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Insights@Questrom Podcast
The Insights@Questrom Podcast digs a bit deeper into thought-provoking ideas on emerging business topics from faculty, alumni, and others from the Boston University Questrom School of Business. For more insights, visit insights.bu.edu
Insights@Questrom Podcast
Bridging the Classroom to the Real World
On this episode of the Insights@Questrom Podcast, we talk to Greg Stoller, Master Lecturer of Strategy and Innovation and Director of Questrom Case Competitions, and Robyn Johnson, Questrom Undergraduate Academic Advisor and part-time MBA student, Class of 2024.
Following her team's recent win, Robyn discusses her experience competing in Questrom's 5th annual Battle of the Boutiques competition, where teams of students are challenged to form, storm, norm, and perform in just 7 days. Additionally, Greg and Robyn discuss Questrom's Global Management Experience, which offers more opportunities for international learning and experiential learning.
We created Battle of the Boutiques so that we would allow our students an opportunity to have different looks of their resumes and have prospective employers see them in action.
Speaker 2:On this episode of the Insights at Questrum podcast, we take a closer look at two examples of action learning and how they're complementing the Questrum learning experience. Let's bring up next. Greetings everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Insights at Questrum podcast. In this episode, Insights at Questrum contributor Shannon Light sat down with Greg Stoller, master lecturer of strategy and innovation and director of Questrum case competitions, and Robin Johnson, Questrum undergraduate academic advisor and part-time MBA student. Robin shares insights into her experience as a competitor and member of the winning team in Questrum's fifth annual Battle of the Boutiques. Then Greg and Robin go on to discuss how Questrum's global management experience provides increased chances for both international and experiential learning opportunities. Here's Shannon Light.
Speaker 3:We are pleased to be here with Greg Stoller, master lecturer of strategy and innovation and director of Questrum case competitions, along with Robin Johnson, questrum undergraduate academic advisor and part-time MBA student class of 2024. Thank you both so much for joining us today.
Speaker 1:Thanks for the opportunity.
Speaker 3:I would love to discuss with you both today more about the Questrum's fifth annual Battle of the Boutiques case competition, as well as the global management experience at Questrum. But to begin I would love quick intro on the general mission of the Battle of the Boutiques case competition from both of your perspectives.
Speaker 1:Sure, I will start. Battle of the Boutiques was started five years ago by Dan Spice and myself. Dan works in the Feld Career Services Office. A number of our graduate students not just full-time MBAs but also evening MBAs as well as one-year, especially master's students really want to work in consulting. A lot of students think it's binary you either work for MBB McKinsey Bay and a Boston Consulting Group or don't. Obviously, a number of us in the building and across the university feel quite differently and strongly about that.
Speaker 1:We created Battle of the Boutiques so that we would allow our students an opportunity to have different looks of their resumes and have prospective employers see them in action. The way the format works is I write an original case every year and we bring in mentors and judges to help the teams prepare the case and then present it. One of the judges is obviously the protagonist from the case study, but all of the mentors and most of the judges are not only professional consultants but also hiring managers at these boutiques strategy consulting firms. Again, it's not just a matter of reading a student's resume in the resume book, but now seeing our students in action. I think one thing that Dan and I are extremely proud of is every year. For the past five years, one of the participants was able to parlay this opportunity for themselves, his or themselves, into a job, if not at one of the participating boutiques consulting firms, one of their close competitors, wow that's great.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Greg. No, I'm curious. I'm Robin. I know you are a part-time MBA student. How did you become involved in this year's case competition? Great question.
Speaker 4:I have worked with Greg for the last three or four years on what we're going to talk about later, which is the global management experience, and had expressed to Greg throughout our conversations around that program. We've become quite close colleagues and friends and so we talk a little bit about what's next, what's in the future, what I'm excited about. He was telling me about how excited he was to plan this fifth annual event and this case competition. He said you know, I'm thinking, maybe consulting. And he says you know it's not something you want to explore. He says I have this case competition. It's happening in two weeks. Do you want to participate? And I was not necessarily a student who had that on my radar and wasn't really thinking about it. It's a lot to do a full-time job and then also take classes. I was taking classes three times a week at the first half of the semester, so it was a lot to add on a little bit extra. But Greg gave me an extra push and said you know, I think you'd be really good at this. You should give it a shot. I kind of took a leap, not really knowing what I was getting myself into, but having a lot of faith that Greg's process is going to be really exciting and interesting way to kind of flex some muscles that I haven't necessarily flexed in a little while.
