Deep End — The First 90 Days at Pennine Drive Systems

A four-round, advanced strategic-leadership simulation set inside Pennine Drive Systems Ltd, a Sheffield-based £210M precision-gearbox manufacturer betting its future on an electric-drivetrain transition.

You are the newly appointed Managing Director of the 220-person Drivetrain Division, dropped into the deep end in your first week: the division's anchor customer — a European rail OEM worth £34M over three years — has issued a 90-day 'cure notice' demanding a qualified production unit or the contract is cancelled, and the board has set a 90-day review of your strategic plan on the same clock.

The division has already burned £26M and missed two launch milestones; engagement sits at 58/100, three senior engineers (combined replacement cost £0.9M) are flight risks, and you can spend only £3.5M before triggering a group capital review, while the full 'do-everything' plan costs £6.2M — so you must choose.

The simulation operationalises Narendra Laljani's research on strategic-leader capability (the visionary–managerial typology) and stretch experiences as the engine of leader development. Round 1 you diagnose the twice-missed launch and set a one-line strategic intent with a 90-day must-win and a stop-list.

Round 2 you choose a crisis posture — a visionary reframe versus a managerial sprint, the answer being a disciplined sprint held inside a clear direction — and allocate the £3.5M recovery budget across engineering, testing and the missing external power-electronics expertise.

Round 3 you make the stretch assignment: the proven deputy (safe, no development) or the high-potential engineer (visionary, unproven), and design the scaffold — authority, mentoring, escalation, day-job cover and a halfway fallback — that turns a stretch into development rather than a drowning.

Round 4, at day 60 with a subsystem slipping and a flight-risk engineer resigning, you recover delivery within budget, coach the stretch leader through the setback without rescuing them, make a retention move, and present a board read that links 90-day delivery to the long-term transition.

The math rewards leaders who hold visionary intent AND managerial delivery together, stretch the high-potential WITH a scaffold, coach rather than rescue, and build confidence on credible commitments — and it punishes the five classic errors: vision without delivery, delivery without direction, never stretching, stretching without scaffolding, and over-promising to everyone at once.

Final KPIs track Strategy Clarity, Execution Rate, Talent Readiness and Stakeholder Confidence.

An advanced simulation for participants used to working with the main frameworks and trade-offs of the subject, designed for executive education and experienced professionals.