How to Win Glo-Bus

Camera and Drone Journal

• The highest overall game Game-To-Date score win

       Highest Overall game Game-To-Date Score =

       +Highest GTD Wgt. Avg. EPS

       +Highest GTD Wgt. Avg. ROE

       +FINAL ROUND ONLY Credit Rating

       +FINAL ROUND ONLY Stock Price

       +FINAL THREE ROUNDS ONLY Image Rating

• Patrick Law's Championship Guidance: If you are moderately smart, you will realize that beginning game scores are irrelevant.  If you are emotionally tough and moderately smart, you can use this to your advantage.

Forecasting

• CEO enters the Industry Average Competitive Assumptions on the Camera and Drone Marketing Pages, red numbers only)

• Save.

Product Design Page

• Set the number of models (high PQ, low models; low PQ, high models).

• Set the R&D to zero.

• Set the PQ to the PQ Guess using the combination of camera and drone components and features.

• Find the combination of camera and drone options that gives you the lowest Total Camera/Drone Cost (per unit) for the PQ guess.

• Patrick Law’s (Globus Champion) Recommendations: There are no magical numbers for winning. This is because the Glo-bus computer formulas and the Glo-bus competition is different every time. There are, however, magical algorithms. These are algorithms for determining what your customers and employees really want as opposed to you forcing on them something that you think they want.  Listen to your customer, not the competition and not your professor and not some rando on the internet!

Marketing Pages Profit Maximizing Quantity

• Test out where the profit maximizing quantity is by looking for the EPS plateau as you change price.

Marketing Pages

• Step 1: Find the Profit Maximizing Quantity (aka Profit Maximizing Market Share)

• Step 2: Find the combination of price and marketing that gives the highest operating profit margin per region at the Profit Maximizing Market Share.

• Patrick Law's Championship Guidance: Ignore the competition, listen to your customer.

Marketing Pages

• Step 1: Find the Profit Maximizing Quantity (aka Profit Maximizing Market Share)

• Step 2: Find the combination of price and marketing that gives the highest operating profit margin per region at the Profit Maximizing Market Share.

• Patrick Law's Championship Guidance: Ignore the competition, listen to your customer.

Compensation

• Base wage between -3% and +3% to make sure your workers don't revolt.

• All other compensation decisions chosen independently of each other to maximize EPS.

• If two choices are equivalent EPS, you might as well pay your workers more so they will add to Capacity.

• The industry average is useless information.

Facility

• Set the number of installed workstations so that the Capacity without overtime (o/t) is equal to the Demand.

Robotics

• Do robotics if it saves you money in the game overall.

• Do not do Robotics if it increases your costs.

• A temporary boost in EPS is not a cost-saving, it is accounting shenanigans.

• Patrick Law's Championship Guidance: If available, I usually implement Robotics when the Net Annual Cost Impact is -1000 or more negative.

Specialty Contracts

• Set the discount offer such that your value index is several points higher than the next highest competitor.

• Patrick Law’s (Globus Champion) Recommendations: The first round this is available, use 40% to prevent other teams from getting it (note that you cannot hurt yourself with Specialty Contracts). Later rounds, I use a heuristic of 10 value points higher than the next highest competitor.

Set the R&D

• (During the first half of the game) Increase your R&D until you reach the target Minimum EPS chosen by your CEO.

• (During the second half of the game) Zero R&D

• Review all inputs again, on every page after increasing your R&D because they have changed slightly, especially the Finance and Cash Flow Page.

Check: quickly go back through all the previous screens to make sure you did not leave anything out. What you are looking for is something for nothing (e.g., an improvement in market share or EPS without a decrease in the other). Generally, move each decision up and down a bit to make sure you did not make mistakes. However, in doing this, you must not change the market share away from the target market share minimum chosen by the CEO otherwise you will not be able to compare with the other teams or against a different PQ.

Adaline: A note from my Dad (Patrick):

"I have seen countless people play this game in all kinds of ways, but the most frequent failure most often comes from poor group dynamics.  Glo-bus is a tricky game because it requires players to think long term.  But a group dynamic of reductionist decision making, where each person takes one page each, can never achieve this.  This is what the late Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen described as "the innovator's dilemma."  Instead of group decision making in long drawn-out meetings or division of labour where each person specializes in one page each (the absolute worst way to organize yourselves), I suggest the following friendly competition between group members to compete for who can create the best build.

But to do this, you first need to set some targets (Step 1) and something to measure to determine who wins (Step 2):

Step 1: Define the group's targets/boundaries.  Decide on a CEO for the year who will set the following boundaries.

• i. Minimum Projected EPS (Projected Performance box)

• ii. Minimum Image (Projected Performance box)

• iii. Maximum and Minimum Debt/Equity Ratio (Finance and Cash Flow Page)

• iv. Minimum Current Ratio (Finance and Cash Flow Page)

• v. Minimum Market Share % per Area (Camera and Drone Marketing Pages)

• vi. Minimum R&D (Product Design Page)

Step 2: EVERYONE in the group, competes for the best True EPS as long as it meets or exceeds all of the step 1 targets/boundaries:

True EPS = Projected EPS + (Total R&D spending for the round / Shares Outstanding)

I promise you, if you stick to this group dynamic, everyone in the group will win because when one of you wins, all of you win."

Competitive Intelligence Report

• Review the difference between the industry average and what you provide.

• Exploit opportunities when your competition clusters around one value (e.g., everyone is in a PQ range of 4.0-4.5 means that there may be some advantage to being a leader here).  TEST out your theories using the Build To Win procedure above.  It is a good theory if it tests out.