Cornell Business

A team of students from the Johnson School recently took first place in the Leeds School of Business / Net Impact 2003 International Case Competition held at the University of Colorado at Boulder.  Michael Ford '04, Heather Henyon '03, Erin McMahon '03, and Roland Springer '03 competed against teams from business schools representing 15 U.S. and Canadian universities including UCLA, NYU, Thunderbird, Indiana, McGill and UNC-Chapel Hill.  The Johnson School team defeated BYU and Case Western Reserve in the final round to receive the first prize of $1600.  The team intends to donate the proceeds to the Community Impact Club as seed funding for a non-profit internship fund.

The Leeds School of Business/Net Impact Case Competition brings together students from different MBA programs to address a business sustainability or social responsibility issue.  The objective of the social-impact-oriented competition is to analyze a business case and make recommendations to increase the organization's bottom line while employing the concepts of sustainable business.  Each entry was judged on a number of aspects, including problem identification and analysis, quality and feasibility of recommendations, ability to answer judges' questions, in addition to clarity, logic, and delivery of the overall presentation.

Cases were handed out at 7:00 p.m. the evening of Friday, March 7, while final PowerPoint presentations were turned in by 8:30 a.m. the next morning.  The case involved a global pharmaceutical manufacturers' implementation of the UN Global Compact, a compact that brings corporations together with UN agencies, labor and civil society to support human rights, labor and the environment as an integral part of doing business. 

Central to the team's analysis was John Kotter's Organizational Change Model, which was used to demonstrate that incomplete efforts hampered the transformation required for implementation of the Global Compact.  The team suggested that a lack of urgency and failure to create a compelling vision hindered the company's efforts to ingrain the principles of the UN Global Compact into their organizational culture.  Furthermore, the team recommended that the company lead efforts to create an industry coalition to address "right to health" issues in developing countries.  The team also recommended that the company engage external stakeholders to create a balanced scorecard aimed to evaluate progress toward the UN Global Compact's fundamental principles.

The Johnson School's participation in this case competition was supported by both the Park Foundation and a grant from the Suter-Staley Endowment for Global Business Education.

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