On the way up the corporate ladder, it’s not uncommon for companies to invest heavily in training their next generation of leaders—often by bringing in outside consultants, enrolling high performers in executive leadership programs, or even sending them off to top-ranked MBA programs.
At Hasbro, the toy giant behind Monopoly, Nerf, and Scrabble, the path to senior leadership looks a little different.
The company’s rising stars first undergo a two-day crash course in business fundamentals and the inner workings of the toy industry, taught by senior executives including CEO Chris Cocks himself. The curriculum spans strategy, capital allocation, and real-world case studies.
Then comes the final test.
On day three, participants are dropped into Toy Tycoon, an immersive, role-playing strategy game designed to simulate the pressures of running a toy company. Cocks has described it as “Monopoly meets a crash course MBA meets startup hustle, Hasbro-style.”
Players are grouped into teams and named co-CEOs of companies armed with existing Hasbro brands. Each round represents a year in business. As the game progresses, the decisions grow more complex—and the consequences more severe. Players must decide when to hire, where to invest, and how to scale operations, all while balancing sales, supply chain constraints, and human resources.
“As a company built on play, it makes sense for us to use a strategy game to develop future leaders,” Brian Baker, Hasbro’s senior vice president of board games, Play-Doh, and Nerf told Fortune. “Toy Tycoon helps our rising talent think like owners, work across teams, and build confidence making decisions, all while staying true to who we are as a company.”
“I think the job of a CEO is very similar to a grand strategy game,” Cocks added to The Wall Street Journal. “Moving pieces on a complex game board has a lot of dynamism around it, and that’s partially why I like it.”
That philosophy fits naturally at Hasbro, an $12 billion company whose products revolve around play—and whose CEO is an avid gamer himself. Cocks introduced the idea for Toy Tycoon after participating in a similar simulation during his years at Microsoft.
Top business leaders, like Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman, are big fans of games
Cocks isn’t alone in viewing games as more than entertainment. A growing number of business leaders argue that games can sharpen strategic thinking, risk assessment, and collaboration—skills that translate directly from the game board to the boardroom.
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, for instance, is an avid player of Settlers of Catan, and has called the game “the best board game for entrepreneurs,” citing its emphasis on resource management, negotiation, and alliance-building.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have also spoken about the strategy lessons they’ve taken from playing Civilization, a turn-based video game franchise built around long-term planning, tradeoffs, and empire-building.
But few executives are as publicly devoted to games as Elon Musk. The world’s richest man has long logged marathon gaming sessions—even in pivotal moments in his business career. When negotiating the acquisition of Twitter in April 2022, Musk stayed up until 5 a.m. the night before playing Elden Ring. And last year, while serving as DOGE administrator, he livestreamed himself playing video games on X.
It’s an obsession biographer Walter Isaacson has argued is central to understanding Musk’s leadership style, which he described as driven by “intensity, focus, competitiveness, die-hard attitudes, and love of strategy.”
At the time, Musk said his favorite game was The Battle of Polytopia, a multiplayer strategy title from which he distilled two guiding principles: “do not fear losing” and “play life like a game.”
The post Forget an MBA: The $12 billion maker of Monopoly makes workers play a literal leadership board game to see if they’re fit for the C-suite appeared first on Fortune.
