Lessons learned, Part One: Learning from my mistakes

Memories from my Binghamton MBA studies, 1973-75.

Binghamton University -- at the time I attended (1969-1975) it was the State University of New York at Binghamton; originally, it was simply Harpur College, a private school incorporated into the New York university system around 1948 -- was a little late in developing a separate business school and in offering an MBA. In 1969, business was a department in the social sciences division. By 1975, the department had evolved to the School of Management. The faculty were an eclectic group of economists, a geographer, accountants, industrial psychologists, statisticians and other faculty, many of whom lacked the combination of an MBA and a PhD on business. Nonetheless, when I started the MBA program at Binghamton in September 1973, I was in the second class. We few, we hearty few, were less than 25 in number.

In our second year, we participated in what was somewhat of a rage in MBA programs -- a business simulation, where student teams made decisions, entered them on IBA pinch cards, handed them to the faculty member (Ted Willoughby) running the simulation, who then ran the cards through the IBM mainframe to produce a set of quarterly results that led to another round of decisions. The simulated industry was laundry detergent; urban legend had it that the simulation was in use at Indiana or Northwestern. Harvard used a somewhat similar simulation, and that would provide an interesting contrast I will come to in a moment.

The MBAs were divided into two independent detergent industries, each with three teams competing, and each teams with three or four members. Our band of warriors was named N-2, which we converted into the name 'Entu'. I was president. Dave Tremblay was our marketing and sales numbers cruncher. We had an almost invisible classmate who managed production.

The game appeared to put a great emphasis on focused market research, which meant finding the 'perfect detergent,' one that matched customer needs and maximized profits. We went all in and quickly found an almost magical product, one that market research suggested would dominate the market and devastate the competition. But as we prepared to launch, we found that our production manager had not ordered a sufficient amount of the key raw material so we produced very little and sold out. Our research showed that we lost a lot of potential business but our competitors mistakenly assumed that our low sales suggested that we had a dud on our hands.

To be continued....