Shall We Fuqua?

I have been an absent blogger of late, but it's been owing to time spent on interesting projects. All of the week before last, my team (3 marketing whizzes and, well, me) was brainstorming on a case submission for the Fuqua Product Strategy Competition, the "World's Largest Business School case challenge focusing on Product Strategy". It was a blast - we applied techniques that they teach in class - 3C, 4P, 9Z (ok, there's no 9Z lest you run to your deans complaining that your classes aren't as cool as mine :), did a lot of research, financials, came up with pizza-pie-in-the-sky ideas - and decided to go with one of those ! Show them a vision of what's possible. No seriously, it was really neat stuff.

As time ran down (and I absented myself for a couple of hours to film a commercial), we finally got our different pieces together into one document. Only to find that each of us had used different font sizes and spacings. That cleared up, we started a final review and the 10 minutes we allocated per page started to go into the 20s. Finallly, with around 5 minutes or so to go, we stopped arguing if a period at the end of sentence goes before or after quotes. Blessed it godspeed and clicked Send.

And, we were told a few minutes ago that we made the Finals !!!! WOW !

This is so cool. Five teams - 2 from Notre Dame, 2 from Michigan, and 1 from Chicago - were selected from the many entrants. Off we go now to Duke to battle it out mano-a-mano during the finals. This is sweet. Sweet.

Go Team !