PIM’s Enhanced Strategic Application of EDPs: ACSM through Glo-Bus Simulation

The Postgraduate Institute of Management (PIM), as the nation’s management mentor, has been in the forefront in breeding thought leaders with character and competence. The Institute’s Executive Development Programmes (EDPs) grown and developed specially during the last decade are of a high calibre, unmatched in both content and conduct. They are specifically tailor-made to cater to current industry requirements. They, in fact, provide the desired vital link in reaching the private/public community. 

These strengthen one of the PIM’s key pillars of the edifice of excellence, namely, partnerships. The aim of EDPs is to help improve organisational management application, systems and practices by providing relevant training and development to the executives of different sectors operating at different levels in the organisational hierarchy.

Advanced Course in Strategic Management (ACSM) is an advanced version of EDPs. While serving to a larger business community through continuous capacity building initiatives, PIM steered to launch the advanced version of EDPs in 2018. The ACSM, through Glo-Bus Simulation for senior managers, offers a three-pronged text-case-simulation course model which gives managers a significantly more learning on application of key concepts of strategic management. 

Participants will be exposed to various challenges in implementing and executing strategy in an organisation. In short, this is implementing and executing strategy in a near-perfect virtual setting. A key feature of this course work is a simulation where participants will be running a company by participating in a digital camera industry. Managers are to run the company in an industry where there is 8-10% growth annually. 

They would have the task of growing the company earnings per share (EPS) and stock price at least 8% annually; maintaining a return on equity investment (ROE) of 15% or more annually; and further, maintaining a B+ or higher credit rating; and achieving an ‘image rating’ of 70 or more. 

Key Features of the Program are (a) limited to 3-4 months course work; (b) extended decision rounds to go up to 14 years; (c) 5-7 full days workshops at the PIM; (d) additional online delivery with more engagement of managers in analysing cases, online quizzes through a Prajna (Moodle) platform; (e) three weeks of preparation online. The revised program will be delivered through regular lectures, class discussion (30%) on cases (10%), simulation (60%) spread over 12-14 weeks.

Company co-managers exercise control over production costs based on the designs and components they specify for their products, work force compensation and training, the length of warranties offered, the amount spent for technical support provided to buyers of the company’s products, and their management of the assembly process. 

Company co-managers make 44 types of decisions each period, ranging from R&D components, and product performance (10 decisions) to production operations and worker compensation (15 decisions) to pricing and marketing (15 decisions) to the financing of company operations (4 decisions).

This new initiative paves the way to achieve several key objectives; a) Develop knowledge and skills needed to conduct strategic analysis in a variety of industries and competitive situations and, specially, to provide a stronger understanding of the competitive challenges of a global market environment; b) Gain hands-on experience in crafting business strategy, reasoning carefully about strategic options, using what-if analysis to evaluate action alternatives, and making sound strategic decisions; c) Enhance managers’ capacity to think strategically about the company, its present business position, its long-term direction, its resources and competitive capabilities, the calibre of its strategy, and its opportunities for gaining sustainable competitive advantage; and d) Acquaint with the managerial tasks associated with implementing and executing company strategies, drill a participant in the range of actions managers can take to promote competent strategy execution, and give the participant some confidence in being able to function effectively as part of a company’s strategy-implementing team.

PIM produces accountable results in the area of learning-goal-directed approach. It is evident that there is an increasing demand for executing, and consolidating the pragmatic EDPs established by PIM for partnering organisations. It shows that training related success is positively generating results which are truly value creating investments for companies. 

A continuous learning engagement platform in EDPs reflected a positive relationship with learning effectiveness by exposing participants to company specific challenges, knowledge and diverse job assignments/projects. Learning and development should, for sure, be objective-focused and result-oriented. 

Thus, organisations have to ensure that a learning road map is made available to participants in both the acquisition and application of competencies to make the EDP provided to employees accountable. Therefore, the new initiative as well as the on-going EDPs fortifies the fact that the PIM has gone the extra mile, through its experiential learning and managerial acumen to produce accountable results in the area of learning-goal-directed-approach.