This post is an invitation for you to attend a free webinar presented by ACS’ Mark Chussil on behalf of the LinkedIn group “Corporate Planning & Global Industry Segmentation.”

The webinar will be on Tuesday, November 17, 2009, at 1:30 pm east-coast time, 10:30 am west-coast time. It will be one hour in duration. You can access video through a web link that you will receive 30 minutes before the webinar begins. (See “How to sign up,” below.) You can access audio by dialing a phone link that you’ll receive with the web link.

The topic is Winning: The How and Why of Business War Games.

Overview

Business war games sound cool. That’s because they are. Business war games are more than a way to escape the tedium of gigabyte spreadsheets and death by PowerPoint. They are a way to put your knowledge of your business to better use. With business war games strategists can achieve surprising new insights into businesses they know well. And by the way, business war games are not about war.

Agenda for our interactive presentation

• Why business war games work where conventional strategy development doesn’t.
• What business war games are good for.
• The essential elements of successful business war games.
• How to design or select a business war game for your company.
• What strategists have learned from business war games; in other words, war stories.
• Q&A

About the presenter

Mark Chussil is Founder and CEO of Advanced Competitive Strategies, Inc. and a pioneer in the field of business war-gaming and strategy simulation. He is also a Founder of Crisis Simulations International, LLC. Mark’s technologies have won a patent (for CSI’s DXMA™ crisis simulator) and an industry award (for ACS’ ValueWar™ strategy simulator). A highly rated, thought-provoking, and entertaining speaker, Mark has lectured and conducted hundreds of business war games on six continents. He has written two books, chapters for five others, and dozens of articles and essays. He earned his MBA at Harvard and his BA at Yale.

How to sign up

You can sign up in either of two ways: through ACS or directly through the LinkedIn group. Whichever you select, please sign up before November 17.

Signing up through ACS

Send an email to info@whatifyourstrategy.com saying that you want to participate in the webinar. ACS will inform the group moderator and email access information to you 30 minutes before the presentation begins.

Signing up directly through the LinkedIn group

• Register on LinkedIn if you don’t already have a profile.
• “Search Groups” for “Corporate Planning & Global Industry Segmentation.”
• Ask to join that group by clicking on “Join this group,” displayed at the right of the group description.
• After the group’s moderator sees and approves your request (usually the same day), visit the group and find Discussion “Special Presentation: Tuesday, Nov 17th.”
• Add a comment to say you will attend.
• On November 17 you will receive an email 30 minutes before the presentation with the call-in number and the URL for the webinar.

Please feel free to share this invitation with your colleagues.

We hope you’ll join the webinar!

This is an announcement for a business war game that ACS will present in Washington, DC, on September 30, 2009. It is in conjunction with the Greater DC chapter of SCIP, the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals.

Click here to register for the event. For location, cost, agenda, and contact information, please see the end of this announcement.

We all know we’re in an economic crisis, and we all know that no one knows what we should do. We all know that, difficult as it may be, we still have to make strategy decisions. And we all know that it is a time of opportunity as well as a time of danger.

It’s a perfect time for business war-gaming.

Imagine you are Alan Mulally, the CEO of Ford. Or you are the CEO of GM, Hyundai, Toyota, or Volkswagen. (Of course, business war-gaming is for companies in any competitive industry, not just automobiles.) How do you decide what to do? How do you know what will work? Will you be a hero, or will you fail miserably and publicly? How can your company tap the opportunity and avoid the danger?

Business war gaming helps you plan with greater confidence, generate consensus and action, and improve your chances of success. It helps you generate valuable surprise insights. It helps you think more clearly, anticipate second- and third-order effects, and see the true big picture. Business war games help strategists plan realistically, not optimistically.

Companies such as British Airways, GlaxoSmithKline, Shell, Weyerhauser and many more have worked with Advanced Competitive Strategies to run business war games and make much better strategy decisions.

