Skip to main content Skip to search

YU News

YU News

Students in Business Strategy Class Rank in Top 100 of Prestigious Competition

Congratulations to the students in Dr. Abram Poczter’s class on business strategy at Sy Syms School of Business upon placing in the GLO-BUS® GlobalTop100® for the week of March 9 through March 15. GLO-BUS runs an online business strategy simulation for colleges and universities, and each week, the best-performing GLO-BUS “companies” measured on four performance variables (Overall Score, Earnings Per Share, Return on Equity, and Stock Price) are honored. The students were selected from a group of 31,000 students from 24 countries. “Due to the various challenges students faced,” said Dr. Poczter, “their accomplishments are even more remarkable. The qualification of several teams in the Global Top 50 and Top 100 is a testament to their resilience and determination to put Sy Syms on the GLO-BUS® Map.” According to their website, instructors using the GLO-BUS system divide their students into teams, and each team manages a company that manufactures and markets action-capture cameras and camera-equipped drones in competition with the other company-teams in the class. An important part of this “total enterprise simulation” is that the company-teams compete in a global marketplace, facing many of the same decisions that real company managers must make in every functional area of the business, including but not limited to product design, marketing, quality control, operations, distribution, human resources, capital structure, dividends and allocation to social programs. Instructors receive a Learning Assurance Report that provides them and the students with solid empirical data regarding the business skills and decision-making capabilities of the company-teams in the class relative to students at other business schools across the world. The pandemic also added an additional real-life dimension to running a multinational enterprise. Due to YU’s campuses being closed, the teams, instead of making group decisions on campus, dispersed to their homes in Israel, Brazil, England, Florida, Panama and California, among other locations. “The students not only needed to battle the time zone differences,” said Dr. Poczter, “but also variations in the level of technology and their worries about the health of their families and friends in the community.” Having students make a variety of different business decisions under circumstances that mirror real-world competitive conditions is a significant part of the business strategy that Dr. Poczter imparts to his students. “I want to harmonize the knowledge and skills they have attained in their courses, such as in accounting, finance, marketing, statistics and so on,” he explained, “by having them develop and implement a business strategy for a multinational enterprise.” They must also be mindful as they work about how market responses and competitive interplay affect outcomes in terms of market share, earnings per share, return on equity, credit rating and other elements of the competitive process. Steven Eisenmann ’21SB, a co-manager of one of the winning teams, commented, “Working with my fellow managers, we were able to create a successful market-leading business strategy. In my opinion, this is the best way we could have been tested on our leadership and management skills.” Michael Strauss, associate dean and clinical professor of strategy and entrepreneurship and entrepreneur-in-residence of Sy Syms, offered a hearty “mazal tov” to the students for their work. “I would like to personally congratulate Dr. Poczter and all the incredible students in his class who earned a Global Top 100 ranking for their company's GLO-BUS performance.”