The Ivey MBA Association

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Graduate Business Conference 2009
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What is the Graduate Business Conference?
Established in 1983, the Graduate Business Forum
(GBF) is a global organisation dedicated to
developing leadership and global citizenship. The
primary activity is to support a global
conference, the Graduate Business Conference
(GBC) which brings together student leaders from
graduate business programs worldwide, assembling
them for inspirational debates, best practice
sharing and opportunities to build lasting
relationships. The annual Graduate Business
Conference (GBC) is the worlds only
international MBA leadership best practice forum,
which includes participants from the top 40 MBA
programs in the world as ranked by the Financial
Times. Invitations are sent to Presidents and
Vice-Presidents of each schools MBA Association.
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What is the Graduate Business Conference?
(Continued)

• Since its inception, the GBC has spanned the
  United States five times, expanded overseas to
  Canada and Europe, and claimed as its venue 17 of
  North Americas top 30 graduate business schools.
  Approximately 2,200 students have participated in
  these forums, and 450 executives have shared
  perspectives in GBC sessions.  Over 250 GBC
  workshops have facilitated the exchange of
  leadership initiatives and helped create new
  student programs.
• Links
• http//www.graduatebusinessforum.org
• http//groups.haas.berkeley.edu/gbc/

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Prior Hosts to the GBC
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Brand Building
Jordan Wickett asks a question to the co-founder
of Quanta Computers in front of conference
delegates.
Kevin Callahan asks a question to the
Vice-President of Taiwan in front of conference
delegates, the press and diplomats.
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Brand Building (Continued)

• Brand Represented to the following speakers
• Vincent C. Siew (Vice President of Taiwan)
• Dr. Robert K. Su (Dean of National Chengchi
  University)
• Barry Lam (Founder and Chairman of Quanta
  Computers)
• Dr. Ted Chang (Co-founder and Vice President of
  Quanta Computers)
• Michael A. Coye (Chief Risk Officer of Standard
  Chartered Bank (Taiwan) Limited)
• Nicholas Winsor (President and CEO of HSBC
  Taiwan)

