The Gazogle Case-Appendix

Experiential games have long been used to break up the tedium and boredom present in courses that consist entirely of lectures and cases. We use the hands-on game “Gazogle” to bring relevance to the concepts of high performance, re-engineering, lean production, and total quality management. We feel that it is important that students actually experience some of the implementation issues relevant to these concepts rather than merely read or talk about them. We have used this game in both MBA and executive training programs for both the public and private sector throughout the world. It has been a successful experience for groups as diverse as manufacturing managers, bowling-center employees, government officials, and high-school students.

The exercise can be used either as a capstone to summarize learnings to date or as a justification for principles to come. The exercise takes approximately 90 minutes to run, with an additional debriefing time of 60 to 90 minutes, often completed during the next class period.

While we initially developed the game to teach principles related to operations management, we found that the lessons learned regarding general management are much more powerful. By analyzing the competitive results of hundreds of teams over a 10-year period, we have observed a set of principles that lead to success in the game. We believe that these principles are applicable to organizations in general.