Speaker 4:I don't have a lot of experience in case competitions. We do one as a part of our launch program at Orientations. The first thing that you do when you enter the BUNBA program is your orientation is a case competition. So before I had taken a single class, they just throw you into it and they're like here, solve this problem. I don't know what, like I barely know what our allies are. I don't know what a KPI is and this was at this point three years ago. So I have learned what the things mean and how to use them and how to think about the strategy around different solving different business problems. So it was really interesting to kind of see I have learned a lot in the last couple of years about how to approach these different business problems. So with a push from Greg got involved and with the help you know with, my whole team worked really well together to try to solve this problem in an interesting way.
Speaker 3:That's wonderful and actually I wanted to expand a bit more. How does the team dynamic work? How are these teams put together? And definitely obviously would love to hear your take on your team dynamic. That was part of this year's competition.
Speaker 1:So Dan, from the field, is extremely creative in how he puts the teams together. Students can either register as a team, but usually they register individually. Dan, as part of our intake, by the way, we require students to submit a resume and a very brief statement of interest. From both of those submissions, dan and his team are able to put teams together so that everyone from the same program, everybody of the same gender, everybody of the same nationality is not necessarily going to be on a team. He also goes to great lengths to make sure that he's pairing complementary skill sets, both from a resume as well as just from knowledge of people.
Speaker 1:As Robin said, I consider her a friend first and a colleague second. In getting to know her, she is a natural leader. She's extremely creative. It wasn't surprising at all to me that her team did so well. I wasn't necessarily expecting them to come in first, because I'd never expected anybody to come in first, but knowing how well they did and watching the body language of the judges, I knew that they were definitely in the running to come in first or second place, based on their presentation.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it was interesting to come in and do a lot of team work in the job that I do every day with a really wonderful, solid team in the academic advising space. But this is a team that came together for this case competition. So I met them via email a week before we presented and so auction, my young Feshaka and and Shiva are our people that I was not familiar with but we got really close over the course of that week, mostly communicating via email and over zoom. We met a couple of times in advance of the case competition and then, the day of, had some time that evening to refine our presentation with our mentor, Ben Lytton hour to talk about like here's where we're thinking, here's, you know what we've come up with, what direction do we want to go in?
Speaker 4:Because when you have a business there's 100 different solutions, 100 different ways to look at exactly what's going on and you know the the most proven way to look at it is to pick, pick one or two things, because you can't get someone to if you suggest all 100 of those things and you're not really focusing on anything and it all gets lost in the week. So one of the things I really credit our mentor with was telling us to just keep it really simple and make it really actionable. Look at one or two or maybe three things and give really concrete, specific recommendations. Very, very simple and straightforward.
Speaker 1:I think it's important to mention that, by design, the format of battle of the boutiques is set up, a to be focused with a live client who, as I said earlier, comes and judges the presentations personally. But these presentations, also by design, are five minutes, fall by five minutes of Q&A. So, to Robin's credit, you can't present 18 different ideas or 100 different ideas, and we also, to be fair to all teams, sort of legislate how many slides they're allowed to use in general, what's on each slide. The mentors obviously add a tremendous amount of value, not only in separating the wheat from the proverbial chaff in terms of the hundred ideas being distilled down, but also how to effectively present it while the clients in the room.
Speaker 1:You know, it's one thing to be debating a case discussion, case study, during a discussion inside a four walled classroom, and maybe the protagonist from the case is going to be there. Probably not. But when the client is sitting right there and he, she or they in this case it was a he is going to take an active role in Q&A, you better be dotting your eyes and crossing your T's, because if you say two plus two equals five, my guess is the client's going to raise his or their head and say I might want to rethink that.
Speaker 4:Absolutely. It was interesting to kind of look at what Kevin was going to say about any of the suggestions and pick which ones were going to be. We had other ideas that we talked about and we talked about what the presentation style was going to be. When we originally had talked about it, we were going to have more than one of our team members present, and by the time we got down to it we realized that five minutes is not a lot of time to present a robust business solution, and so they have decided that we were going to go with one presenter, which is kind of it was not the same strategy that the other teams that they used, and I think it kind of made it our team stand out a little bit more because you were able to tell a singular narrative. That was an easier presentation to follow rather than things changing up. So a singular style made it a little bit easier to kind of say here's the arc of what our, what our decisions or what our strategy was.
