Youmi’s Reflection: Diversity Wins
In early January, I was approached by a good friend and classmate who wanted to participate in the Ivey Sports Leadership Conference case competition later that month. As someone who is competitive by nature and loves sports in its many forms, my response was “Sign me up!”. Around the same time that we were searching for our last team member, we learned the competition would center around the game of golf, a sport that was glaringly absent from our group’s portfolio.
As fate would have it, my co-author Patrick had just started at Ivey the week prior. A fun fact about Patrick and me is that we met in senior kindergarten and went to the same elementary school, high school, and university for our bachelor’s and now master’s. A fun fact about Patrick (that was at the forefront of my mind back in January) is that he is a fantastic golfer – OUA championship-level fantastic. So, I grabbed my phone, texted Patrick, and crossed my fingers that he was still a free agent and thankfully, he was!
The Ivey Sports Leadership Conference is a student led initiative focused on connecting a diverse group of sports industry leaders and facilitating meaningful discussion of current events. This year’s theme was the Ultimate Rebuild. Our group had just over 5 days to determine how Golf Canada, whose mission is to increase Canadian participation and excellence in golf, could drive membership among a rapidly growing public golfer segment.
As a student in these competitions, you make a team with friends, or with casual acquaintances, or sometimes even with complete strangers. So, it can be incredibly challenging to predict if your group will fly sky-high or crash and burn without a test-run. But I’ve learned from experience that you should buy a one-way ticket, fasten your seatbelt, and enjoy the creativity and innovation that can only come from a uniquely diverse team.
When you need to solve a problem, you should ask an expert right? Sometimes, but not always. We succeeded not in spite of, but because of our range of experiences with golf, from beginner to expert. Jasmine had never played before. Banky and I were beginners. Kelli was a social golfer. Patrick was our golf expert. Our team was so diverse that we each approached the problem from many different angles. After defining our problem, we skated through the ever elusive “Empathize” stage of design thinking because we had to look no further than our own team, and our friends and family to understand the unique needs of golfers at every stage of their journey in the sport. The judges seemed to appreciate the authenticity we brought by creating a solution that we would use ourselves and would advocate for our friends and family to use as well. We were able to come up with targeted features on the Golf Canada app that supported the beginner, attracted the public player, and excited the competitor.
I come away from my second case competition knowing that a winning solution is the culmination of hours of collaboration between team members who respect and support each other’s ideas and the unique experiences that drive them.
Patrick’s takeaways
I just started in the Ivey MSc program at the start of January and was thrown into the case-study method of learning that I had never done before in my previous studies. I had heard about the ISLC case competition from a friend that helped run the event and I was obviously intrigued due to my background in sports and wanting to improve my skills in tackling a case-study. Unfortunately, I was so new to Ivey that I couldn’t make a group or find one to join at first…. Until my good old friend Youmi approached me to join her team. I obviously jumped at the opportunity to work with someone I know and also to meet new fellow classmates at Ivey in a case subject that I have a personal passion for.
I definitely underestimated the time it would take to do the case competition on top of adjusting to the workload in my day-to-day classes at Ivey. I can remember staying up until midnight the day before the case competition thinking to myself… “What did I get myself into?” But now as I reflect on the experience I had with the case competition, I can confidently say that participating in it was one of the best decisions I have made for my personal development. Starting from scratch and developing a business strategy for a national company like Golf Canada while also being able to present to the CEO and other established leaders in the sports business world is not an opportunity that everyone gets. It really pushed us as a group to focus a lot of energy into our presentation because we wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to impress and get feedback from the judges. It also gave me valuable experience presenting to large groups of people that will be an essential skill in the business world. Presenting in front of 80 people and judges was definitely stressful and nerve-wracking, but we rose to the occasion, and I will be able to store this memory in the back of my mind as reassurance the next time I have to speak in front of a large group of people.
All in all, I encourage everyone to get involved in case competitions in subjects you are passionate about and even in subjects you may not know a lot about, but have an interest in. The people you meet along the way and the experiences you will gain are so worth the extra time spent during your week to prepare for the case. I know everyone at Ivey is very busy but I assure you that you won’t regret it!