by Roberta Hill...

The MBA 699 Integrated Strategy class, the initial simulation game, and the final challenge round brought all our MBA classes at Meredith together. We saw firsthand how marketing and finance really are related and that benchmarking EVERYTHING is vital. But there were two main lessons. First was the importance of forecasting. We had all the information possible—who our competitors were, the number of units needed in each market, the growth rate of the market, and our real and projected market potential in each category. We knew exactly what our customers wanted, the value they placed on each specification, and how much they would pay for our products. We "just" had to decide how many units to produce, how much to spend to market those units, how much to automate our production lines, or whether to buy or sell production capacity. We had more information available to us than "real world" businesses do, and we still found it very difficult to forecast accurately.

Our second big lesson was the importance of developing a strategy and setting goals. We knew what we wanted our business to become, and we developed our strategy based on that vision. Then we set concrete goals—over $100 million in cumulative profits, greater than 30% contribution margin, doubling our beginning stock price, etc.—and we made decisions using our strategy and goals as the foundation for each decision. We had to consider on our competitors' actions, of course, but our overall strategy and targets guided our decisions. The result was that we exceeded our goals and hopefully learned enough from our mistakes to avoid similar ones in the real world.