Week of May 19, 2008
A team of Cal State Long Beach MBA students captured first runner-up honors at the 2008 International Collegiate Business Strategy Competition (ICBSC). It was the first time a team from CSULB had participated in the 44-year-old contest, which recently culminated with a three-day conference in San Diego.
CSULB MBA students Sylvia Balint, Paul Briet, Elisabeth Gogel, James Lee, Vala Shahabi and Natalia Staneva finished second only to the team from Fresno State and outscored the teams from Mount Vernon Nazarene College of Ohio and Willamette University of Oregon. The competition also included teams from Canada, Europe and the United Arab Emirates.
"According to the judges, the performance scores of the two teams (Fresno and Long Beach) were very close with Long Beach being beat out by only a small percentage of points," said Annette Lohman, a full-time lecturer in the Department of Management and Human Resources and the team's adviser for the competition. "Our students really did an outstanding job. In fact, the adviser of the teams from San Jose State, which has had teams in the competition since 1982, came up to me after the awards dinner to tell me that our finishing first runner-up as a first-time participant was an incredible achievement."
University business students have been competing in the ICBSC each year since 1965, and the number of teams taking part in the competition has grown from nine in the mid-1960s to 30-35 in recent years. The geographic scope of teams participating also has grown dramatically, expanding from just the western United States in the beginning to include teams from Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin American and the Middle East.
The official medium of the competition is the Business Policy Game, a computerized and international simulation designed to enable advanced business students to integrate and apply the theories of their various business courses. The students become strategic managers of simulated companies competing against other business students acting as managers of their own companies. The simulated environment incorporates the economies of two countries and requires consideration of global and domestic strategies.
The early or remote phase of the competition starts in early February each year and last about 10 weeks. Students make decisions at their home campus, upload the decision sets via the Internet about once a week and download the results of each quarter's competition after the game has been run. During this remote phase, each team prepares a comprehensive strategic business plan, including a statement of its mission, objectives, strategies and implementations plans.
The competition culminates with an intensive phase where all teams gather for a three-day conference. Here, teams continue to make some 10 more sets of decisions, give oral presentations to the judges, sometimes react to situations of crisis proportions and submit annual reports on attainment of their strategic objectives.
"Our MBA student team worked from early January through April to integrate and apply the principles learned in their coursework to make decisions with immediate implications. Participants learned key lessons of how to run a business, using teamwork, strategic planning and competitive intelligence," Lohman noted. "The competition gave our students a chance to learn and apply business skills, and we are hoping to provide this unique opportunity to another group of MBA students next year."