The AT Kearney experience!- the first round....

The ATK experience..!! Awesome!!

It all started on 5th October 2010... the ATK kick-off day. AT Kearney is a management consulting firm with strong ties to Cranfield. Becky Drinkwater briefed us about the A T Kearney Global Prize competition and its various steps. After an hour of presentation, we were all anxious to form our teams...the only rule: diversity!!

So, there we were in the forum searching for our prospective team members. After asking around, we finally made our team of four: Mark Grenfell-Shaw with has 25 years of experience across a wide range of sea-going engineering and strategic roles in the UK’s submarine force, Khanh Dinh with 11 years of experience in information technology consulting, Ilan Pragaspathy with 11 years of experience in North America working for both small and blue-chip companies and Prachi Khare with has 5 years of experience in Corporate Banking with expertise in business development, financial modelling, risk analysis, corporate and structured finance, debt syndication and loan documentation. 

Of the 24 Cranfield teams that took part in the competition 10 cleared the first round and we were one of them. Result date: 8th October 2010. Time to get the case and start working on it. Spent about a week trying to understand the case and forming questions to ask the team of senior officials during the simulation round which was on 15th Oct. 15th Oct was a great experience when we simulated a consulting case. Case submission day was near... good amount of work. Thankfully we had Ilan, our power point expert who did lots of work on the slides and they looked just perfect. Based on the submission, three teams were seleceted... 4x4 was one of them. The first reaction...more work? Oh no.. :( But slowly the reaction changed... we are in top 3..wow!!!

8th November..the D-day for the presentaion. We were all set, choreagraphy done, practices done, rules of the game: don't turn your back towards the judges, talk confidently, YOU are the consultant, tell them what they should do, and most imprtantly do not look at the slides. OK... so there we were. Once there, the choreography went hay-wire but thankfully the other things went fine. After the presentations there was a nail-biting time of about half an hour when we prayed... God let us be second, we don't want to come first and work more. The result announcement started with some briefings about each team. What we did well, we should have done well etc etc. Then came the announcements..third is ___, second is ___ and hey..that means we are first. The 'congratulations' started before we heard our names and it was unbelievable! I was shivering...not because of the cold but because I was so thrilled. I could not believe we did it!!

Now, though it looked like a hectic task to do this earlier, I am so glad that we did it. It has been such a great experience. And frankly, the more we have come along, the more we have nderstood what consultanc is all about! Looking forward to the European round on 19th November...and whether we win or lose.. this journey is worth a mention!! :)

AT Kearney..continued...the European round

I will start where I left off.... 8th November... a day to remember. My best buddies here were super happy for me and we decided to celebrate. We went to Nando's for dinner. It was awesome! :)

The next morning the team met at the Cafe Book shop to discuss what went well and what did not and what was the way forward. We were to have feedback sessions with all the judges for the local round. One by one meetngs were fixed. The next 10 days required superb preparation. And the struggle began... yet again... instructions said, ' you have now recommended a strategy. We would like to know how to implement it,, so here we had 10 days to make a new presentation and put in place an implementation. But hey, these 10 days were crucial. We had many assignments, reports and presentations to do for our course. A bit of an anxiety..how would we do it? Where is the time. The 10 days went by with 4 hours of sleep each night, lots of dozing off in the lectures and lots of reading, meetings with professors for their inputs. A busy week but a memorable one. Our learning teams were supportive, not complaining when we did not do the required in time, a big thanks goes to them. And how can I not thank the three musketeers (Sinchan, Rahul and Tanu) who did not expect me to cook and waited endlessly without complaints till late hours for dinner so that I don't have to eat alone!

Everyone around seemed so excited about our going for the European round. The competition was on 19th November and we had to report to the ATK office at 9 am. Sean offered to pay for our stay in London if we wanted to go earlier so that there is no rush on the D-day morning! Wonderful! Even more wonderful, ATK had arranged for dinner after the results and we thought we would not be able to attend it. Why? We had an assignment, WAC, to be submitted on 20th. But Sean was gracious enough to encourage us to stay for dinner and then submit the WAC on 21st!

So, we left Cranfield on 18th evening...8 pm. Reached our hotel in London at around 9.30 pm. Rooms were taken. Small cozy rooms. We spent sometime together at the lounge and then left for our rooms to have a good night's sleep so that we wake up fresh and active the next day. Went to my room, practiced my lines in front of the mirror some 3 times and then off to bed. And then came the D-day... when we would know the results of our efforts!! We reached the office at 9 am and were shown into a conference room right next to the conference room where the final presentations were being made. We started our practice. 2 hours to go... four rounds of serious practice and I started getting stressed... I was forgetting my lines! :(

The team told me to just calm down... Ilan said..ohh don't worry u made a mistake only once so you wont make it in the final presentation and moreover the judges know what you mean. Mark said... just calm down, we will do well. Khanh said..remember Rhino... (will write about rhino sometime probably), for now its just about being confident while making presentations :). So at 11 am we walked into the room, four judges welocmed us and as soon as we reached the end of the room, one of the judges started talking and setting the pace and before we were setlled, he said, you have 20 mins. While Mark started talking, Ilan put the set-up in place and handed over the clicker to Mark. The presentation went smoothly and none of us fumbled for words even once!! Wow! Then there was question round which we answered confidently.

Relieved after the presentation, we decided to have coffee and stepped out. We had a nice one hour walk around the area and then went to a nice little coffee shop. By then it was time for lunch so headed back to office and met lots of people over lunch, the judges, students from other schools. Lots of chatting and discussions. Then we checked into our hotel, Radisson, this one arranged by ATK. Freshned up and then we were off for another long walk, this time to the Buckingham Palace,Trafalgar Square and National Gallery. Quite relaxed initially but then as it started nearing 5.30 pm (which was supossed to be the result announcement time!), the pace towards the ATK office increased.

And then..there we were back at the ATK office at 5.15 pm, there was lots of hustle bustle at the office, all teams were there waiting for the result...anxiety, excitement, nervousness, I felt all of these and even more at that point of time. Finally at 5.30 pm, the judges came out of the conference room and we huddled together around the four judges to know our results. But wait... the judges wanted to keep us waiting. 'We will announce the results but before that the people who were involved in the case would discuss the case with you, then we will give each team a feedback on their performance and finally we will announce the result', one of them told us! And, there were sighs all around... the anxiety was killing!

When the judges started briefing on the solution, I was all too happy to realise how close our recommendations were to the real solution. I was confident that we had done better than many others, if not all. Then came the feedback session and there we got to know we definitely were not the best. I lost hope... we have not won any prize I thought. And then came the final winners announcements and what do I hear... Runners Up... Cranfield!!! Wow!!! I know being first would have been much much better but then... I consider this no less.

The journey has been a learning exerience and each and every stage of the process is a memorable one. These memories from the Cranfield MBA will stay with me forever!

Well done 4x4!!!!