East Meets West: A Collaborative Business Ethics Case Competition

Five years ago, at a popular Indian restaurant southwest of Calgary’s Beltline, Haskayne professor Dr. Piers Steel sat down for dinner with Dr. Gerard Seijts, Executive Director of the Ivey School of Business’ Ian O. Ihnatowycz Institute for Leadership. At the time, Piers held the position of CCAL Distinguished Chair of Leadership. He and Gerard met to discuss ways to promote collaboration among Canadian business schools’ leadership centres. As they ate, they discussed collaboration more broadly – the importance of fostering it in business students. Success in business, they agreed, requires a commitment to outperforming the competition but it also requires cooperation, internally among team members and externally with various stakeholders (suppliers, investors, customers, service providers etc.). They devised a project that would require collaboration between their respective leadership centres and would promote cooperation between students from various Canadian business schools. They jotted the details on a napkin. And in this way, the East Meets West MBA Leadership Case Competition was conceived.

Gerard and Piers imbued East Meets West with the spirit of collaboration by incorporating a mixed doubles competition. In mixed doubles, two members from each four-person university team are paired with two members from another university’s team. At East Meets West, the Mixed Doubles Case Competition is held first, which means shortly after arriving from disparate Canadian universities, competitors are required to collaborate with students from other schools. On the second day of competition, university team members reunite as foursomes to represent their respective schools in a separate competition that pits university teams against one another: the University Teams Case Competition. It is this type of environment – one that encourages both collaboration and competition – that Gerard and Piers sought to engender when they sketched the initial plan.

Not only does East Meets West encourage collaboration among its student-competitors, its planning and coordination require collaboration between the two schools that organize it. The program is jointly coordinated by Ivey and Haskayne. Each school hosts the event biennially, during alternate years. When held in Calgary, CCAL plays host. This year’s competition was held from February 8^th to 10^th, 2018. MBA students from across the country congregated at the Hotel Alma, which is located on the University of Calgary’s main campus, to compete against, and alongside, students from other schools.

The 2018 competition was the fourth in East Meets West history and the second held in Calgary. The atmosphere was one of friendly, but serious, competition. Elena Storle, MBA student and 2018 East Meets West Project Manager, was pleasantly surprised by the sociable atmosphere: “Even though [student-participants] were in competition with each other, they were open to hanging out and getting to know each other.”

The cases presented at East Meets West force competitors to think strategically, consider the interests of multiple stakeholders, assess risks and balance priorities. In order to formulate optimal recommendations – the ideas, plans and proposals on which they are judged – competitors must think like the real-life leaders whose stories are captured in the case studies.

All East Meets West cases are written by case writers at the Ivey School of Business and all are based on events that actually transpired. 2018 East Meets West competitors enjoyed the privilege of meeting Lisa de Wilde, the business leader whose story was featured in the University Teams Case, which was presented on the second day of competition. It featured issues and problems Lisa faced early in her tenure as CEO of TVOntario, an Ontario-based media organization. Over the course of the day, during time allotted for teams to analyze and plan, Lisa met privately with each team to discuss case details. Later, after teams had presented their recommendations to the East Meets West judges, Lisa delivered a presentation to all competitors and coaches. She discussed intricacies of the case – she explained how and why she and her executive team tackled the problems presented. She also discussed her career and the interesting challenges she faces as a media executive.

Dinner followed. And with dinner, the day’s results were announced. The team from Concordia’s John Molson School of Business took first prize in the University Teams Case Competition, and with it, the $1000 prize. The team from Simon Fraser’s Beedie School of Business took second and were awarded $500.

Program Advisor Frances Donohue has overseen CCAL’s management of the East Meets West Case Competition since the very beginning, from the day, in fact, that Piers Steel arrived at a meeting in Scurfield Hall with napkin he’d scribbled all over. When asked about the collaborative nature of the competition’s administration and coordination, she said: “I love working with Gerard and his team. There’s a lot of trust.” 

The collaboration continues. The next East Meets West MBA Leadership Case Competition is scheduled to take place at Western University, in London, Ontario, on Feb. 7 – 9, 2019. MBA students and CCAL community members interested in learning more about the competition should contact Frances Donohue at frances.donohue@haskayne.ucalgary.ca.