ACS’ Mark Chussil, veteran of more than 100 business war games, will join us for an interactive, hands-on, half-day session. The highlight of the session will be our own business war game exercise. The automotive industry will be our use case, perhaps the most interesting industry to examine right now because of the perfect storm of long-term trends impacting all at once. Mark led the SCIP Oregon chapter through a similar exercise earlier this year, a program that received very positive reviews. We’re excited to bring Mark and this program to the Greater Washington chapter.

About the speaker

A highly rated, thought-provoking, and entertaining speaker, Mark lectures and consults around the world about strategic thinking, advanced business war games, and computer simulation. Mark is the Founder of ACS. He has received a patent and an industry award for his simulations. He has worked around the world with dozens of Fortune 500 companies on six continents, and he has published extensively about competitive strategy. Mark earned his MBA from Harvard and his BA from Yale.

Location, cost, agenda, and contact information

Northrop Grunman
NGIS Competitive Analysis
7575 Colshire Drive
Mailstop C4S2
McLean, VA  22101
Office # 4232S
(703) 713-4000

SCIP Members – $35.00
Non-Members - $45.00
Students - $25.00 (Non-SCIP Student member, please contact Robyn Reals)

Agenda
8:00AM – 9:00AM: Registration & Networking
9:00AM  11:30AM: Presentation 

Contact Information
Jeff Trexel, Greater Washington DC Chapter Chair, jeff.trexel@infoition.com,
703-556-0027
Robyn Reals, SCIP Education Manager, rreals@scip.org, 703-739-0696 x107

ACS announces an upcoming workshop about business war-gaming and a forthcoming article about a business war game for the automobile industry. We also invite strategists to participate in a free and fascinating pricing-strategy tournament.

Workshop
Desperate Competitors and New Rules: Using Business War Games to Compete Effectively During Turbulence. ACS will present this two-day workshop Kuala Lumpur (August 17-18, 2009). The workshop is sponsored by IBN. See below for more about the workshop.

Article
Honey, We Shrunk the Industry: An Automotive War Game. This article will appear in the July/August issue of Competitive Intelligence magazine, published by SCIP (the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals). It is based on an ACS blog essay of a similar name.

Pricing-Strategy Tournament
ACS is conducting research on pricing strategy using our Decision Tournament™ technology. We’re using the research in a book about decision tournaments. You can see how your pricing strategies compare to those from hundreds of other strategists! It’s free, fun, serious, fascinating, unique, and confidential. You will develop pricing strategy for businesses in three industries, and you will receive a report detailing the results and implications of your strategy. And if you’re the top pricer, you will be honored on our website! It may not be an Academy Award, but it’s not chopped liver either. Please write to info@whatifyourstrategy.com to enter.

The Desperate Competitors Workshop
How can you compete when everything is changing? How can you know where to commit your resources when the risks are so high? How can you choose new strategies when old strategies have failed and the future is uncertain?

Desperate Competitors and New Rules will challenge the ways you may have thought for a long time. That’s a good thing. What worked in the past may not work when the market is much different, and the companies that succeed in the future will be those who adapt quickly and effectively to that future.

The workshop is not about cheerleading, unsubstantiated magic, miracle strategies, or brow-beating. It is not about uncovering obscure factoids or improving the bottom line by 0.0371 percent. It is not a lecture.

The workshop is not about the past. It is about the future.

Desperate Competitors is about questioning, competing, strategy, and thinking. It is about improving strategists’ skills, applicable every day and starting right away. It is highly interactive, with case studies, lively exercises, simulations, and actual war games. It is designed for people ready to compete effectively by thinking differently.

For more information about the workshop, please write to info@whatifyourstrategy.com.

Patent
Designed by Mark Chussil and implemented by Noam Ben-Ami, Crisis Simulations International’s DXMA™ was recently awarded United States patent number 7,536,287. Mark is a Founder of CSI as well as being Founder and CEO of ACS.

