Twelve different business schools from across the globe will convene to compete at UCLA today.
Teams of five MBA students will vie to represent their school at the two-day second annual Global Business Leadership Competition.
UCLA’s own team consists of five very different members. Each are now students at the UCLA Anderson School of Management who decided to attend the school after working for various global companies.
They will be presented with and must solve three different business-related cases.
“We’re given information that we’re supposed to prepare the response to or identify how we’re supposed to solve it,” said Oxana Hickok, one competitors representing the Anderson School.
Hickok, who is originally from Russia, is one of five UCLA competitors. The others include Alberto Adorini of Italy, Guillermo Lagos of Mexico, Yod Chinsupakul of Thailand and Marcos Perez of Spain.
The cases cover modern topics which world business leaders are dealing with today, Hickok said. They could range from leadership challenges to global issues.
For instance, if the case has to do with a company’s new acquisition, the competitors must decide how to integrate that company and choose a leader for it, said Meera Damle, the lead coordinator of the competition.
Alternatively, if that hypothetical company is involved in a scandal in the news, the team must choose how they would present it to the media, she said.
Though the competition will be fierce among the best graduate business schools in the world, the UCLA team members must rely mostly on their learning experiences thus far when participating.
“To prepare, we talked to the UCLA team that participated in the competition last year,” Hickok said.
“We’re also meeting with an adviser and hoping to get some good tips from him of how we should approach the competition.”
The team is also trying to spend as much time together as a group and build chemistry.
“We did meet three or four times, the first time was just to get to know each other. I knew a couple members out of the five and this was pretty much the situation for everybody,” said Adorini, another of the Anderson competitors.
Aside from having a strong relationship, they’re hoping their prior knowledge will assist them.
“There’s not a whole lot they can do,” Damle said. “It’s taking all the experience they have and drawing from that.”
But winning the competition is not necessarily the UCLA Anderson team’s main focus, Adorini said.
“I think the team feels that, yes, we want to compete and win, but it’s more just a group experience,” he said. “We’re trying to enjoy the experience.”
For the first case, the business students have three hours to read the case, prepare the presentation and present their solutions, Damle said.
The student teams are mixed up with students from the other schools to solve the second case and are given one hour to present a resolution. The final case is on Saturday, a longer day during which five hours are allotted to presenting the last case.
A panel of business professions from the Los Angeles community will judge the competition, Damle said. The top three teams are presented cash prizes.
Competing will allow the students of all the schools meet students from around the world in a global effort to prepare future leaders for the business world.
The competition in general is a way for student to put in practice what they’ve learned, Adorini said.
“This competition looks even more interesting because of its international level,” he said.
“People are coming from all over the world. I definitely think it’ll be a good experience.”