Speaker 1:And the format of this case competition because it's held early in the fall semester is a little bit different.
Speaker 1:We actually have all of the teams watch each other's presentations, which stands in contrast to something like the question 50 case, sustainability case competition or the Cicillo business and ethics case competition, where everyone's competing anonymously and everyone is going to really be presenting in isolation, in battle. The boutiques format, again by design, it's early in the fall, everybody presents in front of everybody else, but, to Robin and their team's credit, it was literally standing room only this year and we've never had this happen where, beyond just the multiple teams that were presenting, the room was literally filled to the gills with other people, which Robyn's right. Five minutes doesn't seem like a lot of time, but when you're presenting in front of strangers it could almost seem interminable. And so, again to her team's credit, she really rallied because she was literally presenting in front of judges she and she and the team didn't know and other classmates that were just attending, both undergraduate and graduate students, whom she and the team didn't know, and it really adds to the quality of their win.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, and unfortunately because of technical, because we are doing this over the internet, greg, you were cutting out a tiny bit there, but I got you know bits and pieces of that. I can't imagine the preparation that went into this and, exactly as you said, robin, the only meeting about a week before and really trying to outline how this We'll go, working with peers that you haven't worked with before. That's what a great learning curve and experience it is for students. Do you mind just giving a little brief on, you know, for somebody who might not be familiar with this case, competitions, goals, what the case was presented to you and your team and what it was to solve for.
Speaker 4:The case is about a local restaurant chain, shaking crab, which does Asian-Casian cuisine sort of southern style seafood boil, but with Asian based spices and, as with many restaurants in the local area, was really really hit hard by COVID but even before that had been struggling a little bit with really high cost of goods sold and labor costs, and so Kevin was looking for ways to impact and improve their business, make it more scalable, decide should we be expanding? Should we hold on expansion for a little while? What strategy is going to help us get to the next level? And it's a really interesting company because he and his co-founder are not. They came from a data space, from a business space, and opened a restaurant. They weren't necessarily restaurantiers or people who had worked in professional kitchens before, but have been able to. Really. They've opened a bunch of different locations and had a really interesting way of kind of approaching the business from this data forward lens.
Speaker 4:So the material that we got was about the financial statements of what they were spending on these various pieces and looking at what their margins were. This is a thing I don't. I didn't also didn't know anything about the restaurant industry specifically coming into this case, competition but learned a lot about it. One thing that we kind of realized up front is that, compared to the average restaurant, any seafood restaurant is going to have higher cost of goods. So that just costs more to buy seafood to themselves, to people, because seafood is expensive. And so you're expecting that your margins are going to be lower because the seafood itself is really expensive and people aren't willing to pay as much for that or as high margins on that. And so we looked at you know you're basically given this case and saying our financials aren't where we want them to be. What can we do? And my team focused on cost of goods sold, on labor costs. There were other teams that focused on different aspects and you know, people were open in ghost kitchens and people were buying you know, seafood futures and people were doing all sorts of different, really creative options and we stuck with like reducing costs in order to increase margins, so that you can have a little bit of a more, so you can have a more sturdy frame before expanding further. So we got again. We got that information, I think. On a Thursday I work full time. The other members of my team are students. During the day, I take classes at night. They're only free at night. So it was really interesting to kind of coordinate.
Speaker 4:I think we met on a Sunday and kind of walked through the case together, looked at some of the financials, tried to piece out what are we learning from this? One of our team members had suggested that we go look at. We looked at Yelp and looked at reviews and tried to pick out the things that you know. What are the? What are the themes here? What are we? What are we seeing as particularly things that people are talking about enjoying and people think, things that customers are not enjoying or that are consistently part of one star reviews. And trying to figure out your, your, your given information, but they don't tell you really what the problem is. They tell you here's some information, figure out what the problem is and then also figure out the solution. So you can kind of go in a lot of different directions the creativity part that we were talking about earlier, where you could solve any aspect of that. You know there's lots of things that could be better. There's always room for growth in in lots of different aspects of the business. So we chose a particular direction. There are other directions that could have also been helpful and interesting to explore.