Conference
Mark will speak at the Pricing $trategies at Retail conference, sponsored by the Institute for International Research, on Tuesday, July 14, in Chicago. He will present ACS’ popular Top Pricer Tournament™, in which the conference attendees will compete to see who can develop the most-effective pricing strategy in three different industries. If you would like to join hundreds of executives from around the world by entering the tournament — it’s free, easy, and completely confidential — please write to info@whatifyourstrategy.com. You won’t have to wait for the conference to get your results.

For a 20% discount on the conference, mention code SPKRM2106MC when you contact IIR to sign up.

Here’s what the conference brochure says about the Tournament:

“All bets are off and muted panic rules the land during the current crisis. Hoping to maintain sales volume, companies race to the bottom on prices, not knowing where the bottom is. Hoping to maintain margins, other companies take a deep breath and hold their prices, not knowing what their competitors will do. How can you raise the odds of making good pricing decisions in bad economic times?

“[In the Top Pricer Tournament] You will make pricing decisions that we will simulate against your competitors – the other attendees at the conference – to see how well your strategies perform. You will see a powerful new technology to help pricing strategists develop excellent pricing strategies. You will get a startling new perspective on successful pricing and learn how better to achieve pricing excellence.”

You can read more about the tournament in When I Was Wrong and Millions of Pricing Simulations.

Public Business War Game
ACS will facilitate a public business war game centered on the automobile industry on June 9, 2009, in Portland, Oregon. It’s sponsored by the Oregon chapter of SCIP (the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals), and you are invited. Here is program and registration information.

Recommended Book
How do smart strategists choose bad strategies? That’s ACS’ business. How do good people do bad things? That’s Stanford Professor Emeritus Philip Zimbardo’s business. Prof. Zimbardo has written a stunning, powerful, and intense book, The Lucifer Effect, based on his famous Stanford Prison Experiment. You can read about it at http://lucifereffect.org/. We’re citing it here not because it’s linked to ACS’ usual material. We’re citing it here because it’s fascinating and important.

ACS is proud to facilitate a joint meeting of the Oregon and Seattle/Puget Sound chapters of SCIP (the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals). Open to anyone (see registration information below), this is an intensive half-day program where you participate in a business war game on the automobile industry.

Of course we don’t expect to solve all the industry’s problems in half a day. We do, however, expect to give you a hands-on taste of business war gaming and show how you can generate competition-beating surprises for your business.

Program Description
What would you do if you were the GM CEO? Or Alan Mulally of Ford, Akio Toyoda of Toyota, Tom Purves of BMW, Robert Cosmei of Hyundai, or another industry leader? And not only what would you do, but how well would your strategies work?  Here’s your chance to find out. What’s more, here’s your chance to learn how to stress-test your strategies and anticipate your competitors with business war gaming. You might even have some fun while you’re at it. Not to mention the cool Top Strategist bragging rights, complete with official certificate and web-wide recognition, you and your team will secure if you win the war.

War games and simulations almost always lead to surprises. Why? Not because they have more decimal points or curvier demand curves. Rather, because they help us think better. They help us take competitors into account realistically, not optimistically. They help us focus on cause and effect. They help us think things through and see the big picture. They help us learn to think strategically.

And while there are no sure things in life, business war games tilt the odds in your favor. That’s what happened for companies like British Airways, GlaxoSmithKline, Shell, Weyerhaeuser, and a couple dozen more around the world, when they worked with Advanced Competitive Strategies. You’ll get a taste of what they discovered in this special, hands-on, half-day session facilitated by Mark Chussil, ACS’ Founder and CEO, a veteran of 100 business war games and a frequent writer and speaker about business war-gaming.

Speaker: Mark Chussil
A highly rated, thought-provoking, and entertaining speaker, Mark lectures and consults around the world about strategic thinking, advanced business war games, and computer simulation. Mark has worked with ACS clients around the world, including Astra Merck, AT&T, British Airways, DuPont, GlaxoSmithKline, Intel, Kodak, Methanex, Nortel, Novartis, Petronas, Sanofi Pasteur, Shell, Sprint, Weyerhaeuser, and others.  Mark earned his MBA from Harvard University and his BA from Yale University.