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Key Takeaways
How are Other Schools Enhancing their Programs?
With regard to succession many schools have had
the role of "succession senator" for quite some
time. Some of the interesting ideas they proposed
was having a transition binder with a list of
events completed by the group, a summary of their
successes, the pitfalls they encountered, etc. In
essence, they have a brief "lessons-learned" from
each event sponsored by their MBAAs. One really
great idea was a "transition weekend", whereby
the outgoing and incoming groups meet and
formally go through the bylaws, roles and
responsibilities, budget etc. Typically the
weekend is sponsored by the MBA Administration
(i.e. no expense to the MBAA). This will be an
important issue going forward as we look towards
the 2010 cohort because there will be no overlap.
Furthermore, the current learning curve for many
positions including the Executive, many clubs,
and many senator positions is very steep
essentially forcing the new leaders to start from
scratch. Also, funding came up on several
occasions. Very few if any MBAAs have an
endowment fund but many have outside sponsorship
with contracts in place. Going forward we will
need to make our endowment a cornerstone of the
MBAA and when the economy is right we can look to
grow it from the current 400,000 and we can look
to find sponsors to fund the MBAA directly,
something that Schulich has already implemented.
Also, many schools take the MBAA fees directly
and then disperse the funds to the MBAA when
needed. Although not directly discussed it would
appear that during a recession these funds might
be diverted from MBAA activities. (Contd)
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Key Takeaways
How are Other Schools Enhancing their Programs?
(Contd)
A terrific idea that came from one school is to
host a competition such as a case comp and then
invite several senior level executives as judges.
After the execs have been secured the idea is to
then approach a consulting firm (or other
interested party) and ask them to fund the event
in exchange for the opportunity to talk with 5 to
10 potential clients offline. This format
worked very well for one school that was then
able to fund most of their clubs and initiatives
for the next several years. The key takeaway is
to create a reason for these firms to want to
fund us instead of asking for money with no
payback.
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Key Takeaways
Some of the Positives and Areas for Improvement
of Ivey Relative to other Top-Tier Programs
Communication came up in one breakout session and
it appears as though eZone can be a good tool
going forward because we have everyone
"plugged-in" to one place and we have a class
calendar. Of course there are areas that it needs
to be improved upon, but many of the other
schools don't have a common place for information
and are, therefore, referring to course syllabus
handed out the first day of class, various
web-sites, and professors blogs in order to
figure out what they have to do for the next day
of class. Going forward we should make a
concerted effort to post everything on eZone and
use the MBAA web-site for communication outside
of the school. Also, most schools don't have an
admin person dedicated to their class such as
Jutta and Fiona. One key takeaway was when Kevin
Callahan spoke with the CEO of HSBC Taiwan,
Nicholas Winsor. Impressed with the Ivey brand
Mr. Winsor suggested more Ivey students apply to
jobs in both Taiwan and India because we do all
of the executive education for HSBC in these two
countries. It appears our brand is very strong in
certain markets and, therefore, more students
should take the opportunity to apply to jobs
posted in markets outside of North America.
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Key Takeaways
How Other Schools Leverage Team Work and Clubs to
Enhance their MBA Experience
A common theme was the majority of clubs is that
the out-going president still has a lot of
involvement with the club. Of course the majority
of the schools present were 2-year programs, but
it seems as though outgoing presidents should
take on a bigger role. Furthermore, young alumni
play a significant role in the success of clubs,
in terms of securing guest speakers, networking,
etc. Going forward it will be essential to extend
out peoples involvement in order to reduce the
learning curve, increase the benefit to students
and help with transition overall during the 2010
cohort. Another way would be to make certain the
most important clubs are well funded and have
corporate sponsors going forward.  
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Key Takeaways
What Role Student Government Plays at Other
Schools
Most of the top tier schools are much larger than
Ivey and still have much fewer leadership roles
and on the whole have much less student body
involvement. The people who want to participate
are a select few and they take on the leadership
roles, while a large percentage of the student
body is seemingly uninvolved. We had a session on
"improving student body participation" and some
of the challenges included an outright lack of
enthusiasm and participation. This seems to be
the complete opposite at Ivey which is something
we should be proud of. One theme appeared to be
that most student governments were giving up
control to the administration departments of
their respective schools. We had a debate with
one school who claimed it was not the role of
student government to decide who goes to a case
competition and who stays behind so he chose to
hand that decision over. This theme was
contradictory to the Ivey theme of student
involvement and in our opinion is that is not how
we should run the MBAA, however, it will be
necessary to utilize Ivey Admin going forward in
order to create institutional knowledge for the
2010 cohort. 
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Key Takeaways
What Global Experiences are Being Offered at
Other Schools
Many of the other top-tier schools have a
compulsory international experience component.
Most schools have trips to China and the UAE, but
some have expanded to Brazil and other parts of
South America. Students pay a flat fee and get
"placed" based upon compatibility etc., but are
responsible for their plane fare. Kevin has
spoken to Fraser about implementing a BRIC or
emerging markets component to the program that
would run similar to the teaching projects, and
the China study trip.
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Key Takeaways
What specific actions we can help put in place at
Ivey to continue the tradition of excellence and
to compete against the other premier schools in
Ontario/Canada/North America?
Ivey's North American reputation is strong. It
seems that we have a strong name in NYC, Boston,
and Chicago. Globally, the European schools know
who we are too because of all the cases that are
written by Ivey professors. Furthermore, our
one-year model is more in line with the European
standard so many people from Europe consider Ivey
when they are doing their initial search. It
would appear that more can be done to keep our
international alumni involved. Many presidents
spent the week meeting with alumni and this
should be a component whenever the Executive is
able to do so.