Alanna Petroff recently completed her MBA at the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford in Britain in 2011. She is currently living and working in London, England.
Before starting my MBA, though I had heard about case competitions, I did not know much about them. Less than one year after starting my MBA, I was flying across the Atlantic Ocean to participate in one of them.
Dozens of my MBA classmates took part in case competitions around the globe, competing for prize money, awards and prestige. There was the INNOVATEChina competition, the IESE-Roland Berger International Case Competition and the San Diego State University International Sports MBA Case Competition, among others.
Before even beginning to prepare for the judging on our presentations, outlining solutions to tough business problems, there is much behind-the-scenes work. It begins with the process of forming teams for the competition. The teams must then be approved by either their business school, the host school, or both, at which point funding must be secured.
Students then hunker down and start working: booking flights and hotels, setting up strategy meetings and sending out a flurry of emails amongst themselves to sort out administrative, preparatory and strategic issues.
In typical case competitions, each team is given the same business case study. Teams must analyze the business issues and problems in order to devise suitable solutions, which are presented to a panel of judges, who come from industry and academia. Generally, teams only have one or two days to create their presentations, so all-nighters are common.
Other case competitions work a bit differently. In some instances, contestants choose their own topics or work on their presentations before arriving at the host school.
In my case, I formed a team to compete in the Intercollegiate Business Ethics Case Competition (IBECC) near Seattle, Wash. My group was tasked with choosing and analyzing a real-life ethical business issue and proposing a solution that was ethically sound and practical. We had a few weeks to prepare in advance of the competition.
Our team chose to analyze executive compensation and severance practices at HP, specifically looking at the large payout that HP’s ex-CEO, Carly Fiorina, received in 2005. We thought it would be interesting to learn more about the hot topic of executive compensation and we agreed that it was a sufficiently nuanced issue.
After choosing our topic, we started preparing. We consulted with experts in the field of executive compensation, combed through dozens of HP’s financial documents and looked at executive compensation practices at other firms in the industry. We conducted analyses from business, legal and ethical standpoints, then compiled our findings into a 25-page PowerPoint presentation.
I originally assumed that competing in an ethics case competition would be easy. I was mistaken.
Preparing for IBECC was extremely time consuming. Thankfully, my group was preparing for the competition over the summer months, when there was a lull in our hectic MBA schedule. However, many students participate in these competitions during the school year, which can be stressful when classes, exams and assignments are jostling for their time.
Classmates told me that case competitions are the ideal way to apply your business knowledge gleaned from lectures and textbooks. Looking back, I could not agree more. As I read through HP’s earnings statements and documents about executive compensation, I began to see the relevance of my MBA studies. My group drew upon our finance, accounting and organizational behaviour classes to better understand the case at hand.
