POST-COMPETITION: HINDSIGHT IS ALWAYS 20-20
Ryan Rowe
Monday, January 10th, 2005, 12:01am
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

We're back in Toronto now, reflecting on what it's like to taste defeat after having practiced for so long and so hard.  First of all, an apology to all those who visited the website late last week looking for updates on our progress, especially after the sombre tone of Wednesday's posting.  There were too many things on my mind and schedule for me to hammer out an update for the site.

On Thursday, our team went into the live case ready to come back at full-speed.  The sponsoring company for the live case portion of the competition turned out to be JetBlue, our second airline analysis of the week.  Using our knowledge from the previous case and armed with a better sense of what the judges were expecting, our team delivered a winning performance to a panel of five executives.

Our team felt slightly better after this win, but a quick check of the results board showed that we only had a mathematical chance of making it into the semi-finals.  For Friday's case we would need to win by a large margin AND hope that a leading team in our division would lose and fall behind.

Dave, Paul, Mark and I were all pretty pumped up going into the Friday session.  After our win the day before we felt ready to conquer the world.  We went head to head against Memorial University of Newfoundland, one of the top teams in our division and a likely contender for a semi-finals spot.  The case that day was Charles River Laboratories, a large player in the life sciences industry.  We wasted not a single minute during our three hour prep and put together a full strategy that covered all of the issues outlined.  The judges agreed with our recommendation and gave us a win.  The entire team felt it was our best performance since September and a personal best for all of us.  Unfortunately, we still missed the semi-finals due to other team wins that did not go in our favour.

Our entire team is taking solace in the fact that there were some fantastic learnings from the four-months of practice and competition.  Our presentation skills improved and we learned a whole lot about marketing, strategy, and real-life business practice.  I acquired a fantastic new methodology for problem-solving which I am sure will stay with me for life.  I would specifically like to say thank you to MBA Program Director Dr. Ashwin Joshi, who is a very kind and patient teacher.  He put up with so much grief throughout four months of practice... We appreciate so much all of the things he did for us.

I made five fantastic new friends in my mentors and teammates.  Ashwin, Shakeel, Dave Chan, Mark, Paul, you guys were awesome to work with.  Thanks for some great life lessons in teamwork and support as well as a ton of laughs.

Despite all of this, it's hard to describe how I feel right now.  I'm still in a daze.  I wanted to win this competition so bad I could almost taste it...

WHATEVER DOESN'T KILL YOU ... ONLY MAKES YOU STRONGER.

For the final results of the competition,
visit the official website of the
2005 John Molson MBA International Case Competition:

http://www.mbacasecomp.com

PHOTOS FROM THE COMPETITION WILL BE POSTED SOON.

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