Nottingham resident Amanda DeCarolis is one of a three-member team of Neumann University business students who finished 42nd worldwide in an international Business Strategy Game that involved 2,968 teams from 164 colleges.

The team’s management skill, based on the performance of a fictitious footwear company it operated, placed it in the top two percent of teams that entered the global competition.

Neumann’s Rising to the Occasion team finished tied for No. 42 in overall rankings according to the results announced by the Business Strategy Game (BSG). The company was managed by DeCarolis, Brandilee Boose of Glen Mills, and Joshua Hendrickson of Akron, Ohio.

“We modeled our company’s values after Neumann’s RISES values, hence our name, which was a major influence on how we ran our company,” DeCarolis said, referencing the university’s core values of reverence, integrity, service, excellence, and stewardship.

BSG casts students in the role of company managers, who are responsible for decisions regarding production, shipping and inventory, corporate social responsibility, pricing and marketing, financing, worker compensation, and other aspects of business management. Teams from Europe, Africa, North America, Asia, and Latin America entered the competition.

“Having students run a company in head-to-head competition with companies managed by other students provides a truly powerful learning experience that places students in active, hands-on managerial roles,” said Dr. Robert Till, professor of business and a former Wall Street executive whose senior seminar class also produced two top-100 teams in the spring 2020 competition.

According to BSG, the contest is “a competition-based strategy simulation where the outcomes are always unique to the competitive interplay among the specific decisions and strategies of each group of competing companies.”

There is no secret set of strategic moves that works every time.

Other colleges with teams ranked in the top 100 are George Washington University, the University of Massachusetts, University of New Hampshire, and University of New Mexico.

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