Trading Bathing Suit for Business Suit

Spring break is traditionally known as a time of relaxation, a week without worries before the final stretch of the academic year. For 33 students at Holy Cross, however, kicking back was not on the agenda last week. Instead, they were learning the nuts and bolts of business during the 5th annual Holy Cross Executive Leadership Workshop.

According to David Chu, director of the Ciocca Office of Entrepreneurial Studies and prebusiness advisor, the workshop aims to accomplish three broad goals.

“First, we aim to demystify business — to understand what it takes to sustain a company,” he says. “Secondly, we introduce the students to real businesspeople — not just the Donald Trump image you see in the media. And lastly, we try to introduce the students to a network of Holy Cross alumni in business, who might serve as contacts or even mentors down the road.”

Inherent in the idea of “demystifying” business is the process of debunking the stereotypes that have become pervasive about the business world.

“People don’t often know what business really entails. They think of empty suits, or corporate hotshots who are unethical and greedy,” says Chu. In reality, “business is about serving the customer, giving them value in return for their money.”

The workshop’s focus on elucidating corporate essentials has quickly made it popular among students from all majors considering a future in business. While the first iteration of the program brought in 19 students, it now regularly draws more than 30.

The Executive Leadership Workshop is not a series of dry lectures. Each day is focused on a different business topic — from creating and maintaining a start-up company, to communicating properly between departments in major corporations. The academic sessions are further broken up by a series of hands-on activities throughout the week.

On the third day, for instance, attendees work in teams to manufacture and sell fashion handbags. Halfway through, the students are informed that there’s been an “earthquake” in China, and their fictional factories have gone off-line. They’re then forced to quickly revamp their strategies if they want to succeed.

This is precisely the sort of adaptability that real business requires.

“When the tsunami hit Indonesia, it caused many companies to completely change their production and supply lines,” explains Chu. “So the game they play is, in fact, a relevant simulation of the rapidly changing realities of the business world.”

The capstone moment of the workshop, on the final day, is the presentation of the weeklong group projects. Student groups of four or five students spend their evenings during the week designing a start-up “company” around a fictitious product, which they then present to a group of five business-savvy alumni, who are meant to represent a group of venture capitalists.

The presentations, incorporating products which range from eco-friendly webcams to movement capture technology, are extremely thorough — complete with market research, financial planning, branding and marketing considerations, and a complete business growth model.

Though they’re conceived in a week, the presentations essentially mimic, on a small scale, the birth of any company requiring capital investment. Here too, there is a reward – the alumni panel votes on the group with the best business plan, and the members of the winning team each receive a $100 prize.

In the future, Chu hopes to make the experience even more realistic, by having the teams come up with proposals “that serve the College campus or the larger community in some real way.” The winner of this competition, ideally, would receive a small sum of money to implement their vision into a real, functioning presence at the College.

“In this way,” Chu says, “not only are the students benefiting from their experience, but we’re showing that business can and should serve the common good.”

By Ross Weisman ’09

Pictured: Brian Mauthe ’11 delivers a presentation during the Executive Leadership Workshop.