2007 Headlines
Johnson School Places Third in Women in Business Case Challenge at USC's Marshall School of Business
October 24, 2007 | Ithaca, NY- Annie Chen, Sochieta Moth, Kate Tansey and Tiffany Foster Rech (all MBA '08) were in Los Angeles at USC's Marshall School of Business on October 18 - 20 to compete in the Women in Business Case Challenge sponsored by Nike. The Challenge spanned the weekend, and had the dual mission of providing an opportunity for women to network across business schools, and present a significant business challenge based on a real business issue facing Nike.
The team spent Thursday evening at Nike's regional office meeting with senior executives from Nike, including one of Nike's most senior women, Heidi O'Neill, global vice president for Nike Women's Training, who inspired the group with a discussion on the status and future of women in sports. The case competition took place on Friday and Saturday, and challenged the group to determine a global strategy and a corresponding execution plan for Nike Women's Training to target young women.
After presenting on Saturday morning to the U.S. head of Women's Training and other Nike executives, the Cornell team was selected as a finalist, beating out top schools like UC Berkeley (Haas School of Business), Emory University (Goizueta Business School) and University of Texas (McComb School of Business). They presented in the finals to a full room of Nike executives, competition participants and guests. In the end, the Cornell women placed third out of eight teams. According to the judges, it was an extremely close competition. Cornell was tied NYU Stern for second place, and the judges required three rounds of voting to break the deadlock. The winning team was the host school, USC's Marshall School of Business.
