The @Corp Case: Enhancing co-operation among managers of different business units

摘要

The @Corp case study concerns a high-technology manufacturing company. It is based on qualitative and quantitative data collected through interviews and written reports. In this paper, we discuss some of misperceptions shared by the strategic business unit (SBU) management. The SBU managers claimed to know various components of the structure interrelating the information, money, raw materials, workforce, and machinery of their SBUs to the extent that they felt confident in their policy design and could identify the structural causes of unfavorable systems behavior. Yet, the whole company did not perform to expectations. Several important business insights were captured in the system dynamics model and emphasized in the @Corp ILE. The interaction with @Corp ILE is intended to increase the managers' understanding of how individual SBU policies impact the overall performance of the whole business system. In this paper we discuss several advanced learning principles used in the ILE and propose a learning strategy to facilitate management learning.