Business Dynamics

Why do so many business strategies fail? Why do some firms grow while others stagnate? How do once-dominant firms lose their competitive edge? Accelerating economic, technological, social, and environmental change challenge

managers to learn at increasing rates. As managers, we must increasingly learn how to design and manage complex systems with multiple feedback effects, long time delays, and nonlinear responses to our decisions. Effective learning in such environments requires methods to develop systems thinking, to represent and assess such dynamic complexity – and tools managers can use to accelerate learning throughout an organization. In this course, students will:

• Visualize a business organization in terms of the structures and policies that create dynamics and regulate performance.
• Conceptualize and capture the structures generating the dynamics in diverse business settings.
• Learn to recognize and deal with situations where policy interventions are likely to be delayed, diluted, or defeated by unanticipated reactions and side effects.

Students will use simulation models to explore strategic issues such as fluctuating sales, production and earnings; market growth and stagnation; the diffusion of new technologies; the use and reliability of forecasts; the

rationality of business decision making; and applications in health care, energy policy, environmental sustainability, and other topics. We will use simulation models, case studies, and management flight simulators to develop principles of

policy design for successful management of complex strategies.