Speaker 4:That was one of the things that was really interesting is we got to meet with Kevin at his corporate office a couple of weeks after the case competition to talk a little bit more about where our ideas had come from, what other things that he had on had in mind.
Speaker 4:He had already actually tried some of the things that we had suggested. The case itself ended in like 2021 or 2022., so in the in the year of time between when the case the snapshot of when the case was written and when we presented, he'd already done a lot of the things that we had talked about. So it was really affirming to be like okay, great, where everybody's on the same page, we have this idea of what helpful next steps would be, and then starting to take those next steps into. Okay, now that we've established that these things are working or these things aren't, what else can we do? So it's, but, but yeah, it was a very interesting kind of problem to define. Based on the information you have, what problem are you trying to solve and then how are you going to solve it?
Speaker 1:And from the perch that I'm sitting on. That's exactly the point is, I work with different graduate and undergraduate students. Every year, we try and write five or six new cases, not only to keep my classroom content up to date, but also we use a lot of these or case competitions from Kevin's perspective Kevin Duong, by the way, is the name of the entrepreneur. Think about it right. He is receiving five sets of consulting advice.
Speaker 1:That has been a deep dive for the week prior to the case competition. This is something that, frankly, doesn't happen very often, which is Kevin, by his own volition, said we'd like to invite the two top teams to our office to further discuss their ideas, and we were all completely positively blindsided by that, because that's the whole point of a case competition, right, and it's not just Robin and her team not that they did this necessarily, but doing your perfunctory all nighter and you know, going through the midnight oil and then presenting and then going to sleep. They have to come up with something real, and if it's good enough, kevin wanted to hear more. So I just think it's a double win across the board.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, I would say so, and to that point, I'm sure there were plenty of ideas, I'm sure the teams did a wonderful job concepting these ideas to present on the big day. But, robin, what would you say? The key strategies or insights that contributed to your team?
Speaker 4:I think the keep it simple, right? You can have 18 great ideas, or 100 great ideas you have. You can pick two. You can pick two. You have to understand what problem you're trying to solve and then pick two solutions because that's all you're really going to have time for.
Speaker 4:So you had a professor once tell us that you need to do all of this work. You need to create and generate a ton of information to make a presentation, and then you're going to throw you're not going to present 70% of that. You're going to present 30% of what you could have presented on All of the stuff that you needed to know, because you could make the strategy, all of the information that you had to put in so you can get to your bottom line. The people you're presenting to they don't need to know the 70% of work that you did, they want to know that last 30%. And so really, our strategy was to develop 100%, like all of these ideas, and then delete 70% of what we had originally had on our slides. So really, simplify, make it easy for the judges to follow what you're hoping that they keep in mind.
Speaker 4:And then the other thing that, like I said before, it set us apart was we had one presenter and I am fortunate to have, in my full-time role, presented to a lot of people a lot of times, so it was a skill that I had already developed and felt comfortable. I know not everybody feels comfortable presenting in front of a bunch of strangers. I regularly present in front of 318 year olds for our freshman or our freshman class at orientation and throughout their freshman year. So the idea of a big crowd of people who I don't know thankfully wasn't the thing that I was most anxious about for that presentation. I was more anxious about making sure that I was representing the work that our team had done accurately and clearly. But the presenting itself was the thing that feels like I've worked really hard to get good at over the last couple of years.
Speaker 1:And Robin's going to get the opportunity to hone those very presentation skills. She has been selected to represent BU at the first annual Sucillow Business and Ethics Case Competition. She is going to be competing, as I said, with undergraduates and graduate students from BU against five other teams that are literally from across the world. In Indonesia in June, in a brand new case study that we are writing, we have initially worked with 22 different universities across the globe in 17 different countries. We did. We had each of those teams submit two page write ups. We then had judges select finalists. Those finalists had to expand those to three pages and then make a live presentation in front of subsects of 25 judges who volunteered. Those 25 judges selected the five finalists plus BU. So Robin is going to be putting her teamwork and presentation skills to work in a different context and in a different time zone a few months from now.
Speaker 3:That is fantastic, I think. Congratulations, robin, seeing you, the best of luck, of course, but really that was an incredible experience.