Location, date, and time. Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Noon – 4:00 pm, followed by a no-host networking event 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm at Jake’s Grill. 611 SW 10th Avenue, Portland, OR 97205. Phone: 503.220.1850.

Registration. SCIP Members – $35.00. Non-Members – $45.00. Lunch is included. Groups of 3-7 people can participate in the business war game as a team.

You can register on-site or by clicking this link: http://www.scip.org/Training/EventsDetail.cfm?itemnumber=7156.

Please contact us (see below) if you plan to register on-site so we can make sure we have a large-enough room.

Registration via the web will close Monday, June 8, 2009.  Cancellations not received in writing by Tuesday, June 2, 2009, will not be refunded.

Contact information
Sean Campbell, Oregon Chapter Chair:sean@cascadeinsights.com, 503.631.7552.
Deborah Trainor, Puget Sound, Washington Chapter Chair: Deborah.trainor@gmail.com, 425-830-0565.
Robyn Reals, SCIP Education Manager: rreals@scip.org, 703.739.0696 x107.

It’s a wide-ranging discussion. You’ll find questions and answers about:

• The difference between business war games and strategy simulations.
• How business war games are the strategy equivalent of clinical trials, flight simulators, and sparring partners.
• The role of business war games and strategy simulations in higher-level strategy.
• How decision tournaments™ can address problems too massive to tackle conventionally.
• How the willingness to be wrong leads to deeper learning about strategy (and strategists).
• Why companies need business war games and why their answers aren’t obvious.
• What strategists and educators should look for as they explore business-simulation options.

Denis writes frequently and insightfully on his blog Experiential eLearning.

“The more feted by the media, the worse a pundit’s accuracy.” So reports Sharon Begley in Newsweek. Her article “Why Pundits Get Things Wrong” is a must-read for anyone placing big bets or assessing predictions. (Update: see also Joel Lovell on “What Do They Know?“, from the Washington Post.) She covers confidence, dismissing opposing views, knowing “one big thing,” sound bites and swagger, and the cognitive styles of foxes and hedgehogs.

Why, then, does our world make punditry a viable occupation? We might infer from Ms. Begley’s article that we humans (or at least media moguls) are apparently more attracted to punditry’s sound bites and swagger than we are repulsed by its negative track records. I’m not saying that pundits try to be wrong and I’m not saying that pundits don’t care if they are wrong; on the contrary, I believe that they believe what they say and I believe that they want to be right. Nonetheless, I find the data Ms. Begley cited about fame versus accuracy and hedgehogs versus foxes more compelling than pundits’ confidence.

(Tangential questions: Are pundits causes or effects? Does anyone consider himself or herself a pundit? Am I following a self-defeating strategy by seeking fame through the world’s foxiest blog about business strategy and strategic thinking?)

So if we shouldn’t trust those who have (merely) achieved fame, how should we decide whom to trust? Fame may not be a prerequisite, but it doesn’t follow that obscurity is. Let us note that we don’t even trust positive track records. For example, I might tell you that I’ve perfectly predicted the movements of the Dow, awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the career of Rafael Nadal. I won’t tell you that, partly because it’s not true and partly because I hadn’t heard of Rafael Nadal before I researched this blog post. (Do not consult me for sports predictions.) But just imagine, for blog post’s sake.

Most of us care about the why behind the track records before most of us will trust future predictions. If I emphasize my sterling credentials and innovative technologies, you might be inclined to believe my astounding track record. If I reveal that I base my predictions on the number of nuggets in each family-sized box of Post Grape-Nuts, you will walk away. Most of you, that is. Some will race out and buy Grape-Nuts and try to break my code, while pundits at Post scramble to explain why they knew all along that sales would rise.

