Teaching Entrepreneurship: A Practice-Based Approach - EXERCISE: BUILDING THE CULTURE OF YOUR BUSINESS WITH THE SIMS (QAA 2,3,4,5)

Objective:

Use and explain the critical interdisciplinary definitions related to organizational culture and entrepreneurship.
Describe the relationship between organizational culture, structure, and leadership.
Evaluate personal approaches to a professional work-life.
Design and assess an emerging organizational culture.
Critically evaluate the approaches to the intentional creation of organizational culture.

Overview:

By the time most enterprise founders start thinking about ensuring a healthy culture in their business, it is usually too late. The culture has already emerged and is not always the most conducive to the health of the founder and employees, or even the enterprise itself. The culture of the enterprise emerges from the mind, values, and practices of the founder(s) while the business is being created, a time when the founder generally places more priority on the creation of economic value than the creation of culture. This exercise is based on a combination of organization and entrepreneurship theory and uses an off-the- shelf computer game, The Sims: Open for Business™, to investigate the core values, assumptions, interpretations, and approaches that combine to define the culture of a new venture. The students are assigned to play the game for a minimum of two hours outside of class, with no introduction given around the concept of culture. The heart of the exercise is the in-class debrief (including viewing the game), which reveals the culture that was created, what it means for all stakeholders, and what actions could be taken to adjust that culture.

Usage Suggestions

This content of the exercise works for all audiences, undergraduate, graduate, executive, or practitioner. The delivery requires that the students have access to the game and are able to play it before the discussion. The exercise lends itself well to online courses, as the debrief and illustration can also be done online, preferably in a synchronous mode, although asynchronous will work too. The exercise works best when each student is able to log on to his orher game for the debrief. This exercise is positioned in the course when emphasis is on resources. Culture is presented as a resource that can either add to or detract from the value of the company.

Activity:

Pre-Work Required by Students

Play The Sims: Open for Business™ for a minimum of two hours.

Time Plan (90 minutes)

This 90- minute exercise can be adapted to fit various time schedules, including an entire class. Prior to the exercise the students would have been told to play the game for two hours. No other instructions are given. In this way, playing the game provides a shared experience and serves as the live case for the discussion.

Step 1 (Introduction) 0:00–0:10 (10 minutes)

Ask the students to open their laptops and log on to their games. Each game should open at the point at which the student left the game. The opening or warm- up questions should be about just playing the game:

How many of you had played some version of The Sims before? Anyone played this particular expansion version?
How was it? Did you enjoy it? If so, why? If not, why?
Were there any particular challenges?
Where there any particular surprises?
How long did you actually play? (Probe for who played the longest and why.)

Step 2 0:10–0:40 (30 minutes)

Divide students into groups of five to six and give them the following directions: “Please select a scribe and a reporter to first capture the themes of your work and then be ready to report out to the full class on your work. First, individually, each write down the answer to this question: What is the culture of the business you created – and how can you tell? You have five minutes for this individual work. After five minutes, and I’ll tell you when the time is up, we’ll switch to working with your team.

First, each student please share with your group the business you created.
Second, as a group create your list of criteria that create an organizational culture.
Third, please describe the impact of how people will carry out work given the culture you have created.

Step 3 (First report out and discussion) 0:40–1:10 (30 minutes)

Start with the first table and have the reporter share their top two criteria, along with an explanation and illustration of each. Then ask each table to add two criteria to the ones already listed. If desired, you can take a hand count at the end to establish what was considered as most important, and so on. The board map should match the theoretical criteria of your choice. For the purposes of this teaching note the primary source is Schein (1983) and focuses on the basic underlying assumptions around which cultural paradigms form. Examples include:

The organization’s relationship to its environment: Is recycling important?
The nature of reality and truth: How important is time?
The nature of human nature: how employees (insiders) are treated and how customers (outsiders) are treated.
The nature of human activity: the physical design of the employee break room.
The nature of human relationships: Is the focus on competition or cooperation?

Summary and Close 1:10–1:30 (20 minutes)

Ask the students to again work individually and list the three things they would keep about their culture and the three things they would change, along with how they would implement that change. Lead the closing discussion in such a way that the students discover:

What types of cultural approaches are common across most businesses?
What is the role of fit between the founder, the company, and the environment in creating culture?
How does culture become a positive resource for your business?

Teaching Tips

The game generally has to be ordered online, so you need to allow students time to order and receive it. The ideal experience is for the classroom to have wireless internet access and for each student to have a laptop. However, if teaching students with no access to computers or ability to buy the game, the instructor can lead the class in playing the game as a group, with one computer and the screen projected on the wall.

Skill Development:

Key Takeaways

The importance of intentionally creating organizational culture during firm emergence.
Organizational culture can be a positive or negative firm resource.
Organizational culture needs to be a fit between the founder, the firm, and the environment.

Resources:

Materials List

Video game: The Sims and the expansion packet The Sims: Open for Business™.

The full text ‘Teaching Entrepreneurship: A Practice-Based Approach’ can be purchased here > http://www.amazon.co.uk/Teaching-Entrepreneurship-A-Practice-Based-Approach/dp/1782540695

References:

This exercise is taken from;

Heidi M. Neck, Patricia G. Greene and Candida G. Brush, 2014. Teaching Entrepreneurship: A Practice-Based Approach (pp.110 – 113). Edition. Edward Elgar Pub.

Author:

This exercise is taken from, Heidi M. Neck, Patricia G. Greene and Candida G. Brush, 2014. Teaching Entrepreneurship: A Practice-Based Approach (pp.110 – 113). Edition. Edward Elgar Pub. and is reprinted with the kind permission of the authors.