Might war games deserve a greater role in business? Military analogies abound in the corporate world. Plenty of bosses look to Sun Tzu, an ancient Chinese general, for management tips. And in business, as in war, outcomes depend on what others do, as well as ones own actions. Yet many firms fail to think systematically about how rivals will react to their plansand traditional planning does a poor job of taking competitors responses into account, says John McDermott, head of strategy at Xerox, an office-equipment company. Corporate war games, which simulate the interactions of multiple actors in a market, provide a better way to do so.
Such games have two chief characteristics. First, players break into teams and take on the roles of fierce competitors . Second, the games involve several turns, allowing competitors not just to draw up their own strategies but to respond to the choices of others. Their popularity is rising. Booz Allen Hamilton , a consultancy, is running 100 war games a year, up from around 50 three years ago. Open Options, a Canadian strategy consultancy, has been going since 1996 and its revenue doubled last year.
BAH introduces a quantitative element into its games, calculating the effect of each teams strategy on their companys profits and stockmarket value at the end of each turn. Open Options takes a further step. To help Xerox understand the market dynamics of the print and copy industry, it ran a one-day workshop in which teams from Xerox took the roles of the big companies in the market, itself included. Each team identified the things their company could do to change its strategy and drew up a list of its desired outcomes; these preference trees were shared with the other teams. The results were then pumped into Open Options proprietary software tools, which played out interactions between the companies and produced a range of possible outcomes.
Mr McDermott says the games predictive power was astonishing: one forecast, that a company would start to acquire a certain group of assets within the industry, came true within six months. By shedding light on areas where companies have different priorities, the concept of preference trees helps to highlight potential trade-offs, as well as competition. Open Options charges North American clients roughly $100,000 for an engagement.
The secret of successful war-gaming does not simply lie in mathematics, however. Interaction, not algebra, is the best way to win support for a new strategy. Game-players must be senior for the same reasonalthough having the top boss on a team can stifle feedback. Strategies also have to capture competitors hard-to-quantify corporate cultures: when designing a game, BAH seeks out employees at its clients who have actually worked at competitors for that reason. But perhaps war games greatest value lies in the way they encourage managers to think differently about the consequences of their actions. To know your enemy, you must become your enemy, as Sun Tzu would say.
41.The expression abound in most probably means _______.
[A] be limited
[B] be appreciated
[C] be driven
[D] be plentiful
42. According to the text, traditional corporate planning _______.
[A] has been completely abandoned.
[B] fails to consider rivals reactions.
[C] includes the detailed analyses of strategies of all rival companies.
[D] functions well for the development of most companies.
43. The positive effect of war games owes to the following EXCEPT_______.
[A] the role playing of competitors
[B] the composition of several turns
[C] the introduction of quantitative factors
[D] the rising popularity of the game
44. Which of the following is TRUE according to the text?
[A] Both BAH and Open Options developed their own software tools for data analysis of war games.
[B] The war game service expands slowly because of its high fee.
[C] Preference trees refers to desired outcomes of the companies.
[D] War games predictive ability is not convincing
45.Which of the following is NOT a reason for the success of war games?
[A] feedback
[B] mathematics
[C] interaction
[D] consideration of enemy
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