Hugging, learning and winning
Last week, team HOW Consulting, comprising of this societies’ very own Gergely and Istvan plus Jasper from the Netherlands, won the Challenge:Future, Future of Work competition. This challenge entailed finding a way to boost Eastern Europe’s declining competitiveness, which is a result of being stuck in the middle between the more knowledge intensive West and more cost-efficient East. From a strategy consultancy point of view, this challenge is relevant and a lot of fun. From a personal point of view, the event subsuming this challenge was overwhelmingly interesting.
Yes, we won a 3-month A.T. Kearney internship for one of our team members and, yes, I landed a great strategy consultancy job as a result of this win. The main point in this case competition, as I have come to find in many, is not about that, though. The process of coming to a solution with a team you like and respect and the event in which the winners are announced are the best reasons to get (or stay) involved in case competitions.
So, let’s go over what happened to team HOW Consulting the last couple of months. Around January, someone made us aware of this challenge and our team got ready to go. Individual participants of HOW Consulting have jointly competed in over one hundred case competitions, about five of which together. Given that we had won neither of those together, combined with the rather competitive nature of all team members, we were set on doing well here. We structured, analyzed, modeled and wrote like never before. Talking about girl problems in the Google Doc chat while mining data for hours on end must definitely be one of the highs or lows, completely dependent on how you want to flip the pancake. Despite being a very experienced team, doing all this took a lot of time, all of which we considered to be a lot of fun. Results reflected this sentiment, as we kept moving up the rounds, going from 600 teams, to 50, to just 3.
After all this, in July we heard we were invited to the finals, which were to take place in a weeklong event. We had no idea what this Challenge Future summit was about and were a bit sour when it turned out that one of our team members – due to his other obligations – can’t come over for the one day out of these seven that would be reserved for the competition itself. Once we received the program, a 10 page document using at least as many colors and pictures, our notion of what this whole thing was really about became even more opaque. Given, however, that we were given free trip and accommodation, were told that people with 30+ nationalities would come over and we would get to meet some of Slovenia’s senior government, being open-minded about what was to come was not so hard.
In this end, this lack of skepticism payed out in ways we could never have expected. Greg and I, the ones representing our team, met some amazing people over there. Apart from learning about strategy consultancy in creating and presenting the solution, they enabled us to learn a lot about ourselves, how we differ from different cultures and what we have in common. This turned out the be the whole point of the summit, to develop future leaders by having them bond and teach each other. These competitions were just a pretense to get the right people together in order to maximize the effect of this ambition. We were tricked. How marvelous.
Days were immensely long, waking up around 700 and going places at 800 and collapsing at 200 or 300. Getting lectures, solving yet other cases for local businesses and passing through one convention after the other, in which we took part in panel discussions. Besides this externally-oriented program, basically spreading what we already had, the organizers also employed all sorts of means to get us closer together through conventional means such as parties, but also less conventional ones, including, but not limited to massaging, hugging, extended eye staring and having intense dialogues in a dark clock tower.
Case competitions rock. There’s free trips, big prices and they might well help you land cool jobs. I think, however, this is all arbitrary as compared to how much fun it is to work with a well-oiled team on a challenge you like and to events such as this were you get to bond, albeit in somewhat unconventional but nonetheless very effective ways, with incredible people. Taking your eyes of the price and cherishing the journey applies in many more facets of life. Why not experiment with its consequences in this one?
Jasper de Vries