Successful MBA class project |
I have never been to business school, but I gather that a certain amount of the curriculum involves pretending to do business stuff. You get a class project that is like “come up with a good plan to develop this golf resort, build a financial model, create a PowerPoint deck and do a presentation in class describing and arguing for your vision.” Sometimes the project will be a purely invented hypothetical situation, but more often, for realism, it will be based on a real case, some real business situation that actually happened. To keep things relevant, the case might be from quite recent history. To be really relevant, and to make it a bit more challenging to find the answers, the case might be an ongoing situation: “Here is an actual golf resort that is actually in the early stages of being developed; what’s your plan to do it?”
And then you form a team with your classmates and pretend to develop the golf resort. And you come up with a plan and build a financial model. And maybe they are good, and you think “huh, this is a great opportunity; if we actually developed this golf resort, we could make a lot of money.” And then you finish the project and do the presentation and get an A- and consider a career in golf resort development. Perhaps when you graduate you even get a job at the company that developed the golf resort you pretended to develop.
Or. Or. Or? What if you stopped pretending? What if the opportunity is too good? What if you and your project team do such a good job pretending to develop the golf resort that you just go ahead and develop the golf resort? What if, in the course of pretending to develop the golf resort, you build a financial model showing that the opportunity is extremely lucrative? What if you create a really compelling vision for how to develop the golf resort? What if you contact people who actually work in the golf-resort-development industry for their advice on your class presentation, and they are so impressed with your ideas that they want in on the deal? What if you go and raise actual financing to actually develop the golf resort?
What if your plan and financing and contacts are so compelling that you are able to jump the original deal? What if you call up the people who own the land on which the golf resort is going to be developed and say “look, I know that you are already working with people to develop this golf resort. But we have done a class project on developing this golf resort, and we think our ideas are so good that you should work with us rather than the original people.” What if you’re right? What if the people who own the land break their deal with the original people and bring you in to develop the golf resort?
Well then you get an A+ in my class, man. That is putting your business education to work. Here’s the syllabus for the fall 2021 edition of Indiana University Kelley School of Business Course X596, Integrative Case Experience: The Business of Sport:
You have come a long way in your Kelley experience. You are now completing the final core curriculum sequence. To complete this significant milestone, you will need to demonstrate integrative knowledge of the previous eight core classes using a capstone experience. The purpose of this experience and the focus of this course is to allow you to integrate your learnings from across some/ all disciplines, work effectively with a team, and create an executive-level recommendation to an entity facing real-world challenges. It also serves as an opportunity for reflection and celebration.
There’s a choice of three capstone projects; the first is:
Exclusive Golf Community/ Resort in Puerto Rico Recommendation
The opportunity to develop an exclusive golfing community in Puerto Rico has largely been untapped until recently. The management team at Roosevelt Reserve Development Company has put under contract 1,550 acres of waterfront property and have contracted with Jack Nicklaus [the world-renowned golf designer] to design the first 18 holes. You have the opportunity to shape what this resort will look like – what business model it will adopt including branding, product mix and pricing and how it will differentiate itself to become a world-renowned venue, including suggesting the designer for the second course.
Sixty percent of the grade is based on the client presentation. “A successful deliverable will take evidence from the case, plus your own research, and integrate your team's learnings across the [Kelley] core curriculum to identify and present a recommendation that is actionable (e.g., could be done) and takes into account the organizational realities of the client.” Presumably if your team gave the Roosevelt Reserve developers a really good plan to develop the golf resort, you’d get an A.
But for an A+++, plus money, your team could instead do this:
Discovery Land Company ... works to develop exclusive golf course communities. … Discovery Land engages in similar activities to the Roosevelt Reserve project, and touts itself as a U.S. based developer of world-renowned properties. ...
The Student Defendants shared the idea of Roosevelt Reserves with executives at Discovery Land.
The Student Defendants made the following admissions in their recorded presentation:
a. We “explore[d] a union with Discovery Land companies;” and
b. They were “speaking with the Discovery team;” and
c. They “knew what Discovery would pay in fees so they had to go deep with them to get a ‘quote;’” and
d. We had “conversations with key leaders at Discovery Land company.” …
Discovery Land never contacted Plaintiffs [that is, the Roosevelt Reserve developers] to buy their idea or partner with them, instead they began a campaign to steal the project. …
Beginning with undermining the Plaintiffs’ relationship with the [Puerto Rican Local Redevelopment Authority, which apparently controls the land] and continuing through the business relationships Plaintiffs had developed with the golf course designers, investors, developers, and others, Discovery Land systematically interfered with and ultimately stole Plaintiffs entire business model.
That is from a wild lawsuit filed last month by the companies that were developing Roosevelt Reserve. “Being proudly associated with Indiana University,” says the complaint, “the owners of Roosevelt Reserve agreed to allow Indiana University to create a class at the prestigious MBA program at the Kelley School of Business in Bloomington related to the project.” Oops! I don’t know if they were just doing that out of the goodness of their hearts, or if they were hoping that the students’ final presentations would actually be actionable enough that they could use their advice in developing the golf resort. But apparently the students’ ideas were too actionable.
Also apparently the students calculated the damages?
In the class, the profits for the plaintiffs’ business plan were determined to exceed $1 or $2 billion, according to a press release.
“It is rare to file a lawsuit where the defendants have already determined the value of the damages to the plaintiffs,” the plaintiffs’ attorney Paul Jefferson said in the release. “But that is what the Kelley School of Business did here. We look forward to a fair resolution of this case.”
Yes look if you are in class pretending to develop a golf resort and you calculate that the profits from doing so would be $2 billion, you might as well try to do it for real? |
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