Last month, Ross classmates Tina Chung, Anna Eaton, Ash Easwar, Arcelia Gomez, and Lauren Hoepper competed in the Deloitte Human Capital Case Competition. The HCC Board caught up with two of them to hear about their experience.
Question: What made you want to participate in the case competition?
Anna: I came to Ross with an interest in Human Capital Consulting. I saw the case competition as an opportunity to have access to the Deloitte network and to practice the casing method. I was also really excited to work with a team to come up with innovative solutions to human capital challenges!
Question: What was it like to do the competition so soon after starting school?
Ash: The case competition happened before I had even really begun casing. So myself and the team knew a couple of frameworks, but still had a lot to learn. However, this was part of the fun! Deloitte made it clear that they knew participants were coming in fresh since it was so early in the process. They just wanted to see what our thought processes were like and how we approached solving a difficult problem.
Question: What was the topic of the case competition? How did you prepare?
Anna: The topic was super interesting to us all because it was a broad strategy case combined with human capital strategy. We were tasked with figuring out how to expand a company called Hidrovias, a transportation company in Brazil, that was founded on the effort to be more environmentally friendly and had just become the first company to leverage Brazil’s waterway for the transport of goods. This led to unexpected growth that they were struggling to keep up with. From a human capital standpoint, we worked on helping to keep employees on the same page through the growth process and developing effective managers.
Ash: We prepared using a divide and conquer strategy. Two of us focused on the strategy aspects of the case and the other three worked on the human capital aspect. To develop our solution, we incorporated thinking from Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends reports and writings on the future of work. Leading up to the competition, we used every free moment we had to dedicate to the case. During the actual competition, we only got 4 hours of sleep!!
Question: What is something you were able to learn about Human capital through the case competition?
Anna: I learned how integral the combination of strategy and human capital is: you can’t have a strategy without thinking about the people aspect of it. The competition made me even more excited to work in human capital because it will give me the opportunity to work cross-functionally with strategy. Meeting the other case competition teams was fun as well! We hung out with the Duke team and it was great to connect with other people interested in human capital!
Ash: I liked seeing how many solutions there are to solve one human capital problem. As I’m casing, I think back on that and remind myself that there is no one solution to a case and that there are many different ways to solve a human capital or strategy problem.
Question: What are your big takeaways from having experienced this or what advice would you have for MBAs who want to do this a competition like this?
Anna: It is so important to try to get physically together with your team from day one to develop the strategy. We did a lot of it over the phone because it was hard to coordinate schedules, and we felt it would have been best to get together right from the beginning to help with the cohesiveness of the strategy moving forward.
Ash: As a team, we did a lot of background research on the business problem that we used to inform our solution, but didn’t directly include in our presentation or appendix. hat this taught me is not to take too narrow of an approach to solving human capital problems. Any background information you find is probably relevant to directly mention.