“E
veryone, take your order slips and move the shipment to the left,” says Nelson Repenning, a professor of systems dynamics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “Factories, brew beer.”

With that, six groups of high-achieving managers from a major multinational firm, ensconced in MIT’s Building E62, check some small slips of paper, move piles of red chips along the tables where they are seated, and scribble numbers on some rudimentary accounting forms.

The executives are playing the Beer Game, a business simulation that is an institution at MIT, where management guru Jay Forrester invented it during the 1960s; every entering class in Sloan tries it en masse at the beginning of the academic year. The Beer Game is at once simple to play, difficult to master, and full of lessons.

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