Ordinary thinking leads to ordinary decisions and produces ordinary results.
Great thinking leads to great decisions and produces great results.
The highest-leverage investment you can make is in the quality of your company’s thinking. That’s what ACS workshops help you achieve.
We offer a variety of provocative, interactive, downright entertaining programs for executive education and management development. Adjustable to fit time slots from an hour to a day, customizable for your audience and situation, these programs open eyes, challenge brains, enhance skills, and build teams.
See these sections below:
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Brain Food: How to Get Out of the Box, Think Strategically, and Amaze Your Friends. Ideal for general business audiences and non-specialists.
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Strategy Gone Tame: Why Smart Strategists Choose Bad Strategies. Ideal for strategists, decision-makers, and advanced audiences.
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Winning: A Hands-On, Live-Fire Introduction to Business War Games. Ideal for strategists, decision-makers, and internal subject-matter experts.
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Customization and capabilities. How we can customize your workshop.
ACS workshops are not death by PowerPoint or the same old, same old. They’re highly interactive. They include case studies, lively exercises, and the same simulation technologies we use to conduct advanced business war games for Fortune 500 companies. And they’re fun! That’s why participants give our workshops superb ratings. See Praise for ACS Workshops, below.
ACS workshops work. They work because they are so engaging, and because they build on our long and successful experience with thousands of managers around the world. ACS techniques have helped companies make or save billions of dollars.
Of course, ACS workshops are non-commercial.
For a brochure in PDF format about ACS’ How to Think Better workshops, please write to info@whatifyourstrategy.com.
Brain Food: How to Get Out of the Box, Think Strategically, and Amaze Your Friends
Ideal for general business audiences and non-specialists. Brain Food works for people with little business experience while still being challenging for those who have been around for a while. It’s a great way to build a common culture of strategic thinking.
Brain Food is not about cheerleading, unsubstantiated magic, miracle-diet strategies, brow-beating, or some mysterious secret that can only now be revealed. It is not about uncovering an obscure factoid or prescribing a one-size-fits-all strategy. It is not about improving the bottom line by 0.0371 percent. It is not a lecture.
Brain Food is about improving strategic-thinking skills, applicable every day and starting right away. It combines competitive dynamics, deep experience, psychological research, world-class simulation technology, and learning-by-doing.
In this workshop:
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You will see, and experience, how common errors in thinking lead to, shall we say, unintended consequences.
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You will learn about the competitive-strategy equivalent of financial fundamentals.
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You will combine your expertise and imagination with techniques such as competitive role-playing to gain surprising new insight into businesses you thought you knew well.
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You will leave this thought-provoking, action-packed workshop energized with powerful new perspectives on the decisions you make.
Strategy Gone Tame: Why Smart Strategists Choose Bad Strategies
Ideal for strategists, decision-makers, and advanced audiences. Strategy Gone Tame takes a rigorous, provocative look at competitive strategy and business success. It helps those in senior positions challenge conventional wisdom and make much better strategy decisions.
People trigger crises and price wars; people buy high and then can’t sell low; people due-diligence strategies only to watch a competitor swoop in from left field. Glorious companies suffer, shrivel, and die. Surely that’s not what their strategies called for.
In Strategy Gone Tame you’ll see how human biases and flawed tools lead smart, dedicated strategists to make strategy mistakes. You’ll see why companies can get better results by upgrading their thinking than by upbraiding their personnel.
We cover topics including these:
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How the conventional tools you’ve seen many times can cause, rather than cure, bad strategy decisions.
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Garbage-out does not result only from garbage-in. See how precision-in can do the same thing.
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Why do upstarts beat incumbents? How well do we predict competitors? How do we fall into groupthink, and how can we prevent it?
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Business war games and strategy simulations produce actionable surprises. If we know our businesses so well, why does that happen? And what do those actionable surprises look like? You’ll see, because you’ll experience them.
Winning: A Hands-On, Live-Fire Introduction to Business War Games
Ideal for strategists, decision-makers, and internal subject-matter experts. Winning immerses participants in an actual business war game. It teaches the technology of war-gaming and brings your competitive-strategy skills to a new level.
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.
In Winning you will participate in an actual business war game. You will be a strategist for a company in the automobile or hotel industry (or perhaps your own industry), and with your teammates you will do your best to win. Oh, there’s one complication: other participants will strategize for your competitors, and they’ll do their best to win too.
In this workshop you will learn:
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Why business war games work where conventional strategy development doesn’t.
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What business war games are good for.
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The essential elements of successful business war games.
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How to design or select a business war game for your company.
