The fantasy can be fun, but also hard to integrate back into a real-world setting. To better emphasize managerial issues, the fantasy in this game is that participants are the top managers of the worst-run steel mill in North America. Inc. Loskill is characterized by high labor costs, low productivity, declining market share, and an aging infrastructure. Their last good quarter was sometime during the Nixon administration, and they have generated a negative net income for each of the last five years. Now separated from the resources of its parent, Loskill must face a competitive and hostile market on its own.
Failure means closure of the mill, the last employer in a rural Ohio town.
It is your job as the management team to craft a strategy, and turn the company around. But, it won t be easy. Successful completion of each station requires some combination of physical effort and problem-solving. Many of the stations are designed to induce a sense of perceived risk, while others have goals which are seemingly impossible. These challenges arrive as memos delivered in inter-office mailers.