A global manufacturing company was building a multi-month leadership development program for executives and senior leaders. Most of the program was already in place, but the learning team wanted a stronger business acumen component that could match the quality and energy of the wider leadership curriculum.
The company was growing quickly and operating across multiple countries. Leaders needed more than theoretical business knowledge. They needed to practice strategic decision-making, understand financial and operational trade-offs, and experience how choices in marketing, production, finance, and customer delivery affect one another.
The learning team also wanted participants to become fully immersed in the experience, including how they behaved under pressure. The goal was to create a learning environment that felt realistic, demanding, and relevant to the company’s own business context.
The company chose CELEMI Decision Base™, a competitive, board-based business simulation where teams run a simulated company over several business years.
Participants worked in four-person teams with colleagues from different regions and business backgrounds. The simulation required them to make decisions across purchasing, production, finance, accounting, marketing, and sales. As the simulation unfolded, teams had to manage growth ambitions, capacity, customer expectations, delivery performance, cash pressure, and cost.
The experience created a safe but demanding environment for decision-making under uncertainty. Some teams pursued aggressive growth strategies and struggled when revenue did not support their investments. Others took more conservative approaches. One team nearly went bankrupt after assuming they could win sales without investing sufficiently in marketing, while another improved performance by focusing on process efficiency and manufacturing terms.
Facilitation played an important role. The facilitator connected the simulation to real business situations and, on the second day, gave teams the opportunity to propose changes to their simulated companies that they then had to fund, implement, track, and report. This made the experience less about rules and more about business reality.
The simulation helped leaders see that running a business is a delicate balance with many moving parts. Participants experienced how growth, marketing investment, capacity, cash, customer expectations, delivery performance, and cost must be managed together.
The social nature of the simulation was especially important. Leaders debated strategic choices, challenged assumptions, and saw how different functions and cultures responded to pressure, success, and failure. The experience surfaced practical tensions between functions, including the need to balance changing sales forecasts with operational stability and delivery commitments.
The program also helped create a stronger common business vocabulary. Participants left with a clearer shared understanding of how decisions in one part of the business affect performance elsewhere. In that sense, the value went beyond individual leadership skills. The simulation helped business acumen become something leaders could discuss, apply, and reinforce together across regions and functions.
The program was considered successful enough that the company later added another CELEMI simulation to a global leadership initiative.