain solvent. Modest performance on some balanced scorecard measures is the best that we can presently hope for. What this track record of poor performance means is that the management team has not been as effective, the decisions have not been particularly strong, and that we face a crisis of management and decision-making going forward. For example, we are going to need to determine what products are worth pursuing, what price points we are going to offer, and how we can improve upon our internal processes in general.

We performed mostly at the lower end of the groups, but ultimately I would say that we could have done better. The fact that our metrics were relatively poor is evidence enough of that. That other teams outperformed us most of the time is also disappointing, and we take no solace in the fact that there were other teams that performed more poorly. This report will look at some of the experiences we had as a group and how we can improve, learning from our mistakes to get better.

Strategy Development

The challenge that we face is to ensure that the company Ferris has a coherent strategy. We have learned that strategy is most effective when all elements of the strategy support each other. This is a core lesson of the balanced scorecard, where the optimal strategy is one that creates positive results along all dimensions. Understanding the trade-offs between the different elements of the scorecard, and understanding what strategies will create positive feedback loops for these elements are important factors. Our team must at this point revisit our strategy. We probably did not have a clear enough strategic direction for the company from the outset. One of the biggest challenges going forward will be to pursue precisely such a path -- we must have a clearer sense of vision and work harder to implement strategies that work within that vision.

Teamwork

There are six members of the team, and there were some interesting challenges with respect to teamwork and leadership. There were no clear leaders on the team, and for the most part the group agreed that it would be best if we worked things out as a team. This lead to some interesting challenges in terms of setting a strategic direction. Different team members had different ideas, and it was sometimes a challenge to build consensus. The communication process was maybe not as rigorous as would have been ideal. In a real world situation, the six top executives at a company can sit down over forty or fifty hours per week and really hammer out the details of strategy, build consensus and buy-in from the team members. Our approach saw us build to consensus, but maybe there was not that much buy-in. This meant that for six of us, we were not necessarily working to our optimal capabilities in terms of each team member doing a lot of hard analysis and contributing to the strategy.

The result was that we sort of experienced groupthink more than we built a six-person buy-in to a clear strategy. Instead, we were more guessing at what might work, and people wanted to get along so that everybody agreed with the first few ideas. There was not the sort of vigorous hashing out of different ideas coming from difference perspectives. All being students with similar backgrounds, the team might have been too homogenous, and inexperienced, to really get into sophisticated arguments about the trade-offs the different decisions entailed. As a result, we probably didn't come up with the best ideas. Instead, we ran with the first ideas and ultimately they were not that good, as the performance of Ferris indicates. This was definitely a flaw in the way we set up our organization -- we had six people...

People were not coming from strong specialist backgrounds so we sort of ran things like a group of generalists, which perhaps inhibited optimal decision-making.
Team communication was actually not that bad. We could have had better direction in terms of our communications -- directing people to do specific tasks, ensuring that everybody was pulling together, towards the same strategy. But overall, we got along and most of us continued to contribute some good work and communication through the entire process. We probably could have done more if we had more face-to-face time because ideas can be communicated more quickly, but overall I felt that the teamwork was actually pretty strong. Our faults were more in the process by which we generated strategy and in particular how we set about implementing our strategy. The only aspect of communication that would have helped was having a better plan from the outset, for example knowing that we needed to focus more on the development of specific roles and figuring out what each role was going to do towards the overall project.

However, my overall impression is actually quite positive. I feel that given more time, we would be able to remedy some of the mistakes that we made. I think we have a much better sense now of what we would need to do with respect to strategy. I think we could divide the tasks better, and allow people to build specializations. We would develop more benchmarks, and we have a better sense of what works and what does not work in this industry. For these reasons I think our ability to work as a team is stronger today than it was at the beginning and that we would perform better if put back to the beginning of the simulation now.

Development of Interpersonal Skills

I cannot really speak about the other team members, but I feel that I did gain some ability with respect to the development of interpersonal skills, which was one of the stated objectives of this exercise. Initially, there was this process where the team members got to know one another. We had to build trust, and some of the missteps in strategy development were probably the result of everybody trying to come up with their own ideas. This occurred because we didn't really know one another and had yet to build up sufficient trust to fully believe in each other yet. Studies of teamwork show that remote work teams are most successful when they are forced to come together quickly for a specific project objective. The difference between such real world situations and this one is that in the real world there is a leader from outside the team, who has put the team together and who gives the team the context and strategic direction. Had this been the case with us, we might have actually done better. The lack of direction -- the fact that we had to find this direction for ourselves before we had had the opportunity to build trust -- was one of the team downfalls.

As we worked through the simulation, we started to learn who was more persuasive about ideas, and how they were persuasive. Usually it was a mix of having evidence and working with course material to help derive strategy. Unfortunately, there was not the total buy-in that might have been beneficial. Persuasiveness got us to agree on things as a group, but mostly because people did not want to argue and nobody had a particular expertise it was harder for people to foster informal authority. So we were left with no formal authority and only a loose sense of informal authority. This is why I think we resorted to groupthink more often, and we even chose to make decisions as a group. Ultimately, there might be better ways to setting out strategic direction. I have learned through this experience that building consensus is not the same thing as getting buy-in. But this is one of the aspects of communication and group work that was probably made more challenging by the fact that it was a simulation with students rather than a real world situation where people have formal titles and experience on which to draw informal authority.

Conclusions

The simulation proved an excellent way to learn about group dynamics, communication and strategy. It provided a situation where the group had to come together quickly, and establish roles. Communication flows had to be established as well. I feel that we did this better than…