An HKUST MBA team outperformed their peers from the world’s top business schools, including the Yale School of Management and the Chicago Booth School of Business, and won the Grand Prize at the Marshall Global Consulting Challenge in late February.
This annual competition organized by the University of Southern California is designed to challenge the minds and problem-solving abilities of the best MBA students around the world.
HKUST was the only team from Asia, but the five-member team represented a highly international composition from around the globe including Lauren Bonds from the US, Claudia-Catharina Hase from Germany, Sashank Lanka from India, Hiraku Tsuzuki from Japan, and Shane Xiong from Mainland China.
Winner of internal competition
It began with Shane and Sashank forming a team of four with Lauren and Hiraku to compete in an internal case contest organized by the HKUST MBA Program. Each of the teams was required to include at least one member from Mainland PRC, one from the West, and one from non-PRC Asian - a combination that is likely to stimulate new ideas. The four-member international team won the competition, and also the tickets to travel abroad to compete in the prestigious Marshall Challenge.
The contest however required a team of five, and therefore they needed to recruit a fifth teammate in the class who could add value to the squad. Of many outstanding MBA students, Catharina, who had previously worked as a management consultant, was invited to join and the outcome proved they made the right decision.
Where opportunity meets preparation
The Marshall Challenge provided a good opportunity for the team to put their skills they learned from the program to test. The competition consisted of four weeks of preparation culminating in a two-day competition in the US. The competing teams were tasked to help the sponsor company, Yahoo! Inc., identify a differentiating media strategy in the digital media business.
The teams were required to deliver three separate presentations with analysis and recommendations focusing on industry trends, consulting methodology and the challenge the sponsor faced. They were judged by panels consisting of industry experts, consultants, and Yahoo’s leadership team.
The HKUST team prepared well for the competition. Team member Lauren said, “We spent a lot of time in sourcing the quality data and structured the information into a story that helped put across our recommendations to Yahoo.”
“Meanwhile, we created a list of questions that the judges would ask and made back-up slides in our presentation. When a question was asked, we were able to quickly show the slide to explain our answer, which helped assure the judges of our accuracy and credibility,” she added.
Learning from diversity
Although the team cannot disclose the recommended solution, they revealed that their success hinged on the way they looked into the future media and technology trends, and their innovative idea.
“Our team is highly diverse with teammates from different parts of the world. We also come from various work backgrounds including consulting, finance, marketing and an online business. The combination functioned well and provoked stimulating discussions and new thinking,” Catharina said.
The diverse combination has a range of benefits for the team. They could look into a very same question from a different perspective, for example.
The team said the competition provided an occasion where they could not only demonstrate their skills in front of an expert audience in the industry, but also learn how to relate and partner with people who were culturally different from themselves.
International case competitions are one of the key learning experiences that the HKUST MBA Program offers to its students. In addition to faculty support through training workshops and ongoing coaching, students are funded by the Business School to attend contests overseas. This year, a total of 78 students representing 20 teams will be sent out to compete in case competitions around the globe.