There are many ways the instructor can insert a business game within a course. Accordingly there can be a great number of different types of syllabi depending on each instructor's instructional needs, teaching philosophy and personality. Rather than creating a sample set of syllabi a set of guidelines has been prepared that should help you make the best of The Global Business Game in your program.

One of the major learning sources associated with the experiential approach is the team itself. Thus the method you use to put players on their teams is very important. There are many ways players can be assigned to teams. The major ways this can be done has been summarized for you along with each method's advantages and disadvantages.

You will find in the Download presented below a reference to the Team Formation Exercise. If you elect to have your players choose their own company partners, this is in-class activity that will help them make more-informed decisions about those they choose to have as teammates.

A large number of PowerPoint materials and presentations have been created for your use. You can use them for your own lecture presentations as they currently stand or you can edit them to match how you have configured The Global Business Game. You might also allow your players to have them for either their own use as Tutorials or as handouts that can be followed along with during your in-class presentations.

You will have many opportunities to advise your players on various questions as the management teams play The Global Business Game. When the occasion arises you might like to drive home a particular point or lesson or suggest an analytical technique that would be especially appropriate. A number of Teaching Tips have been created for you within the game's various Help topics. The tips themselves have been summarized in Help's Teaching Tips.

Each company in The Global Business Game must perform a large amount of number crunching to understand what it is doing. This work can be done by hand but it goes much quicker and produces more accurate results when spreadsheets are used. The aids themselves are no better than the quality of the thinking and input made by the user but whatever is calculated is calculated faster and more accurately. You may use the following as examples of the types of spreadsheets that can be created, or ones that can be either customized or improved upon by your company teams.

Your students will have to deal with both social and task issues within their management teams to achieve optimal learning results and company profits. A number of team-building and goal-setting exercises are available for you and your students' use. These exercises, which are experiential in nature, can be conducted as part of class time or as individual team homework assignments. If you use them in class each exercise requires a degree of off-site preparation and you should set aside class time so that each exercise can be conducted and debriefed.

No matter how hard you try to help your students prepare themselves for the GBG experience, it is possible they will make mistakes. Some mistakes are errors of omission, others will be errors of judgment, and others will be errors of commission. In other cases a firm, or a group of firms, may collude or otherwise engage in an action that would be at least unethical and perhaps illegal under most statutes. Should either mistakes be made, or unethical behavior occurs, once a decision round has been processed the GBG cannot be turned back to correct a "bad" decision. There are, however, a number of devices that you can use to ameliorate the affects of such problems or to make appropriate adjustments.

After all is said and done your players will want to know how well they did. Your evaluation of their performance can have two major thrusts. One is purely quantitative and can use the multidimensional economic results reported in The Global Industry Report. The game’s economic results also yield an overall Performance Index based on weights assigned during the game design process. You might also want to use other empirically derived and financial predictive measures such as the Altman-Z and the Tobin q. The other thrust gets at the qualitative or subjective side of the gaming experience. This will provide you with a more holistic grasp of what your players did and what they may have learned.

Based on our experience with The Global Business Game we have provided you with a summary of the various evaluation methods you might use. You can also download an Excel-based workbook calculates any company's Altman-Z bankruptcy measure or the Tobin q investment attractiveness index.

A debriefing session can do much to bring closure to the business game. It gives you a chance to draw on each participant's experiences so they can generate conclusions about what they learned about strategic management, group decision making, and themselves as managers of their own learning and the learning of others. A debriefing can also put into relief what experiences were common to all teams and which ones were unique.

When any of your gaming sessions end you can add a nice touch and a bit of fun to the game's closing debriefing session in the form of awards and prizes. These certificates of recognition need not be expensive but instead should be lighthearted in nature.

You will find below the types of awards that could be used.