A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

198 ■ A CLASS WITH DRUCKER
in competition <strong>with</strong> other student teams representing competing “companies.”
The environmental conditions changed every week, representing
a fiscal quarter in real life, as did the performance of each “company”
based on inputs provided by the students in reaction to the previous
quarter’s (i.e., last week’s) situation and also the reactions of and inputs
of other student teams.
For example, one could shift dollar resources from research and development
to sales. That decision might help out in the short run, but it could
hurt in other areas or in several quarters later. The simulation was supposed
to teach the principles of business and how the various functions
worked together under competition to produce various results. Claremont
made it a little more interesting by assigning a psychologist along <strong>with</strong> the
regular professor to observe the team meetings held during several hours
of class time. Of course, teams spent much of their time meeting during
the week out of class.
This was not a course <strong>Drucker</strong> taught, but the similarity to the lessons
from the concept of the Management Control Panel was striking.
The course was required for our doctoral program. However, like many
graduate courses at Claremont, it could be taken for either masters or
doctoral level credit. Only a few courses were reserved just for doctoral
students. In any case, this particular class had only four of my doctoral
classmates out of a class of about thirty, both masters and doctoral students.
Since a team consisted of four students, we decided to form a team
of four “aces.”
We anticipated that our team would easily win the competition
between the companies. We definitely had advantages. Not only were we
at a higher educational level, but at a higher managerial level as well. Of
the four members of my team, I was the only one who was not at least a
corporate vice president and accustomed to making decisions involving all
business disciplines. And I had worked <strong>with</strong> all functional areas while running
a department of research and development. Only a few of the masters
level students were corporate officers, and no other team had more than
one of these on their team. We had three!
Despite the educational advantage of being doctoral students, and the
advantage of this top level managerial experience, we did not easily finish
as the top team in this competition. In fact, we did not finish as top team
at all. We finished somewhere in the middle of the pack. We couldn’t figure
it out. More than once, one of our members would say something like,