Nanyang (NTU) Asian Business Case Competition (ABCC) 2007, Oct 8-13

Already the title sounds impressive, isn't it?

Indeed, it was a huge pleasure to attend the ABCC and represent my Alma Mater, The University of St. Gallen with three other Swiss (two of them on exchange at the very NTU itself and one flew in solely for this purpose from Switzerland).
Sad only that the NTU campus is "so far" (25km or so from the Woodlands?) away at the Western edge of S'pore (and it takes ages (i.e. 80min.) to get there.

Cool was the accommodation, the Executive Center, a fairly well equipped Hotel usually used for Manager Seminars or so.

Monday, Oct 8:
I just arrived back from KL at 9.30am in the Woodlands, took a shower, caught my suitcase and was off for NTU.
In the evening we had our welcome dinner with a lot of fun, small games etc. where every university (12, among them Rotterdam, St. Gallen, State Unis of Washington, Minnesota, Florida, South Carolina, UBS Vancouver, Otago, Thammasat Thailand, NTU, HK UST, another NZ school) presented itself briefly.
After the "formal" part we gathered at the pub nearby for a drink and already there you could see how competitive all the others saw their task. Most of them had already a competition at home as selection criteria and have already forged strong team ties. Some have studied business cases intensively. There have been people who were quite laid-back, others might have been over-ambitious...
In comparison, we Swiss just met for the first on Monday for lunch, discussing how life is in Singapore. For all of us, this was the first case competition ever. And for me, as a non-business student it was funny to see how our business-folks would perform.
Funny was that every team got an "ambassador" (= a nanny, in our case a cute one, who took care of the team, gave infos about logistics and so on)

Tuesday, Oct 9:
We gathered in suits for the opening ceremony and a key note speech plus lunch talks at banquet tables. Nanyang business school dean Prof Singh welcomed us - a strange Indian who came in from Wharton School, UPenn, and was on the advisory committee for establishing SMU (one NTU student told me, Singh did not like it there so he changed to NTU --> everybody seem to be extremely keen on his/her own school, often denigrating the others. It this - looking down on others - what you call being competitive????).

The Econ Prof was even more strange. His speech on the Asian Financial Crisis 1997, its underlyings and the future outlook (will there be another one?) was to some extent inflammatory, defending capital controls, blaming the IMF and using bizarre rationales for this. Only after some critical questions came up he started to become more differentiated and serious in choosing his words. But still, I found his way of addressing things completely off the track, influencing poor, unknowledgeable business students about Monetary and Macroeconomics in the wrong way.

During the lunch talk I did not really get along with our Malaysian expert (whose name I still do not know...) and the facilitator who wasn't. He said good things, but didn't understand what I was trying to say (ok, my communicative skills are worst, I know). But why criticize me in structuring the dialogue (when the facilitator was silent and noone had a clue what the topic was all about) and starting with Macro Econ (when the prof's speech was abt this) and then saying exactly the same stuff 15min later?

Tuesday afternoon we went out for exploring Singapore by bus, boat and feet organized by the NTU; this was cool. Some of the pic's are on flickr. The day ended after supper in Chinatown in Harry's pub on the Singapore river bay.


Wednesday - Thursday, Oct 10/11:
On wednesday we got the case and separated ourselves. Our HSG team met, read the stuff and set itself to work. We took the matter quite serious, but it took a while to coordinate us and structure out thoughts. Nobody had an idea at first about the case's Keppel Offshore&Marine firm.
But still, we got some sleep as well (4-7 hours roughly per day? depends on who you ask in our team:-). Other teams put in more time and slept apparently just 2 hours per day during the solution-prep time.
We had constantly hunger, although I ate as much as never before (although the food was not that good, rice and noodles all the time).

Friday, Oct 12:
I handed in the USB stick (flash drive for Americans) with our ppt-presentation at 1.53am, then went to bed. Others have finished at 6.55am, minutes before the deadline at 7am... Asians tend to use every minute to work on the problem, I was told.

We had our presentation at 10.30, but rehearsed too few times and have been prepared not that good. Our team felt quite bad after the presentation in front of 3 judges, since a lot of details went wrong.
The 12 teams have been structured in 4 groups, the best presenting team of each group would go to the finals on Friday afternoon. We competed in our group against Rotterdam (seemingly a holiday-hobby crew more interested in drinking/alc without any Dutch, but Italian, German and 2 Poles) and HK UST.

Apparently, we didn't reach the finals, so we enjoyed them watching 4 quite different presentations.
- Rotterdam: bit unprepared, rushed throught the slides, somewhat bad layout, but a lot of business-style charts
- NTU: professional, but many slides (more to impress?), focus on risk mgmt and due to my drowsyness I didn't really hear any concrete solution.
- Florida: simple, using SWOT and Vision first (as we did...), straightforward recommendations, stripped down-version (it seemed they didn't know that much abt the case/industry), but superbly presented and very consistent/cohesive.
- South Carolina: good ideas, but screw-up with financials (never mention this if you lack some figures and have problems in calculating!!), forgot to treat the oil rigs...

--> Florida won, probably because they have been the most consistend and clear-cut.

In the evening we gathered at the Asian Civilization Museum for a Gala Dinner. In the end, everybody got a nice pen.


Saturday, Oct 13:
I had to leave "early" at 9.30 to get back to the Woodlands and work on papers