The Management Game - Hardcover

Burst, Ardis; Schlesinger, Leonard A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 028399651X ISBN 13: 9780283996511

Publisher: Pan Macmillan, 1988

Synopsis

This book challenges its readers to test their skills at managing a complex division of a large corporation. By following a year in the life of Ed Cunningham, a senior vice-president who heads the Speciality Foods Division, a small but vital division of Consolidated Commodities Inc. (or ConCom), readers see exactly what choices a top manager must make, participate themselves in the decision making and learn the results. This Division concentrates on the lower volume but higher profit "glamour" products suitable for gourmet food stores. After a detailed and realistic description of the company, important personnel, the industry, and the competition, readers are asked to assume the title of manager and actually run the division. Each chapter sets the scene for a specific managerial challenge - the selection of a distributor, staffing, organization, advertising, promotion - and the reader must choose from a number of possible "solutions". At the end of the "year", each solution is analyzed and the authors present a picture that takes into account how each solution meshed with corporate priorities, divisional needs, and personal career alternatives. Readers are awarded points for choosing solutions that do the most to advance the long-term strength of the company and their own position in it. Ardis Burst received her MBA from Harvard Business School after having served on its faculty as a researcher in organizational behaviour. Leonard A. Schlesinger is Executive Vice-President and Director of Au Bon Pain Co. Inc., a national retail food chain based in Boston, Massachusetts.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

As a means of teaching and testing management skills, Harvard Business School teachers Burst and Schlesinger here fictionalize a year in the life of a division president for a giant food conglomerate as he faces a series of problems. Each chapter presents a different challengechoosing the right advertising campaign, appraising the human factor at a small-town subsidiary that may have to be closed, selecting a submanager via modern (i.e., polygraph) screening methods, reacting to "creative" bookkeeping suggested from above and so forthwith various options offered in each case to which the reader is invited to respond. At the close is an analysis of each option's results in terms of the reader's skills, as well as the division's corporate profitability and the division president's own future prospects. A novel and intriguing study that makes a game of learning about business management.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 028399651X
• ISBN 13: 9780283996511
• Binding: Hardcover