The case competition took place all day Saturday. Basically they put you into a team with five other randomly chosen students from different B-Schools. I was on a team with students from Simon, Stern, Rice, Temple, and Iowa. We were provided the case at 8:30 am, had 15 minutes for questions, and then locked ourselves in a room for five hours to develop our marketing strategy. Unfortunately our strategy wasn't one of the top three winners, but apparently we were in the top five. I did win the beer pouring competition for our team though!
Aside from the competition, the weekend was great. I met a bunch of great people at different B-Schools, learned about exciting opportunities at Heineken, and spent two evenings enjoying the delightful Rochester garbage plate.
The best part of the weekend was finding out my bid results for DAS (Drop Add Swap) IV in our bidding system. I love taking risks and so my bidding style is to wait until the later rounds to get into good classes that typically sell for a lot of points, but sell for much less in the later rounds. I ended up adding "Strategy & Structure" with Matthew Bothner, "Negotiations" with Linda Ginzel, and "Corporate Finance" with Anir Sufi to go along with the New Venture Challenge. By the way, Bothner's Strategy & Structure class seems awesome (which is probably why it goes for 10,000 points). Prof Bothner is amazing and discussing Wal-mart and Apple this week was phenomenal. Essentially, Wal-mart created a competitive advantage when it was forced to adapt to pricing pressure and challenges created by suppliers in the retail industry. Essentially, in the early days the company was unable to get competitive pricing from manufacturers because the company wasn't big enough and wasn't selling enough volume per store. In response, Wal-mart decided to buy items in bulk and ship them to a central warehouse where they stored the items and shipped them to stores as they were needed. This allowed them to get decent pricing, which remained in line with their low-pricing strategy. Eventually they came to dominate small towns in the south (where other discount retailers didn't want to go) and then began to expand out from within.
Let's see, on Wednesday the GSB Wine Club hosted an event with Jack Cakebread, founder and owner of Cakebread Cellars. Jake was great and the wines we tasted were all excellent. Afterward a bunch of us walked over to Enology, a new wine bar on Michigan Ave next to the Chicago Tribune Tower. The bar was awesome and I met the wine director who showed me their wine cellar, which was full of some classic wines including three bottles of 1945 Chateau Latour that they just picked up at a wine auction. Afterward we took a cab over to Billy Goat Tavern and grabbed some hot dogs and burgers.
By the way...I am so pissed. I placed 4th out of 80 in the GSB Risk & Gaming Club NCAA bracket pool! Damn. The top three places won money. I even picked the right finals OSU vs. Florida. Oh well, next year...
