Live

The Operator

General Management & Continuous Operations

About This Simulation

The Operator is unlike traditional batched-decision simulations. Instead of one big strategic call per week, you live in an inbox: every active day brings 2-5 small events from your VP Engineering, CFO, head of legal, board chair, or a viral customer thread. Some events offer multiple-choice responses with explicit consequences; others ask you to draft a real written response that an LLM grades on decisiveness, reasoning quality, and operational realism. State is persistent — cash, headcount, customer health, team morale, brand, and operations — and compounds over many weeks. Professors control which days of the week are active (e.g., weekdays only), how many events fire per active day, and the response window. The result feels like actually running a company.

Learning Objectives

  • Make decisions across multiple timescales simultaneously (today's cash, this quarter's strategy)
  • Communicate decisively in writing under time pressure
  • Read partial information and act anyway — every event is incomplete
  • Build team rhythm for handling continuous interrupt-driven work
  • Balance four operating pillars (customer, team, brand, ops) without optimizing one at others' expense
  • Recognize and respond to crises before they compound
  • Defend judgment calls in writing when stakeholders disagree

Week-by-Week Overview

1

Days 1-5: orientation

Your inbox lights up. Small events. Customer complaints, an employee asking for a raise, a supplier delay. Learn the cadence; build a rhythm with your team.

2

Days 6-10: escalation

Stakes rise. A regulator letter. A reporter calls. A strategic partnership offer. Your written responses start to matter more.

3

Days 11-15: crisis

Multiple urgent events stack up in one day. Cash gets tight. Morale wobbles. You learn what your team is actually capable of.

4

Days 16-20: compound

Choices from week 1 start to shape what events fire. The teams who kept brand and morale intact see opportunities the others don't.

5

Days 21-25: stretch

The final stretch. Final state compounds. Composite leaderboard ranks the cohort by how healthy you kept the whole thing.

Ready to Play?

Log in to start playing with your team. Make strategic decisions and compete on the leaderboard.