Wharton Undergraduate Case Competition

Together with a fellow GLOBEr and three other UNC students, I was selected to represent UNC at a case competition at Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. 18 teams from 12 different school were invited to participate. Although I have exams coming up, with the opportunity to try myself out against schools such as Harvard, Yale, Wharton and NYU, the chance to see Philadelphia and another US campus, and the solemn pride of being selected to represent the school, I accepted.

A case competition is an attempt to compete at business and hone skills such as critical thinking, team work, and presentation skills. A company (in this case Ernst and Young, an big accounting / consulting firm) writes a 10 page "case", a real-life example of a problem that a company has. You and your team then have to solve this problem by a deadline (here Friday at 9 AM, so some 60 hours from the time the case was released), and then present your findings and answer questions in front of a panel of judges. Even to the untrained "caser", a couple of points stand out. 1) The limited amount of time often means that there is very little diminishing returns to work - ie more work = better chance of winning. So sleep is often a luxury in this time frame. 2) There is never a single "correct" solution to a case. Because it is taken from the real world, a good solution is often an analysis of choices faced by the firm, and then arguing which option is the better.

This case was about the problem of a post-merger integration of two large wealth management companies (fascinating, right?). Essentially the company had problems with certain technologies after the integration, and found it difficult to pass information around the company. There were NO given numbers apart from the overall size of the company (normally you get an overview of their costs, revenues, profits, and how they spend their money). The problem posed was to create a "strategic blueprint" for 3-5 years of how the company could be better integrated - essentially how could the company better use the skills of its people, and how would we structure the flow of its information. This was qualitative, strategic, and without any numbers. My group worked hard and put in the hours needed. Our analysis was strong, our slide deck was professional, and our structure was coherent. So by Friday morning as we were driving to the airport, we all had a good feeling.


We didn't even make the final round. The anticlimax was unbearable, but that's competition. After the initial disappointment, I felt good about my effort and thought I had put up a good fight. We did well, but we were beaten by someone better. So although not having slept more than 3 out of the past 35 hours, I was content with helping myself to free tuna sandwiches and browsing around the consulting conference that was also on, looking forward to seeing the finalists and learn from someone better.

But the finalists were dire. They did well on most areas, coming up with interesting solutions and making it clear that they too had worked. But on so many other levels they disappointed me.´One was their PowerPoint, which looked like it had been made in an hour (I am no wizard at PPT, but I will definitely admit that it hurts my credibility. Luckily our group had other people with such talents). But it was mainly the lack of critique of their own assumptions. Groups said stuff like: "You should reinvent your organization", when talking about a hypothetical firm owning 35% of the market share and managing assets over $1 trillion, or "implementing this idea will cost you $3.5 billion dollars, but will definitely payoff in the long-run", when we were never told the composition of the company (so no idea where he got the 3.5 billion from), which ultimately showed when he didn't give a figure of the actual impact. Just assuming your idea is going to pay off is grasping at straws. Other moronic statements were: "this idea will improve efficiency by 99,5%" and "hiring midlevel managers will eliminate any problems of communication between the company's 800 offices". Some people did attempt to construct numbers (such as costs of acquiring a product; we did that) if these prices are available online, but then their calculations were poor. The cost of putting all your data into the cloud is not simply the cost of running the servers. You have to factor in license-fees, security, training of your employees if the program is different, and transferring hard data to the cloud, just to name a few. And then you cannot assume that it be implemented by tomorrow. I mean come on.

All case competition solutions have flaws, ours included. But the aim is to provide the most feasible solution, effectively showing how much information you can encompass without losing your chain of thought. From what I saw, I was not impressed. I did not feel I had lost to better opponents. So at the networking session afterwards, I spent my time soul-searching, as well as asking questions to try and understand their line of thought in order to improve for future cases.

My main take-away was "know your audience" and that case competitions also include luck. Ernst and Young is an accounting firm, but this case was written by IT-consulting (never knew). I also found out that the 2 judges in my room (there were several rooms of judges) were both Ph.D. statisticians. Speaking about knowledge transfer and corporate culture just didn't resonate with them. They would rather forgive a bad assumption and reward a line of thought that had data than reward a more feasible line of thought without data. The judge kept saying he wanted to know "how much" we would gain by creating a better platform for knowledge transfer, and I kept saying that with the data provided, his guess was as good as mine. It was like asking how much revenue will I get if I invest in R&D? I can tell you based on industry average (none exist for wealth management knowledge teams btw), or what the past 5 years have shown, but I can never tell you how much you will make by starting to invest in R&D now. Especially without numbers.

Apart from that it was an up-and-down experience. The networking event was a joke; companies sent people who hadn't even read the case and then proceeded to ask questions about how it was. If you are going to represent your company then at least seem like you are prepared. The worst moment was when a young woman who had been hired in September proceeded to tell me that "she had not expected more from an undergraduate competition, that she was sure I did well and tried my best, and the competition is a great learning experience for us all about the real world". Another point was that none of the finalists were Ivy League. I guess that makes them beatable - good to know.:) I also strolled around their beautiful campus, had dinner and drinks with 5 GLOBErs from previous batches (most of whom work for BCG), and made good friends with those who had been through this ordeal with me. Perhaps next time we'll make it a bit further.