Speaker 4:It's bigger than my wildest dreams for what this case competition was going to end up meaning for me. When Greg said, hey, I think you'd be good at this. Do you want to do this thing like in a week and a half? I didn't anticipate that it was going to lead me to Indonesia in June, but I'm really glad that it did. It's going to be a really exciting, challenging, fun process.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, and that really is a great segue to learning and explaining more about Questrum's global management experience. I personally only know kind of high level about it, but I'd love to learn more about that program, the initiatives, and I know there are some plans even earlier than June, but March for travel. So yeah, I would love to hear more.
Speaker 1:So this is going to be the 24th edition of my Teaching the Class. This started at a different school 24 years ago. With the exception of SARS and COVID, we have run this every year. The global management experience, which is what we call it at Boston University Questrum School of Business, is an undergraduate class. We have worked very closely with not only the dean's office but also Rachel Reiser, who is the assistant dean in what we call the UDC, the Undergraduate Development Center. Rachel said when I started at BU nine years ago that this was on her bucket list and in a phrase or two, it is a spring semester course.
Speaker 1:We have six or seven preparatory sessions, which are regular classes on campus, where we teach under the auspices of the theme global strategic effectiveness, but in addition to going over international business and cultural themes, we also have each of the students working in pairs or in teams of three present on each of the eight to 10 companies that we are going to be meeting with, and these are not just five minute quick presentations, these are 15 to 20 minute presentations followed by 15 to 20 minutes of Q&A. We ask those students to curate five articles from the popular press. We maintain what's called a wiki. So for the past 24 years that I've done this, we have, if we visited some of the companies, we happen to be going to Tokyo and Osaka, japan, in March of 2024. In March of 2023, we went to Singapore. Some of the companies in Singapore we have visited in other countries before, in Japan. This is not the first time we're going, but I have done my own curation of sorts. So if we're going to see X and we have visited company X before, the students have the benefit of reviewing the five or six predecessor presentations and articles that were done in class before so that they can comment on those and make sure that the current students are fully up to date.
Speaker 1:And, in addition to the travel component, the field study component. We would like to believe this is not a forced march. We price free time into the itinerary. We price sightseeing into the itinerary. We hold an alumni event where alumni from any part of BU it doesn't necessarily need to be a question, it certainly doesn't need to be a question of undergraduate, but alumni from literally across the university and our 18 colleges are welcome to join us for an alumni event.
Speaker 1:Again, robin being Robin, she is extremely creative Over the years. This is going to be our third time traveling together. She has said to me ideas such as hey, we normally do two countries in two cities. Why not experiment by doing a single country and a single city and letting the students really get to know it a little bit more? Or she said hey, why don't we do something which isn't a company visit, which is a cooking class, which was a huge hit last year. That's going to be on the docket again for Tokyo and it's always, by the way, with her, you know, prefaced by a hey. She said hey, what happens if we produce little gifts on the bus so that, as students are going to the airport, they don't have to worry about what they pack? So Robin literally makes customized name tags, she has medicine, she has a little bit of everything. So when the students get on the bus, they literally have everything they need to on their carry on and on their person.
Speaker 4:No, we can't give up, we can't. We can't give up medicine. But there's breath mints and you know sanitizer and all sorts of good stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, she's awesome. Yeah, it's true for anybody who's listening to this we are not giving you OTC, or medications but, we're giving breath mints and making sure that people uh shall we say feel that they're okay yeah.
Speaker 4:If you're going to be, if you're going to be on a plane for 15 to 24 hours with 30 undergrads, you want to make sure that they are prepared. So some of them are like me and they're going to have gone down the whole list and had everything that they could possibly imagine they might theoretically someday need, and others will have forgotten everything but their passport, and so giving them kind of a base level is really fun. I like to think about. The global management experience is kind of half study abroad, mini study abroad and half business trip, so it's a way for students to get out of the four walls of a classroom and really watch what business looks like in the context in which it is done. And so we have this great resource and Greg, who has many, many hundreds of contacts all over the world, who he does a spectacular job maintaining those relationships. A lot of the people that we visited are people he's known for 20 plus years and it shows in that they they ask him and his students back every year. We do he does an excellent job of making sure that our students are prepared, that the questions that they're asking is talked about, this Q and A situation when we go to visit these companies. They give a little presentation on what they do, but, honestly, most of the presentation that they give is stuff that our students have already discovered about that company, and so when they go in, a little bit like a case prep, you know, they it's a little case study, mini, tiny, like same kind of information that you're collecting about a business, so that our students can ask really insightful questions that can help them figure out. Maybe do I want to work in this country as an intern or when I graduate, or you know, many companies that these students are going on to work for are multi-nationals, and so you may be working with folks who are overseas or in these, in these other locations.
