BU PEMBA Case Competition 2021

I had a chance to team up with great folks from the MBA program at BU in order to participate in Boston University Questrom School of Business' annual case competition. This was the first attending for me and all of our team members who were about to graduate this spring or fall. I had invited Youngbin who has shown efficient and reasonable approaches over the course of MBA (and is my soju mate), then Minish who has great skillsets for data analysis, slide deck composition and passion to work, and Carolyn who takes everything proactively and makes any process operating go in a smooth and effective way as a whole. We admitted our work would be clumsy to some extent given the first participation, but at the same time humbly called ourselves 'dream team' as we had been through the MBA program all together since fall 2018 at Thompson Island and had acknowledged each other's virtue. 

The competition is a 2-day event that is literally intensive. With the peculiar situation due to the pandemic, this year's event went through Zoom. The entire itinerary was following (excerpted from the guidance email from Questrom School of Business):

1) Case study: You will be receiving this on Wednesday night 2/17 at 5 pm (EST) and here is the prompt (with the client’s name removed): Design a sustainability plan of action for the client. In terms of breaking this down into smaller portions, please use some of the questions in the final paragraph of the case: 'How should the protagonist in the case take the client from where the company is now to where they want to be in 2025? How well does the client’s sustainability program fit in with their commitment to ESG? Should the protagonist broaden the existing program? What else is there that the client could be doing better? Programs take time to implement and 2025 is less than five years away.’

2) Mentor: On the Google doc (whose link is here), we’ve assigned your Mentor, with his / her / their email address. To be respectful of everyone’s time, the Mentors will be available from 2:30 - 5:00 pm on Friday (only), please.

3) Schedule: Below is the master schedule. The Zoom invite is below, too, just to be on the safe side. 

Key times for Friday, please: 

8:00 - 8:30 am: Kickoff Session / Competition Overview. Dean Fournier will be providing opening remarks

2:00 - 2:30 pm: Live Q&A session with the client. However, the client participants will be *different* executives than those judging the Finals. (Same Zoom link as Kickoff Session)

2:30 - 5:00 pm: Virtual mentor meeting. Please set up your own links with your Mentor (i.e., Zoom, Google Meets, MS Teams)

For Saturday, please:

8:00 am: Please post your 15 minute presentations to QuestromTools and *SEPARATELY* email to gstoller@bu.edu

8:30 am: We’ll randomly set presentation order. Please only attend your 15 min slot. If your team arrives early, please keep your computer on audio & video mute and turn off the volume. To avoid people getting confused, we’ll provide the Saturday Zoom link separately. (We’ll be running 2 rooms simultaneously with five teams / breakout room for the Semi-Finals).

11:30 am: Finalists announced and Judges will provide feedback for non-advancing teams

2:00 pm: 4 Finalists should post revised slides to QuestromTools and again *SEPARATELY* email to gstoller@bu.edu, please

2:15 pm: Finalists present via a randomly generated presentation order. 20 minute presentations. 

5:30 pm: Remo reception, whose link is here

The client's case was released on Wednesday night which was two days before the competition day.  The client turned out to be Waters Corporation (NYSE: WAT), Milford, MA-based lab instrument company that has more than $2 billion of annual sales. The theme was about sustainability strategy. It is something hot these days and we all know this is so important for the planet and our offspring, but honestly, it has never been taken seriously at MBA. This means, the topic was not an easy toy.

Fortunately we won the first place in the end. Eleven teams took part in, and I found that all of the works were really great. I think the results were totally up to particular circumstances and luckily we resonated with the client at that point. 

I would not reveal the client's case but like to publish our team's output. I appreciate all the team members have agreed that any one of us would be able to publish it without redaction. Also, thank you again Youngbin, Minish, and Carolyn for being together on this once in a lifetime experience.