Early Adopters: Professor Dan Ondrack

FABULOUS FACILITATORS

Professor Dan Ondrack

 I’ve been the Academic Director of several Executive Programs where we’ve used the ExperienceChange GlobalTech simulation.  I believe we were one of the first adopters of the new simulation when it came out.  It’s a core part of our executive programs in Managing Strategic Change for both open-enrolment and numerous custom programs for business and government clients.

There are a number of key advantages for using the GT simulation in our courses.  First, students gain practical and real-time experience in applying the theories of organization analysis and change management that they learned in class.  Second, the simulation is very realistic and engaging and student evaluations always stress how much they enjoyed the interesting and practical experience.   The experience of planning and implementing a change strategy and then seeing the scores for the results of their strategy compared to scores for other teams appeals strongly to competitive motivations.  Third, since the students work in teams to do the analysis, strategic planning and implementation in the simulation, this also provides an excellent opportunity to learn and practice team management skills.

We emphasize this aspect a lot in custom programs for corporate clients where one of the educational objectives is development of team management skills.  Finally, I have also worked with ExperiencePoint to develop some custom modifications of the GT simulation to focus on developing management skills in organization analysis.  These versions of the GT simulation are used for our programs where we teach due-diligence in programs on Mergers and Acquisitions, and SWOT analysis in programs on Corporate Strategy and Management Consulting.    In all of our years in working with ExperiencePoint, we have been extremely satisfied with the sophistication of their simulations and especially with their level of service to us and corporate clients.

Professor Dan Ondrack

Executive Program

Rotman School of Management,
University of Toronto
105 St. George Street
Toronto, ON, M5S 3E6