Speaker 4:So, having the on the ground experience of understanding what does it mean to do business in Singapore, what does it mean to do business in Tokyo, what does it mean to do business in in the Pacific Rim, broadly, our students have a really hands-on, experiential view of what that looks like, and so it's an opportunity for them to get their you know, roll up their sleeves and get into it.
Speaker 4:It's a really interesting group as well, because it's not all business students. We bring usually about two-thirds business students and one-third folks from across the university and I love our engineers and our IR majors, international relations majors and we brought people from biology and economics, all sorts of over things that sometimes feel very related, like it makes a lot of sense that our international relations folks are interested in this trip, but also folks who are from the region, people who have never traveled outside of the US before, students who are, you know, studying in the US but might be from Albania or Croatia or Spain or wherever, and, you know, bringing this diversity of thought and the diversity of our perspective really makes it a global classroom while we're on campus and then literally a global camp, a classroom when we really make it to Asia. So a really fun and engaging and educational experience for sure.
Speaker 1:And I think the biggest compliment that I can get I think I can include Robin in this is when the companies come up to us and say your students asked us the same caliber of questions as a stock analyst or as a journalist. That to us, is considered to be a win. But there's also a nice element of this, a neosyncratic element of this that Robin alluded to is Robin has gotten me into the 21st century in the sense that she has a lot of the students express their company interests on a Google form and on the face of it it's like that's no big deal. But when she and I review that Google form, she will often say to me you know, we have a student from the School of Hospitality Administration and while we're in Singapore last year one of those company visits was Ducitani and Robin said doesn't it make sense to give that student Ducitani as a company assignment? And of course we have finance majors who run the trip and one of the people we met with last year was an investment management company and the idea being that when a student is studying hotel and restaurant management, for him, her or them to take the lead and not only do the in-class presentation but kick off the Q&A while we're in the country.
Speaker 1:You can imagine the sense of pride not only on the student's face but also the sense of satisfaction on the executive's face because you know that the first question isn't going to be so. What's your SIC code? And what do you guys do as opposed to? We know from our research that Ducitani is doing blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I almost like a jury in a courtroom. What say you, what are your thoughts on that? And the executives now have come to expect it after us working together for several years. But that is why I'd like to believe we get invited back every year is because the lead set of first three, four, five questions are really detailed, high caliber. And again, we're certainly not trying to be belligerent with the executives and put them on edge, but I think within the first five or 10 minutes of that meeting, the executives who are presenting know that our students know their stuff.
Speaker 3:Right, of course, and I mean, I really truly just think it's incredible the opportunity that everyone is getting out of this. Just as you said, greg, it really does benefit both parties here. Obviously, these are big trips you're taking because you're going out of the country. How long do you, would you say, it takes to plan? Yeah, that's a great question A long time.
Speaker 4:We started planning, I think we picked Japan. Did we pick Japan like in March last year? So we go in March every year. I think I said, great, we just landed from Singapore and I said, can we go to Japan next year? You know so I. But we started planning it early. We called our travel agent company, I think in June, and started to look at what that was going to look like.
Speaker 4:So, touching up the syllabus, working with our travel agent to decide how much is what's pricing out that it's expensive to get 20 or 30 kids to Asia, you know, trying to figure out a way to make that cost effective for the student and also the school, thinking about what companies are available. How do we make sure that we're representing a broad swath of industries and types of companies, both multinational, local companies, expat run things in Japan. We started recruiting for students in August. They apply for the course in October. Application opens October 1st and closes November 1st. So we do a series of information sessions, we do outreach. We had a lot of our students who went to Singapore with us last year, were really excited to help us promote this trip to the next round of students. So we had a lot of them on the ground talking it up, and I have the also exciting role of being an academic advisor. Every time I work with a student who's like I'm interested in Asia or I'm interested in global business, I'm like, hey, have you heard about this before, see?
