How an engineer in a room full of business majors runs a car company
So last time I mentioned that I was taking a business strategy course to fulfill a requirement for my MBA. We simulated running a car company for 10 years, at a rate of one simulated year per physical week. The first week was a Mulligan and got rewound so we could get a feel for the simulator, and it doesn't appear in any of the charts below
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With regard to the second question, it's kind of a mixed bag. Certainly, we learned how to game the sim. There were things we did in the simulation that would never be effective in real life -- but, usually, we were aware of that when we were doing it.
The stock price calculator is driven primarily by annual net income, so it was mostly an exercise in maximizing sales while minimizing expenses. But, for example, you could move arbitrary amounts of manufacturing to Asia in one year at virtually no cost, so it was hard to justify retaining any manufacturing in the US, with its higher costs of production. There were fixed import/export tariffs, but they didn't really change the cost equation much. Ultimately we retained big truck and SUV production in the US so that we could say that we did in the report (psychographic reasons, etc.)
On the whole, I'd say it was among the more pleasant ways I've been forced to waste a semester. In my AI class in undergrad we had to write programs to play arbitrary Pitfall!-esque 2-d games (an n-by-n map with varying hazards and rewards, an exercise in game tree management) and we'd be tested by every week when the professor would run our code submissions against a new map he'd write over the weekend. I can say that this was about as useful as that.
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I think I must have gotten lucky in my AI classes, because I enjoyed most of them and felt like I learned a fair bit.
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