Chair of Excellence, Marketing and Sales at Fogelman College of Business &
Economics, University of Memphis
Hello and Welcome!
I am Rajiv Grover, the developer of Virtual Business Professional, or VB Pro for short. I am the founder of PrecisED, Inc., which has many more business education simulations in its portfolio.
Before I tell you more about VB Pro and the reason for creating it, let me share a small part of my journey to this point.
While hiring faculty as a B-school Dean and as a Market Research and Management Consultant, my experience revealed that business students, faculty and professionals alike, tended to seek very focused knowledge. This would result in tunnel vision and, hence, cross-functional conflict.
Specialists within silos of knowledge do have important places in organizations. But to rise in organizations, they need to break open the silos and become more of generalists with cross-functional skills.
I developed VB Pro to train specialists in general business. It imparts cross-functional business knowledge dictated by the need at that point in the virtual business.
The simulation starts with a germ of an idea and continues until the virtual business grows to be a publicly-traded diversified global company.
The Areas covered include Strategy, Accounting, Finance, Marketing, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior, Business Laws, Statistics and Digital Analytics, Global Management and Supply Chains, Economics, Corporate Governance, and IT and Big Data.
In VB Pro, you will learn by individually running a business. Running a business means making decisions. To make decisions, you will need theories. These theories are provided at appropriate times before making the decisions.
You will be continuously provided feedback on the quality of your decisions and, through quizzes, on your understanding of theories.
You can use both the quality of decisions made and the performance on quizzes to evaluate your performance on the simulation.
Additionally, VB Pro provides personal feedback on the type of leader, follower or colleague you are in an organization. The feedback is on 8 principles you consciously or unconsciously use. These principles are Maintaining/Innovating; Delivery/People-first; Self/Organization-Orientation and Profit/Balance-focus.
Finally, VB Pro can be offered in a program that includes projects. These team projects should be such that they address more than one functional area.
Hope you enjoy learning with Virtual Business Professional.