Archive for April, 2010
Georgetown Strategy Worldcup
One of the most exciting things when you do an MBA are the opportunities outside of the classrooms. You can engage in sports or business clubs, go to different guest speakers, fairs etc. One of these things are case competitions that many MBA schools are hosting throughout a year.
Three friends and I made a spontaneous decision to participate in the Georgetown Strategy Worldcup when we had lunch together out on the ESADE terrace one day. A week later we received the case prompt for the first round. It was about Germany’s planned subvention for the Opel/Magna deal and how Daimler should react to these plans. The case reflected the emphasis of the competition – combining strategic decisions with public policy issues. Some days after submitting our presentation we received the good news that we were selected as one of 5 teams (out of 29 initially) that was invited to Washington DC to participate in the final round.
With this invitation we also received our new case prompt. We were to analyze the situation of GMO authorization (genetically modified organisms) in the EU with regards to changes that have recently been proposed by the European Commission. We started working on it right away and were quite startled by the complexity of the topic and by the huge amount of information out there.
We finally left Barcelona for Washington on Wednesday with the submission deadline just 18 hours away. It would be the quickest flight all of us ever had. 9 hours went by very quickly as we were frantically producing slides on the plane. We submitted just in time and had about a day to prepare our presentation. We finally presented on Friday, April 9th. We had 15 minutes, a real challenge to cover all we had prepared …
Luckily we were the third team to present, so we had the chance to see two other teams presenting after us. All of us were very impressed by the presentations of the other teams from Duke, NYU, University of Maryland and Georgetown. So it came as a little surprise to us, when at 4pm our team was announced the winner of the Georgetown Strategy Worldcup!
It honestly was an amazing experience. Working in a team of friends with complementing strength is really rewarding. We met a lot of new people, also because the Georgetown MBA was also so nice to invite us to their annual MBA formal Friday night. We partied hard and on top of that DC spoiled us with clear skies and some perfect spring days! What a weekend …
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ESADE is on a roll !
There has been several competitions happening throughout these two terms and it’s been really interesting and motivating to find out that ESADE won in many of them. Winning the Georgetown Strategy World Cup competition in Washington D.C, followed by the Adidas case competition, and the Société Générale’s Citizen Act competition (their “Bank Better” concept received praise from the jury for originality and thoroughness) are just great success stories. Not only I am proud of the winning teams but also even better is ESADE’s increasing visibility. Congratulations to all the teams and hope we keep having such a proactive and exciting term!