Graduate Studies Blog

Article written by Zeeshan Ashraf.

It was a privilege to represent Nanyang Business School at John Molson MBA case competition. The intense 5 days long competition kept us on our toes and we left the competition with a steep learning curve. The experience is a major highlight of our MBA experience at Nanyang Business school and we feel it important to share our learnings and experiences with our MBA cohort.

First day- Networking event over cocktails.

36 schools participated in 2017 edition of John Molson MBA case competition. The experience for John Molson case competition had started for us with the internal selection rounds within our cohort. In total two case competition were held with initial requirement of one page essay on motivation for competing in John Molson case competition.

Once our team was selected, we went through rigorous total 9 training sessions. Alumni from previous years including Akshay, Cory, Sunitha, Aswathi and Jonah participated in team’s training. The training schedule lasted until second week of December as couple of team members had plans for Christmas vacation.

Once at John Molson, the show started in no time. The stakes seemed high in an extremely international and diverse environment. We met Prof. Patrick Gibbons, who is our global leadership professor at the competition where he was representing his school in Ireland as coach.

Our first case in the competition was on Apple Watch and Swatch. We lost this case and ended up at the bottom of our pool. The team had only 4 points with leading teams scoring 37 points. The team morale went down like a plane, and we held late night meetings on first day to discuss what went wrong and what needed to be done differently in the next cases.

The second day was big for us. We had to literally win all cases after losing first case, and the second day had two back-to-back cases. We went into the second day with the learnings from first day and with slight modifications in our case study method and presentation, and won both cases on. The team was back on winning streak and felt good about it. However, the pressure was still immense as every case had to be won in order to qualify for semi-finals.

While competing in cases, we also had a chance to witness other teams’ performances as well. Nanyang team’s methodology for case competition was superior to many. We felt content.

The third day has a live case and hockey game. We won the live case and came back from hockey game after just first quarter as the tea was still recovering from jet lag and had to recover for next day’s case competition.

The fourth day of the case competition had both the last case for Round Robin and semi-finals for qualifying teams. We won the last case competition in Round Robin and emerged as division winners while qualifying for semi-finals.

In semi-finals, our team was up against teams from Cape Town and Calgary. The team from Calgary won the semi-finals from our pool and qualified for finals.

The overall experience of going through the competition, networking with students from other business schools and building reputation for Nanyang Business school was really enriching. We realized that Nanyang Business School has a strong reputation among participating schools at John Molson case competition and we met the organizer’s expectations of living up to our school’s reputation.

The learnings we have got from this case competition are going to be lifelong. Listening to everyone’s ideas open mindedly was the key to our teamwork. We also learned to not be afraid to think of big ideas and solutions for a given business problem. The diversity of real-life business cases at the case competition gave us a flavor of real business challenges, which tend to be complex and intricate. The coaches who trained us were exceptional. Especially, Jonah, who travelled with us to the competition, not only helped us unwind our thought process for different business challenges and gave us different perspective of things, but also helped us a lot with fetching coffee and cookies during our case competitions. His kindness and dedication to our team and school seems unparalleled.

Post event get-together at Hai Di Lao, Singapore.