Texas MBAs Talk

The Deloitte Consulting Challenge. Presented with a case at 6:30 pm, you and 4 team members are expected to read, digest, analyze, make recommendations, and present results by 8:30 am the next day. For some of you this may not be that obvious. It wasn’t for me. Basically this means you have ALL NIGHT to come up with a presentation to deliver, coherently i might add, a logical presentation to senior members of the Deloitte Consulting team after little to no sleep.

This challenge is one of many here on campus that are available to first year MBA students. When I first heard of these challenges, I thought you would have to be crazy to even consider it. Come on, staying up all night for the sake of it? That sounded crazy to me. But then someone mentioned a whole lot of money, a chance to get in front of recruiters at a top consulting firm, and a chance to work on my case analysis skills (which need some serious work by the way).  I slowly changed my mind. It was even more attractive a few months back when a good friend of mine approached me with the idea of pulling a team together. He was someone I really wanted to work with, and at the time, I was thinking of going down the path of trying to be a consultant so I was quick to jump at the opportunity.

As we finally got our full team together, I was very confident in our chances to do well. We were a group of strong personalities and I figured that would translate well into a strong presence in front of the judges. As I have heard from many participants in other and past case competitions, it’s the presentation that matters most. I figured we were all set - not to mention all the preparation we did.  Weeks prior to the actual challenge we met numerous times: we analyzed individual strengths and weaknesses, planned our strategy for the night of, booked the big work room in the Carpenter Center, scheduled a Plus coach (a communications expert that is at our disposal here at school, especially for challenges, to clean up delivery of presentations, messages, etc) and we even consulted a second year who had won two challenges she competed in last year. As the night approached, we were full of confidence….

We received our case and quickly flipped through the deck to find out that it was about social networking (Facebook, MySpace, etc) which seemed like a very interesting case to analyze. We were further boosted by the fact that one of our team members had already done some work on his own on the ins and outs of social networking so that only added to our confidence. As sat down to read the case in more detail, I could see the sense of confidence oozing out from each of my team members. We didn’t know if we were going to win or not at that point, but we had a feeling we would do well.

The most important part of an all night case competition is to come to a consensus as to which strategy you would employ early, address each and every question asked in the case, and make sure that everyone is striving to that goal. By 11pm we were on that route. By that time we had deduced our plan, assigned responsibilities, and come up with a skeleton recommendation. As the night wore on we knew all that was standing in between us was pulling it all together and delivering a good message. For that, we had the Plus coach who was coming in from 5-6am to evaluate our presentation. We were golden…

Well, that is until about 4:30 am rolled around and we finally came together to discuss where we stood on everything before putting together the presentation deck. It turned out that for 5 and half hours 3 of us were working towards one recommendation and the other two were working towards another!!! So when the Plus coach walked in, thinking he was going to be watching us present our deck, what he saw was something completely different: each of arguing (that strong personality thing coming through) in defense of our given strategies. For the next hour the Plus coach spent his time, diffusing arguments and pointing us in constructive directions so that we would actually have something to present to the judges come 7:45 am. He left at 6am so we had an hour and a half to merge the presentation into something coherent. And we took every single one of those minutes, turning in our file just in time. I think that we were somehow punished by the case challenge powers that be, because they had somehow determined that our group would be among the first groups to present which meant an 8:30 presentation.  That left us with no time to practice a presentation that none of us had seen, which meant a nearly impossible challenge of making it to the finals round.

Although our presentation did not go as poorly as we thought it would at 8am, it didn’t go as we were hoping only a few hours before. We didn’t make it through to the finals round, but I don’t think that we were at all surprised by the judge’s decision. We could and should have done better. I mean with all the prep work we did, how could this have happened? I don’t think any of us know for sure, but we will be laughing at about this night for years to come. It also secured career decisions for all but one of us. Other Texas MBAs aspiring to get into Consulting now have 4 fewer people to compete with for those precious interview spots. HA!!

As for me personally, I am off to the Wall Street Trek tomorrow afternoon in search of a career in I-Banking. Please check back soon to find out that went for me…