You will not make a monkey out of me

For those of you who are already in business school, you'll be able to relate. For those of you thinking about applying to business school, think of this as a head's up. For those of you who want nothing to do with business school you can still enjoy this. :)

Harvard Business School writes the majority of the business school cases. Cases are stories about businesses. They frame a problem, give you loads of information to weed through, or sometimes, not that much information, and pose a question to you at the end. What should Firm A do?

The catch, these problems have already been solved, but you don't get to find out what happened until the end of class on the day of the case discussion. Your job in reading these cases is to come up with solutions for these companies, using only the data available. That sounds easy enough. Let's see, I'm 28. I'm a second year business school student. A BS in Chemical Engineering. I've had absolutely no prior exposure to business. You're having trouble expanding Disney? No problem. Just give me about twenty pages of background info on your 80 year old company, some financial data, and a couple of pictures of your products, and I'll take care of it. Leave it all to me.

When I first got to school, this was very daunting. I never knew were to begin. One false move and Disney would no longer exist as we knew it! But then, as I started going through these HBS cases, I noticed a commonality. There was a trick. The answer was never intuitive. Ever.

Example:

"Jeff McManahan put down the phone, then leaned back in his chair. That was Joanna Williams, the CEO of ENS Manufacturing. The numbers were in and they weren't pretty. She wanted results. McMahanan was the new COO hired to turn the company around. He was given a timeline of six months and he was already coming up to the end of the third month. He knew that if he didn't do something and soon, it would cost him his job. He turned to Jamal Green and Wei Chu, head of Marketing and Sales respectively. "Guys, its time we analyzed our business model to see what changes need to be made to run the business more effectively. Hope you guys weren't planning on going home tonight, cause it looks like we're going to be here awhile."

So then you as a business school student analyze the business -

Marketing: Rather than invest in an advertising agency, they have school children design all of their promotional materials as part of an after school program initiative. They then photocopy the designs and send them to customers. These promotional ads highlight (quite literally in some cases) the products' features and benefits.

Sales: Salaried, no commision

Operations: Instead of people they use monkeys to build their products

Packaging: Again, monkeys...


You finish reviewing the data... Talk about red flags. No wonder they're doing poorly, you think to yourself. Good thing you came along. So, you go through the case, picking out all that needs to be changed. Sure monkeys are cute, but are they reliable? You begrudgingly get rid of the monkeys. Add commission into the mix for the sales team; decrease salary. You make some other minor changes in their business model in ordinance with child labor laws. . You show up to class, sure that you have done all you could to try and save ENS Manufacturing from an unfortunate demise. You spend an hour exchanging ideas with your peers.

Then at the end the professor says. Want to know what happened?

Heck yes I want to know what happened to these pack of idiots.

The professor puts up some slides. Three bullet points:

- They left marketing the same.
- They kept the monkeys.
- Raised base salary and added a commission of 20%.

ENS Manufacturing is now the largest manufacturer of X products in the US and they are going to be expanding internationally this year.

What the-?

I can't help but think that Harvard Business School is trying to pull one over on all of us. They produce all of these business school cases. Send them to the rest of the top tier schools. Meanwhile they have the real cases in their classes. What NOT to do in the real world. I'm on to you Harvard, and tempting as it may be, you will not fool me into using monkeys in my business.