Going For Gold

Among the many taglines that Business Standard sported was one that said that "Finance is no laughing matter".

But recently, Team BS had to face up to the prospect that moving up the value chain was, in fact, a matter of fun and games.

What are we talking about?

Here's what. NIS Sparta, an NIIT affiliate and a corporate learning solutions company, has brought The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine (LDGM) "" "a globally-acclaimed, high-energy business simulation" game "" to India.

And Business Standard Ltd was invited to be part of this learning process. Other invitees included participants from media houses like Cybermedia, Hindustan Times, The Economic Times, The Pioneer, Living Media, Zee TV, The Hindu and The Indian Express Group.

At the briefing, Sanjeev Duggal, president, NIS Sparta, said, "LDGM is a unique managment simulation game that can be used to enhance personal and organisational effectiveness."

LDGM is, basically, a gold rush. There's a stretch of land "" getting to which involves battling weather, keeping stock of provisions, and having to reckon with a possible vehicle breakdown "" where there are huge quantities of gold stashed away by the mysterious Dutchman. Each team, comprising four to five members, has to get there and spend as much time as they can mining gold (in one day, you can mine up to 100 kg of gold). Then, they have to get back to the starting point.

The amount of gold that you manage to mine is supposed to be an index of your company's "opportunities to maximise return on investment". The planning you do, the kind of calculated risks you take and, most significantly, how you click as a team all go a long way on the road to the gold rush.

Now, all this had to be accomplished within a timeframe of 20 days. There were three routes that could be taken to reach the gold mine: all three had their share of hazards.

For instance, one route took you to the mine in four days, while the others took more time. But there was a chance that the weather would be worse on that stretch: it could rain, which meant your car would have to slow down, which further meant it would consume more fuel, and maybe the river could overflow resulting in a loss of a day.

All this, of course, is the abstract concept of the game. In real time, the 20-days timeframe was whittled down to 20 two-minute capsules (two minutes=one day).

A gong was going to go off each time the two-minute period was over "" signalling the end of a day and the beginning of a new one. Weather reports were also available, which forecast climatic conditions for the next five days "" so you could hedge your bets accordingly.

Each team was provided with provisions. You had food, fuel, batteries, tents, and cash.

For starters, each team was asked to think up a "team name" and an accompanying cheer cry. There were names like Hunters and Numero Uno "" Team BS called itself Brown Sugar. The cheer cries had to be let off every now and then "to make your presence felt", and, of course, for "team spirit and involvement" (there were "yahoos" and "yippees" and "maros").

Then, we had to choose the following:

1) Leader (the chief executive officer) who would be the guiding spirit and the "mentor" of the pack, who take all the critical decisions

2) Mapper (the chief financial officer), who would keep stock of provisions and decide on how to cut what kind of corners "" say, whether we should use the money to buy food or fuel, or simply keep it away for a rainy day

3) Trader (the marketing team), who would sell his ideas and get the best deals. In this case, if we felt that we were low on fuel the trader could go and swap, say, food for fuel from other teams "" but he had to convince the other team that the swap would be worth it for them too; it had to be a case of quid pro quo

4) Spy (benchmarker), who would pay visits to the tables of other teams and find out what they were up to "" the kind of best practices they were following, whether they would be applicable in our case, whether they could be bettered etc

Other than this, there was an Expedition Leader who would be like a guide: give you tips which you may or may not take. In fact, one of the things he did was show us a video cassette and tell us we could "buy" it from him.

It would be useful, he said, for it contained "helpful information" about the site. It turned out to be a lot of hype "" it contained nothing that we couldn't have found out ourselves. We ended up spending a lot of money, which we could have invested in something useful "" like fuel or batteries or food.

Later, we realised that the Expedition Leader was probably masquerading as a "consultant" "" many of who charge a lot of money to "sell" their obvious ideas!

There were also some Master Traders along the way from who you could buy provisions in case you fell short "" for either cash or kind.

LDGM started off with a bang "" literally. The Expedition Leader fired a gunshot, while strains of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly filled The Oak Room at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi where it was all happening.

What followed was 40 minutes of hyperactivity. Surprisingly, some of us who had been complaining bitterly all this while about what a waste of time this whole thing would be, got involved in the chase as if it was a matter of life and death.

For the record, Team BS "died" on the way "" we never made it back to the home run. Small comfort that most of the other teams also died; the rest couldn't make it back in time.

As part of the de-briefing, we were asked why we couldn't survive the long haul. We realised that we had made a hash of our book-keeping and been too cavalier about our big-bang approach. The bottomline: we hadn't been calculating enough about our risk-taking. How about that for an object lesson?

Another interesting observation was that those teams that had tried to "trip down" the others, didn't really come out trumps. There was, for instance, one team that had fuel in excess but wouldn't part with any of it since it would mean giving some other team (in this case, Brown Sugar!) some sort of leeway. Lesson number two: healthy competition is good, bringing down others isn't.

But for most of us who are too used to management theories, the lesson of a lifetime was the formula we stumbled upon while frantically trying to mine for gold: fun+stimulation=high energy.

Clearly, fun is no laughing matter. It's serious business.