Force Majeure is built from two decades of the founders’ field research in conflict and crisis economies, distilled into two books and calibrated to a 2021 Harvard Business Review finding.
Most business simulations invent their scenarios. This one does not. The decisions a player makes, and the way the engine scores them, trace back to documented field cases and a peer-reviewed finding, set down in two books by Jason Miklian of the University of Oslo and John E. Katsos of the American University of Sharjah. This page is the provenance: the work the simulation rests on, and where you can read it for yourself.
Responsible Management in Crisis: Global Lessons on Generating Social Sustainability Through Uncertain Business Environments, by Jason Miklian and John Katsos, was a Financial Times Book of the Month in July 2025. It is a case primer of about a dozen real-world leadership cases written on the Ivey case model, from Colombian coffee plantations to Unilever under Paul Polman, refugee hiring at Chobani, and Starbucks in Sumatra. It is the casebook the classroom simulation maps to: the same decisions students read about on the page, they live through on the map.
Real-world leadership cases on the Ivey case model, built for classroom use and self-study.
Selected in July 2025, a marker of reach beyond the academy.
The cases here are the source the classroom simulation maps to, scenario by scenario.
Ethical Leadership in Conflict and Crisis: Evidence from Leaders on How to Make More Peaceful, Sustainable, and Profitable Communities, by Jason Miklian and John E. Katsos, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2024 in the Elements in Leadership series. It is Open Access and free to read. Where the practitioner book carries the cases, this volume carries the evidence, drawn from leaders on how firms behave under conflict and crisis, and it is the scholarly grounding the simulation is built on.
Elements in Leadership series, published 2024 and peer reviewed.
No paywall. The full text is available to anyone on Cambridge Core.
How firms actually behave in conflict and crisis, the spine under the scoring.
The founders’ research has been profiled in the New York Times, the Financial Times, The Economist, Foreign Policy, the BBC, and the Los Angeles Times, among other outlets, and has been jointly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. That is the record the simulation inherits.
The authors’ 2021 Harvard Business Review study found that firms embedded in their communities were about three times more likely to stay profitable and nine times more likely to survive a crisis. Force Majeure is calibrated to that finding: the community-embedded play wins because the evidence says it does, and the documented cases from the casebook inform the scenarios a player faces.
The books supply the cases and the evidence; the simulation turns them into decisions under pressure. The fuller method, and the people behind it, sit on the evidence page.
See the evidence →Yes. Force Majeure is built from two decades of the founders’ field research in conflict and crisis economies, distilled into two books and calibrated to a 2021 Harvard Business Review finding that community-embedded firms were about three times more likely to stay profitable and nine times more likely to survive a crisis.
The practitioner book, Responsible Management in Crisis, is available on Amazon. The academic volume, Ethical Leadership in Conflict and Crisis, is published Open Access by Cambridge University Press and is free to read on Cambridge Core. The underlying evidence is summarized on the evidence page.
Yes. Responsible Management in Crisis is a case primer of about a dozen real-world leadership cases written on the Ivey case model, and it is the casebook the classroom simulation maps to. It pairs with the classroom simulation for educators.
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