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What strategists — including you — have learned from business war games.
Customization and Capabilities: Making Your Workshop Yours
We have a great deal of flexibility to make your workshop fit your needs.
Audiences
We have delivered workshops on six continents to audiences from 10 to 600 people. Audiences from a single company or from many. Audiences of senior executives, middle management, or business-school students. Audiences speaking English, audiences needing simultaneous translation.
Length
Our workshops can be adjusted to fit time slots from an hour to a day. That means you can use a workshop as an energetic, provocative event in a company meeting; you can insert a workshop in a management-development program at a corporate university; you can make a workshop the in-depth, out-of-the-box focus for your department.
Aim the spotlight
Getting out of the box. Competitors. Customers. Pricing. Consensus and team-building. Conventional wisdom. Decision-making. What-if scenarios. Etc. In your workshop we can aim the spotlight on those or other top-priority objectives.
Tailored to your industry
We can customize a workshop simulation, including a war game, for your industry. We can make that customization merely have the “look and feel” of your industry or we can even calibrate a war game so that the workshop tackles a real problem you face.
The Top Pricer Tournament
ACS has developed groundbreaking Strategy Decision Test™ technology (patent pending) that we use in a contest called the Top Pricer Tournament. You and your colleagues can test your pricing-strategy skills against hundreds of other strategists. Are you the Top Pricer? Besides being fun, the tournament sets the stage for fascinating discussion about how to think better about competition, pricing, luck, and achieving success.
Praise for ACS Workshops
ACS workshops get superb ratings, typically 4.5 or above on a 1-5 scale.
“Mark Chussil conducted a workshop on the strategic planning process at our company in April 2010. The workshop was designed to get participants to realize inherent human biases that have a deep impact on the outcome of strategic planning. Mark used numerous examples and engaged the participants in role-playing. Feedback from my team members was excellent. I recommend Mark’s workshop to anyone interested in improving a strategic planning process.”
Cyrille Michel, Senior Vice President, Blount, Inc.
“The war game designed and facilitated by ACS delivered two game-changing results. First, we were able to arrive at a decision on a very tricky and challenging subject where such a decision had eluded us for months. Second, we created a new cross-functional internal experience that is so groundbreaking that it has unleashed new energies in our team.”
C-level executive, multi-billion-dollar global company (names withheld by request for competitive reasons)
“This entertaining and thought-provoking workshop will change your strategic thinking in ways you will never expect.”
Bruce Hamilton, Director, Navigant Consulting
“Mark took a unique approach that really grabbed my attention. In addition to enlightening lectures, he made effective use of small group exercises that energized and focused our management group in ways I’ve never seen before. After just one day we made tangible progress planning a new direction for our company. It was a refreshing ‘outside the box’ experience!”
Marketing executive, non-profit organization
“One of the best, most informative workshops I have attended.”
Strategist, manufacturing company
Recent ACS workshops
- Upcoming on October 16, 2010: Why Strategies Fail (P.S. We Expected Them to Win). The Advanced Bizology conference, Portland, Oregon.
- Going Beyond Strategy As We’ve Known It. Multiple locations.
- Marvelous Techniques: A Workshop on What Ails Competitive Strategy. The Harvard Business School Association of Oregon.
- Numbers Gone Wild: Or, Precision In, Garbage Out. Washington, DC; workshop for the SCIP 2010 Annual Conference). See Numbers Gone Wild (the essay) for related commentary.
- A Perfect Time for Business War-Gaming (focused on the automobile industry). Washington, DC. See Honey, We Shrunk the Industry Again for a write-up of this event.
- Business War Gaming: How to Stress-Test Your Options Before You Commit. Kuala Lumpur.
- Surprise! How Business War Games Shock Strategists into Beating the Competition (focused on the automobile industry). Portland, Oregon. See Honey, We Shrunk the Industry for a write-up of this event.
- Too Bad You’re Human: Why Smart Pricers Start Price Wars, and Other Unfortunate Inclinations. Chicago.
- Pricing Excellence: How to Know It When You See It (And How to Get It). Chicago.
- Too Bad You’re Human, And How To Create Great Strategies Anyway. Portland, Oregon.
- Competitive Intelligence and Business War-Gaming. Kuala Lumpur.
- Too Bad You’re Human: Why Smart Strategists Choose Bad Strategies. Istanbul.
- Does Your Strategy Hurt When I Do This? Curing Strategies with Business War Games. Istanbul.
- Business War Gaming: Battling Rivals with Business and Competitive Intelligence. Dubai.
- I Thought You Started It! Price Wars, Business War Games, and Strategy. Miami.