Last week, the 19 rising sophomore interns in the Business Innovation Program (BIP) spent three full days with Ron Dostal ’92, a retired management consultant from Deloitte. Having years of management consulting experience, Ron Dostal ’92 shared his expertise and knowledge in solving real-world business problems. Case study comprehension and consulting/project management were the two main areas of focus. Before our time with Ron Dostal ’92, I didn’t know how to read a case study or what consulting was, so everything was a great learning experience.
Case Studies
The BIP interns analyzed four different case studies from the Harvard Business School about the FIFA World Cup, winery, packaging, and NASA. There were seemingly countless valuable lessons we learned from these case studies in consulting and problem-solving. One skill I found was relating scenarios we don’t know much about to subjects everyone knows. It helped the rest of the BIP and me understand situations to come to a more educated solution.
Consulting & Project Management
Ron Dostal ’92 also spent a great deal of time teaching us how to be better consultants. We used skills like decision modeling and decision trees to solve problems and effectively weigh each outcome. He continued to push the idea of detached investment when consulting another firm. It means that we should be involved in solving the problem from an outside perspective. To practice our consulting skills, we split up into our business pitch groups and consulted another pitch group on their implementation plan. It was beneficial to ask questions before giving suggestions to be on the same page as the other team and help them think through all possible decisions. I found the information about consulting to be a very cool aspect of the business since I had never encountered it to this degree. Thanks again to Ron and the rest of the CIBE team for the three-day experience.
