24 / 48 hour reports, Jack Bauer style

Question: if Jack saves the world every time in 24 hours why can’t we, and the guy doesn’t even have an MBA?

Non the less, Ivey group reports are feared by some and are mentally compared by others to an experience which is as close as you come to slavery in the free world (right.., I should be careful here and make a note that I make an implicit assumption that slavery is not a pleasurable experience for majority of us). Fortunately, I’m here to shed some light on this urban myth. Having gone through both the 24 and 48 hour reports, I can honestly say that, like majority of students, I survived this experience and actually fared fairly well, apart from a slight lack of sleep that is, and we all know that sleep is overrated anyways.

So as it turns out, like a lot of things in life, the experience of a 24 or 48 h report is what you make out of it. There’s no question about it, it puts teams under a lot of pressure to deliver high quality end product within a very aggressive timeframe. However, you can also look at it as a battlefield where your tactics and theories can get a reality check.

Following is my brief recollection of a group report experience. As I’ve mentioned in one of my previous posts we got assigned to our learning teams at the start of the program. Those were also the teams that we worked in for the 24 hour report. Right at noon on Thursday we got a case and associated questions which would be at the foundation of our report. The case that we got was Harvard case dealing with rise and fall of equity research group at US investment bank Lehman Brothers. The case was about 30 pages, which is a bit longer than a typical in-class case. The primary focus was issues of leadership and organizational change. The report was due 6pm the day after, with presentation slides due four hours after that.

Looking back, it was a challenging experience with the hardest part being the issues around trust and control. Real challenge was that since we didn’t work on any significant deliverables as a group before there just wasn’t a sufficient level of trust. Each one of us was trying to write our own equal piece of the report and then attempt putting it all together. I lead the group through the initial analysis, brainstorming, and structuring of ideas. We ended the day at 12pm with a clear outline of the report, feeling pretty good about our progress.

Morning of Friday was spent writing and editing individual pieces of the report. Even though we were running a bit behind the schedule we were moving along nicely.
And then we got a real curve ball. One of our professors came in and gave us a little “hint” which if taken literally meant reversing course of the report 180 degrees at the 19th hour mark. And as they say, the rest is history.

The shear number of lessons that I took away from the 24h report experience is impressive. Apart from the obvious chance to apply the material that we’ve learned in class, team dynamics, leadership, project management, and the list goes on.

We had our second group report last week at the end of second module. The report was the extended version, running for 48 hours. This time around it was a lot smoother, with us being able to manage and delegate well and even finish the report ahead of schedule. Lessons that we’ve learned from our first experience still vivid in our minds we fine tuned the project to deliver a much better results this time around.

That sleep thing… So do any of you recollect how much did Jack sleep during the 24 hours? Wonderful world of TV comes to my rescue again when I’m looking for parallels.