Speaker 1:there was the hey.
Speaker 4:Yes, I didn't know that that was a thing that I do, but it's fun to know it now. So, a lot of introducing students having come up nationally over the course of the work that I do during the year, planning with students who have these goals of getting of experiences, or students who want to study abroad but couldn't make it fit, and it's a way to get them off campus a little bit. So it's the planning process is extensive and really starts the moment we touch down again in March. Greg, I'm curious your perspective on it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I want to use this as an analogy, but for our listeners, I don't want them to feel that classes are on the same level as entertainment. But if you take the analogy at face value, I consider this every year to be a Broadway show and I consider the field study to essentially be our opening night. Now, the differences between a Broadway show is that people go there for two hours. They have a wonderful experience, we hope. And then Siskel and Ebert they were movies, but of course, the beat writers come up as the entertainment critics. That's where the analogy comes to a screeching halt. Anybody who knows anything about Broadway knows that it takes a village to plan one of these shows, and you need to have a choreographer, you need to have an orchestra director, you need to have a ticket seller, you need probably you have 50 or 60 people outside of the actor, actors and the actresses who help bring one of these shows to life, including an investor. The global management experience has all of those, with the exception of the theater critics. That's what we call course evaluations, but I mean. All joking aside, what we have is we really have a true global village mentality. Is that Robin Hithinale on the head? We are very lucky to have the fundraising team that we do, headed by David Frew of DAR Development, alumni and Relations. We have Robin who is our on the ground, shill who is talking to her team all joking aside, in the UDC when they say what would we like to talk about in our team meeting and with the students this month, this semester, etc. Gme the global management experience is usually on that docket in late September and October.
Speaker 1:I love the fact that I am not a one man operation, that I don't just come up with these 10 visits and then metaphorically hit my fist on the table and say this is audio, it's not video. This is where we're going, take it or leave it. I do this in an iterative process and I say to Robin and the rest of the team this is the first draft of companies that I think would make sense. Then again, robin being Robin, I get prefaced with hey, I love that. She'll say last year we had a number of finance people on the field study. Could we get a bank? We're going to Japan this year. That is the heart of manufacturing. Can we do an automotive factory tour? Hey, we're going to Japan, which is the heart of the most efficient railway system in the world. Can we go on a Shinkansen or a bullet train and give the students that experience? To me, that's the mark of a good team and that's the mark of a good program is.
Speaker 1:This is by no way shape or form the Greg Stoller show. I might be the front man and I might be the faculty member of record, but it is truly the epitome of a team effort and I love that. I absolutely love the fact that I'm not just sending emails over the trance. I've been saying this is it, we're done. That, to me, is step one, and probably a 10 or 15 step process where whoever's involved has veto rights and says oh, this is great but not perfect. Why do we do this to make it even better?
Speaker 3:I really something. I also can't even imagine how big this has grown, but I'm sure the alumni network that you have. Well, that's going to wrap things up for this episode of the Insights at Western Podcast.
Speaker 2:I'd like to thank our guests once again Paul Ligon and Tom Seeker from Kasella as well as Greg Stoller, master lecturer in strategy and innovation at Western School of Business, and thanks to our insights contributors, shannon Light and Steve Sisto.
Speaker 3:For more information about this episode.
Speaker 2:As well as more insights, don't forget to check in online at insightsbubu.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean our students we have this.
Speaker 4:It was interesting to plan. Last year we went to Singapore and it had been a couple of years. The last time we had traveled was in 2019. So we had a couple of years where we didn't have students to build from. And so this you know, we had, I think, 26 applicants last year and we took 20 students this year. We had 41 applicants and we're taking 30. So we were really able to expand the program, both with the help of our students.
Speaker 4:Easier to sell a class to students when they their friend of a friend, of a friend has gone on it and can talk about it.
Speaker 4:Easier to say, oh yeah, last year we did this, this is where we did, this is where we went, this is what it looked like, this is how it could help you in your you know, in your internship search, in your job search, in your just well-roundedness as a human search Way for you to kind of to to market it and to help get the word out. The alumni aspect is always a fun piece. A lot of the people that we visit are folks who have done this course or a course with Greg in the past, so I'll let I'll let him tell you a little bit more about the alumni and how he gets them involved. But it's definitely the kind of thing where I can imagine that some of the students we've taken we took last year and the students that we'll take in the future will end up hosting their own GME visits in the next 15 years. So it'll be exciting to see who comes who comes through on that. But, greg, tell us a little bit more about the alumni option.
