This year’s East Meets West MBA Leadership Case Competition was true to its name with teams from Simon Fraser University (Burnaby, B.C.) and Concordia University (Montreal, Que.) selected as the finalists by judges in Calgary, Alta. In the end, the Concordia team edged out the competition and was awarded the first-place prize of $1,000.
A collaboration between Ivey’s Ian O. Ihnatowycz Institute for Leadership and the Canadian Centre for Advanced Leadership in Business at the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business, the competition challenges participants to work through live business cases while balancing the fiscal demands of a good business with the ethical demands of good leadership. It ran Feb. 8-10 at the University of Calgary.
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Managing a crisis
In the first round, students from the nine participating universities were organized into mixed teams and required to collaborate, make decisions, and present case solutions with individuals they had just met. The business case focused on Nestlé India’s crisis following the discovery of unsafe levels of lead in its popular and iconic product, Maggi noodles. The case included aspects of supply chain management, communication strategies and brand management, regulatory systems, cultural sensitivities, and corporate accountability.
Leading transformational change
In the final round, teams presented solutions on leading transformational change at TVOntario. The public service broadcaster needs to continue to fulfill its mandate of offering education to Ontarians (and beyond) while recognizing that traditional methods of delivery (i.e. television) are experiencing massive disruption. During presentation preparation, each team was granted 10 minutes to ask questions of TVO CEO Lisa de Wilde. Although not a judge, de Wilde watched the case presentations and said she appreciated the ideas and solutions put forward by each team. In her keynote address, she revealed how TVO is evolving to be directly immersed in the classroom and is playing a critical role in transforming how kids learn and teachers teach.
“Our secret sauce is leveraging our ability to weave the Ontario curriculum and 21st century pedagogy with digital technology,” she said.
