Accessible text version. Each heading below is one slide, in order. Instructor: Ryan Lamare.
LER 565, Week 1 live session: Introduction to Strategic Thinking and HR. Instructor: Ryan Lamare.
One: how our live sessions will work. Two: how you're graded, plus weekly quizzes. Three: playing Azee together. Four: this week's games — the number game and an Azee demo.
Live sessions are mostly interactive — games, activities, and discussion. We meet Mondays, six to eight pm Central Time, over Zoom. Come having done the week's videos, readings, and podcasts. This is also where we play Azee each week.
Live session participation is twenty percent. Weekly quizzes, six total, are thirty percent. Azee reflections, three total, are twenty-five percent. Podcast analyses, two total, are twenty-five percent.
Ten questions each week, fifty points. They are based on the lecture videos, readings, and media. No questions come from the podcasts. They are open notes with unlimited time; the Week 1 quiz is due Sunday, July 5.
Azee is the online version of the board game Azul. Play at azee.mattle.online. We play together in live sessions, every week. There are three reflections — in Weeks 2, 4, and 6 — plus a class tournament to close.
Week 1: Introduction to Strategic Thinking and HR. Week 2: Sequential and Zero-Sum Strategies and Their Applications to HR. Week 3: Prisoner's Dilemmas and How to Overcome Them at Work. Week 4: Coordination Games between HR and Management. Week 5: Information Asymmetries at Work. Week 6: Strategic Moves for Competitive Advantage in HR.
Lecture: Intro to Strategic Thinking and HR. Clips: A Common Knowledge Example, and The Battle of Wits. Readings: The Art of Strategy, pages 15 to 21, and The Right Game. Podcast: Game Theory — Thinking Strategically.
To be strategic, you must always consider others. Game theory is our key tool. Common knowledge and equilibrium. Types of games — and some paradoxes.
We put this week's common-knowledge clips into action. I need one volunteer to play against me. Everyone else: offer hints in the chat. The volunteer can take or ignore them.
I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 100. You get five guesses. After each guess, I'll tell you higher or lower.
The most efficient first guess is fifty. The most efficient second guess is twenty-five or seventy-five. Keep dividing and conquering toward the answer.
We're not in a vacuum — I'm strategic too. Divide-and-conquer narrows you to the range 44 to 49. So what's the right answer?
Read Chapter 1 of The Art of Strategy and you'd say 48. But I know you've read it — so I picked differently. Maybe 47 or 49.
But it isn't 47 or 49. You'd know that I'd know you'd avoid 48. The book calls 47 or 49 the more clever answer. So I picked something more clever still — 46.
Always put yourself in the other person's shoes. People aren't random in their strategies. You know something — but I know that you know it. Strategic HR thinking is always multidimensional.
Draft colored tiles from the shared factory displays. Place them to complete the rows on your board. Tiles you don't take are left for your opponents. Turn order and timing matter — it's a sequential game.
Let's walk through a sample match together. I'll show the board and play a few turns live. Notice how each pick shapes your later options. Reflection #1, on sequential strategies, is due Sunday, July 12.
Next week: sequential and zero-sum strategies. Backward reasoning — the ultimatum and centipede games. Read up on game trees and payoffs before we meet. Due Sunday, July 12: the Week 2 quiz and Azee reflection #1.