A slice of life to whet the appetite
It is Saturday afternoon in October 2008 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre and everyone is talking about pizza. Over the next few hours the 35 people assembled in a classroom on the fifth floor will get very passionate about it. Not about their favourite toppings, or whether they prefer the deep pan to the thin crust. No, these are the members of the future 2010 MBA class at the Richard Ivey School of Business.
Today, they have the task of deciding how they would handle a mission-critical business decision faced in the real world by The Public Pizza Company in Thailand in 1999. Should they accept the take-it-or-leave-it deal on the table to keep the Pizza Hut franchise? Should they hold out and try to negotiate better terms? Or should they go for broke and set up on their own? On such decisions are fortunes, jobs and entire business empires won and lost. And on such case studies are modern MBAs earned.
Over the course of a full MBA or EMBA course, whether full- or part-time, each student will study, review, discuss and even role play some 200 cases - all based on real-world experiences.
Kathleen Slaughter, associate dean for Asia at Richard Ivey School of Business in Hong Kong, is adamant that case study experiences for students are only valuable if they are factual: 'We write all our own case studies based on true business experiences. Also, as with the Thai pizza story, we write them together with the people who were actually involved in the case.
'You have to work with real companies and real cases so that people can identify with them. We never write armchair cases where we just sit down and fabricate an artificial story to illustrate an idea. It simply doesn't work.'
In the notes to the pizza case study, we learn that the Public Pizza Company is in dispute with a company called Tricom, which at the time of the dispute in 1999 owned the rights to the Pizza Hut franchise in Thailand.
Through those branded outlets, Public Pizza controls over 95 per cent of the Thai pizza market. Now they have to make a decision: do they accept an 'impossible' deal from Tricom, or do they walk away? The responses from the class are extreme and highly varied, as you might expect from a group comprising 12 nationalities, 14 different industries and the entire spectrum of professional disciplines.