| Several dozen executives and middle managers are spread around the room's perimeter, huddling in small groups. Suddenly, Eureka! One five-women cluster hollers in unison: "Sip on sexy, sassy Saturn Water - Wow." Delighted with their new slogan, several of the women "beam" themselves to a circle of tables at the room's center, home to 16 stellar saloon-keepers with a professional thirst fro intergalactic water. Strenuous haggling ensues, the first sale made. Welcome, earthlings, to "Planet X," the parallel universes of space-shuttling entrepreneurs devised by Business Simulation International Inc. of Ottawa. "I kept reading that adults learn better in a participatory situation than they do when someone's just talking to them," recalls BSI president Don Jones, whose firm has created custom games for the Royal Bank, Canada Post and others. Planet X is BSI's first generic offering. At eh game's outset, roughly one-quarter of the participants are assigned "customer" roles and put in charge of Planet X taprooms names "Olde Earth Bard & Grill," "Starburst" and the like, whose clientele is a mix of humanoids, robots and quasi-animals. The other players form selling teams, each with its own brand of flavoured water to sell to the good people of Planet X, which has just joined NIFTA (New Intergalactic free trade agreement). Whichever team sells the most cases of water in the next two-and-a-half hours wins the game. Then, in a wrap-up session, everybody talks about the Jetsonesque lessons of salesmanship they've learned and how they might apply back home on the little blue planet, third from the Sun. In one recent round of the game organized by Toronto's On Track Sales Development Group Ltd., not everyone was up to warp speed. Team Mars, fro instance, was an organizational black hole and its product -"War, the drink fro warriors"-bombed, even though it contained the ostensibly delicious and refreshing stomach acid extracted from the rare orangebird of Quadrant 7. Team Apollo, after taking an early lead, fell victim to overconfidence. "Customer loyalty is based on performance-you can't take it for granted," one chastened Apollonian observed in the post-mortem. Far more effervescent were those sexy, sassy Saturnalians. They flogged a game-winning 195 cases of their distinctive H2O. "It's a great team-building exercise and a way of seeing how people operate under pressure," bubbled Barb McDowell, the victorious Saturn chief now back in her day job in the human resources department of Tip Top Tailors, Dylex Ltd.'s down-to-earth mens wear chain. | |
