12 Jan 2007: There's a case to be made for MBAs
The Gazette
12 January 2007
Montreal Gazette
Copyright © 2007 Montreal Gazette
The debate about the value of an MBA degree seems to be a perennial one.
And plenty of people are ready to disparage business schools for failing to provide their students with training for the real world.
But I got a decidedly different impression after spending a half-day as a judge at this year's John Molson MBA International Case Competition organized by Concordia University's business school.
Thirty-six teams are entered at the Bonaventure Hilton Hotel in the 26th edition of the event. Along with Canadian schools are teams from universities in France, Germany, Finland, India, Sweden, England, China and the United States, competing in a round-robin format until semifinalists are chosen and a winner is declared tomorrow.
From what I saw, they were a quick-thinking and articulate bunch as they made presentations on business cases they had seen for the first time, just three hours earlier.
Indeed, if there's a premium in the business world for employees who can assimilate and analyze large amounts of information quickly, develop strategy and defend it under withering pressure, then this is a good place to find them.
A lot of companies do just that, according to Hani Farag, a vice-president of human resources at Bombardier Aerospace who serves as chairman of the board of the case competition.
Bombardier has hired a couple of students from previous competitions, he said, and many companies are on the lookout for talent at such events.
Concordia claims to have started the case competition phenomenon in 1981, but by now, these events have become fairly common. Similar ones are held each year by McGill, HEC and Laval.
They've become a recruiting bonanza for companies who pony up sponsorship money. Bombardier, CAE, EDC, Molson Coors, the National Bank and the Montreal Exchange are among the corporate backers this year who kicked in $150,000 of the $200,000 operating budget for the Concordia event
It has also become a marketing dream for schools anxious to show off their stuff.
Pierre Brunet, a Concordia business professor and faculty adviser to the competition, admits teams are heavily coached prior to the contest (although coaches can't be in the room when the teams, each made up of four students, get their cases and prepare their presentations).
But even with all the advance coaching, the students still have to step up and perform.
The two teams before our judging panel were from the University of Western Ontario's Richard Ivey School and from Concordia. The real-life case before them: how a small, family-owned Guyanese food company by the name of Vegetarian Gardens should go about expanding its business into new markets.
It wasn't an obvious call. The case contained little hard information about the company's sales and finances.
But it did offer some intriguing information about potential markets in neighbouring countries like Brazil, Venezuela, Suriname and Trinidad.
And it contained a problem common to many family-owned businesses: a founding entrepreneur who was a bit of a control-freak and a son (attending business school in Canada) with ambitions to take the company onto the international stage.
The trick for the students was to make realistic, credible recommendations based on the information at hand, without reading too much into the limited financial numbers.
Our judging panel gave the nod to the Ivey School based on a realistic plan to bring the son back home to learn the business basics and help lead an expansion into the Trinidadian city of Port of Spain.
I was particularly impressed when we asked the Ivey crew about possible risks to their plan and they responded by whipping an acetate into an overhead projector that assessed all the risks in their options.
Student organizers of the Concordia competition get academic credit for their efforts.
"We started working on this last April," said one of the organizers, Barbara Ann Crivello. "We've done everything from raising the sponsorship money, to organizing the logistics to booking the hotel."
Those are skills you don't learn in a classroom - a reason why competitions like this help make the much-maligned MBA degree a little more tuned to real life.
