Play to Profit (A Cultural History of Corporate Business Games)

The little-known history of business games and simulations from 1955 and on—and how they influenced modern economic theory and rationality.

The business simulation emerged around 1955, after the Second World War, in the context of social change. Companies in the post-war economy were confronted with globalization, increasingly complex management tasks, and changing concepts of control and planning. At the intersection of corporate management, human resource management, and scientific economic logics and rationalities, a training tool materialized in the form of business simulations—partly played on early mainframe computers—that was to give rise to a new type of manager: the professional manager.

In Play to Profit, Rolf Nohr reconstructs the popularity of those management games in the United States from the 1950s to the 1970s and its spread around the world. He traces, for example, the role of IBM in the development and distribution of these games, examines the influence of think tanks (such as the Rand Corporation), and questions the use of these games in educational institutions such as the American Management Association and business schools such as Harvard Business School.

As management simulations evolved from serious games to teaching machines to the logics of operations research and mathematical game theory, Nohr argues that we can observe the economic rationality that characterizes our current reality.