Speaker 1:Sure, there are a couple of different facets of this. One is that we now have a LinkedIn group, which, of course, is something that Robert has gotten us once again into the 21st century. But they're all joking aside. I think that a lot of universities have a bad rap because the only time that alumni hears from their alma mater is usually with an envelope inside a mailing, saying what have you done for us lately? You had a wonderful experience. We'll take cash, we'll take credit card, we'll take your first born, but just make sure that you're supporting us for the future generation of people. That's not what Robin and I are trying to do. In fact, we put a wall I'm not going to offend anybody by using a type of wall, but a wall between fundraising and what we do. We do not charge the companies for these visits. We receive neither actual nor in-kind compensation from doing them. It's not like I am on a secret payroll account here. They're doing it out of the goodness of their heart.
Speaker 1:The alumni event is a good opportunity for the alumni to reconnect with their alma mater, talk to faculty and staff and not have us running around the room with a hat saying oh, I hope you had a good experience tonight, by the way, we'll take it in yen, we'll take it in Singapore dollars, we'll take it in US dollars, but before you leave, could you slip us a 20? That's not what our MO is at all. It really is an opportunity that we go out of our way to not charge the alumni for these events. It's not a way to not charge our students for the events. It really is a good old fashioned rah, rah, rah opportunity to talk about current events at BU, to talk about current classes, to talk about the alumni's own background. We go around the room and have the alumni introduce themselves and we really leave the fundraising to the professionals and the specialists in that part of BU.
Speaker 4:It's always interesting to see, as you're introducing, the alumni you also have. They're from all across the university. You're also seeing the students. Their ears perk up and they're like, oh, so and so works at this company. I need to go talk to them or the alumni hearing about the students that are coming up. It's really great place for it's really natural, organic networking that's able to happen at the alumni event so that we can all find the rah, rah, rah and the excitement and the remembering what it was like to be a student and for the students to start to get a glimpse of what it's like to be a professional in one of these countries.
Speaker 1:And, as Robin indicated, I lived overseas for several years after I graduated from college. My first job after business school I was the head of the Asia Pacific and, separately, latin American regions. As a marketing manager did a lot of traveling on behalf of the high tech company that I was representing, so I'm very lucky to have organically developed these contacts over the years. I also speak, read and write a lot of the different Asian languages, but it's also equally gratifying to know that some of the people hosting us were participants on this course over the past 24 years and now they have ascended to a certain position in these companies, that they can give a strategic briefing and that they feel like they have the gumption to do it as well as the CEO, and to me that's just the mark of an educational experience that has been a success, because having student A want to just come back, let alone host us, to me is just the magic of something like the global management experience.
Speaker 3:Yeah, truly seems like it comes full circle, and it's it must, be so rewarding to see that firsthand with your students. Well, truly cannot thank you both enough for diving into this today. I really, really enjoyed hearing more, and it makes me want to want to go and do this myself with you.
Speaker 1:We have the means to do that.
Speaker 3:I'm really excited to hear more about both your trip in March and also to Indonesia in June, and Robin, again Good luck. And also congratulations on the fifth annual Battle of the Boutiques case competition, when. Truly enjoyed hearing more about your, your experience, but we will definitely touch base to hear more about how March goes. I'd love to do a follow up then. But really thank you both. Thank you so much for your time. I know you're clear about this at all.
Speaker 4:I'm just booking plane tickets this afternoon, don't worry about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm counting the ceiling tiles in my office One, two.
Speaker 4:Well, thank you so much, Shannon. It was a pleasure, thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you again for the opportunity. It was a pleasure working with you and we appreciate the invitation.
Speaker 2:So Well, that'll wrap things up for this episode of the Insights at Questrum podcast. My thanks again to Shannon Light, insights at Questrum contributor Greg Stoller and Robin Johnson. To learn more about this episode, as well as previous episodes, and get other insights from faculty and staff and others from Questrum School of Business, visit us at insightsbuedu. Thanks a lot.