9/30/2002
EAST LANSING, Mich. - A foursome from Michigan State University's Eli Broad Graduate School of Management walked away with first-place honors from the National Black MBA Case Competition held this past weekend in Nashville, Tenn.
Second-year students Tasha McCarter, Rose Nyatanga and Donald Bryant and first-year student Arica Drummond competed against 41 other MBA teams, including teams from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management, The Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, Carnegie Mellon University Graduate School of Industrial Management, the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, The Anderson School at the University of California at Los Angeles and The Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia, as well as most Big Ten schools.
The Broad team defeated five teams in the finals, with last year's winner, University of California-Los Angeles, earning second-place honors and the University of Michigan placing third. Michigan State's MBA team placed second in this competition in 2001.
The case competition is one of the highlights of the weeklong National Black MBA Conference. This year, nearly 10,000 delegates attended the 24th annual conference. Daimler-Chrysler was the sponsor of the case competition that pitted teams of MBA students from top-rated business schools against one another in analyzing a business case. Students were given the case prior to the competition and had four weeks to analyze the case, develop a set of recommendations and write a presentation that they then made to judges at the conference.
This year's case focused on business ethics, accounting manipulations and the pressures on top management to achieve year-end earnings projects. As the author of the case, Kim Harris-Jones, a manager with Daimler-Chrysler, noted that the case was purposefully designed to challenge students and see how they would respond to the ethical issues faced by executives operating under severe performance pressures.
Broad students have enjoyed tremendous success at a variety of case competitions in recent years. Another Broad team took first-place honors at the Big Ten Case Competition in April. Bryant was a member of that winning team as well.