So, deciding where to place our trust is not only a matter of the person making the predictions. It is also a matter of where those predictions come from. And as I’ve mentioned numerous times on these e-pages, track records alone aren’t enough. See, for instance, It’s Working! and The Good, the Bad, and the Lucky.

Speaking of track records, the Wall Street Journal reports that the Obama administration proposes to stress-test banks to ensure they can withstand a “dark economic scenario.” As veterans of business war games and decision tournaments, both of which stress-test competitive strategies, we at ACS have seen the positive effects of such efforts in numerous industries, and I believe the Administration’s move will help the banks help themselves. Moreover, requiring that most large banks can withstand such a stress-test will make it harder for banks to outperform competitors by taking on excessive risk, thereby leveling the playing field and avoiding future replays of the risk-race that contributed to the present crisis.

Of note: “Investing Experts Urge ‘Do as I Say, Not as I Do’” in the Wall Street Journal of January 3, 2009, which talks of how even Nobel winners find it difficult to follow their own advice. A conclusion we may draw: it is critical in all matters, including and perhaps especially competitive strategy of all kinds, to take into account how we humans actually behave, not how we or “they” should behave.

Of note: “Why We Keep Falling for Financial Scams” in the WSJ of the same date. Intriguing article about gullibility and how smart people fall can make bad decisions. The concept of a “feedback loop theory of investor bubbles” (by Yale economist Robert Shiller) in scams and other investment crazes is powerful. (See also It’s Working!)

Of note: “The Doomsayers Who Got It Right,” the WSJ, January 2, 2009. A somewhat alarming article because it implies that we ought to listen to the doomsayers who “got it right,” which is alarming because they are saying more doom. (Note the possible feedback loop theory of investor anti-bubbles.) I don’t know if the doomsayers are right or wrong; it’s largely and perhaps entirely unknowable.

In any case, what we want is not to find a person who said something that came true and then listen to what that person says for the future. Unfortunately, and with absolutely zero disrespect intended, we don’t know whether a person is right because of luck or because of perspicacity, especially because those who got it right use different methods and rationales. Remember too that the people who predicted incorrectly were as smart, articulate, persuasive, and renowned as those who got it right. And timing is important. One of the predictors in the WSJ article made his calls eight years in advance. Acting on his calls at the time he made them would have meant missing out on seven years of stock-market advances.

Rather, what we really want is to find a theory (in the sense of a model or system, not in the sense of an idea) that repeatedly, not anecdotally, predicts future events well. That’s how it works in science, where the scientific method is designed to foster testing, evaluating, and enhancing models, not people. I am not saying it’s easy. I am saying it is possible and it doesn’t have to be perfect to make an improvement.

“Thousands of Indians in Mumbai angrily called for answers from a government they say failed to protect the public.” See our articles about crisis preparedness “We Are Fully Prepared”; or, Why Plans Fail and Who Would You Follow?, and our essay Feeling Is Believing.

“Bill Gates urged the government to maintain investment in foreign aid and education despite the financial crisis.” “Lufthansa’s supervisory board approved a plan to buy ailing Austrian Airlines.” When the going gets tough, the tough keep thinking. See our essay A Dark and Stormy Night.

“The United Auto Workers offered concessions to the Big Three a day before their CEOs are to visit Congress.” How can we know whether to bail out the auto industry? See our essays To Bail or to Bail Out, The Good, the Bad, and the Lucky, and Suffering Was Optional.

And as we think about what will become tomorrow’s news, we humbly remember our experience in When I Was Wrong.

Visit our website and sign up for our blog for ongoing, insightful thinking about the news before it happens. The news, that is.

ACS CEO Mark Chussil will deliver a two-day workshop on business war-gaming in Kuala Lumpur on February 11-12, 2009. It will be stimulating and provocative and it will include hands-on strategy simulation; we only said “drab” in the title for comic effect. For more information, please write to info@whatifyourstrategy.com.