In my last post I talked about some of the lessons I learned from my strategy simulation class. Luckily I was able to take the class again this semester with a couple of my class mates and had another really great experience. As part of the class we have to do a brief presentation on the results of the simulation and I thought it would be neat to share it online.

Having used, and been unimpressed by, some online presentation tools in the past I decided to try something new. Having recently learnt about SlideRocket I figured that importing my presentation into SlideRocket would be a good way to put the application through its paces.

As you can see the results are quite good. The free version was easy to sign up to and the import process handled the animations and transitions in the original PowerPoint pretty well. There were some minor fidelity issues, but nothing that couldn’t be sorted within a couple of minutes editing. All told I was able to sign up, take the interactive tour, import and tweak the presentation in under ten minutes. I was pretty impressed.

In addition to standard presentation tools SlideRocket offers some interesting looking analytical features in the professional version such as who is looking at your slides and how long people are spending on each slide. One question I couldn’t find answered in my brief excursion on the site though is how well such analytical data can be shared with other analysis tools for further investigation.

Update: According to SlideRocket you can export your analytics as CSV files:

@BenMeadowcroft you can export analytics from SlideRocket as CSV files and then do with them what you like. 🙂

— SlideRocket (@SlideRocket) February 17, 2012

During my MBA I have taken several classes on strategy, one of my most enjoyable was the strategic simulation course. Teams are pitted against each other in a simulated world and are judged on how well they perform in a particular industry. Two of the key things I took from the Fall 2011 class were:

1. Focus on the strategy not just on the financials.
2. Depend on operational excellence

Focus on the Strategy

One of our failings was that when our strategy was going well we were tempted to deviate from our strategy in an effort to capitalize on the strength we had built up in the market. For example at one point with our low cost base we were operating profitably in one market without competition who could undercut us without them losing money. We took advantage of this to drive out competitors. We then decided to raise prices substantially only for a new competitor entered the market and undercut us. We came back into the market with aggressive, but profitable, prices and won back our market share. Later in the game this competitor responded by lowering their prices below cost in an effort to damage us financially. If we had not seceded this market by raising our prices and instead stuck with our strategy I think it would have made the market less attractive to others and prevented some of the aggressive moves that occurred.

Operational Excellence

One of the keys of our strategy in the game was to invest in quality and operational efficiency. We tried to lead the industry on capacity and so we could leverage our fixed costs and cumulative quality investments over a larger number of products, thus lowering our variable costs per item and keeping a low cost base. Ensuring our operational decisions were always aligned with our strategy allowed us to be really efficient and operate at levels other companies couldn’t approach cost wise.