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The Value of Experience
By Robert Strauss
Wharton’s Global Consulting Practicum has given students real-world experience for 25 years.
Josefa Nolte was faced with a business impasse.
The non-profit organization she runs in Peru, Mercomujer,
was successful at making toys and other artisan-like objects in
rural women's cooperatives. Yet its distribution, accounting,
and general organizing systems were clearly too haphazard.
Then she discovered that the Corporation Andina
de Fomento, a rural banking program associated with
Mercomujer, was going to meet with Wharton MBA students—American
students who were taking a class designed to advise
companies in developing economies break into the American market.
She decided to sit in on the proposal from the students from
the Wharton Global Consulting Practicum.
"Because my program was closer to their proposal, they came
to our office, where I made a presentation (for them to take on)
Mercomujer," said Ms. Nolte.
Take Mercomujer on they did. Four students from Wharton
and four from a partner program at the Universidad Del Pacifico
in Lima, Peru, spent several months doing a consulting job that
otherwise might have cost Mercomujer hundreds of thousands of
dollars—a sum the non-profit surely did not have—had they been
consulted by McKinsey or Bain or even some lesser first-world firm.
Instead, it paid some of the students' expenses and got what Ms.
Nolte considers first-class advice.
"I think they have done great work," said Ms. Nolte. "They had
to understand the logic of an enterprise working under the cover of
an NGO (Non-Government Organization), and all the difficulties
working with 800 producers in 40 different sites in Peru.
"Understanding these issues, and the target to grow the market
in the United States, will bring the benefit not only of meeting our
break-even point, but will include more women in the production
end," she said.
It has now been 25 years since Wharton Professor
Leonard Lodish began what was then an experimental program, the
Global Consulting Practicum. The idea was, according to Lodish,
who still runs the program, to give current students a chance to do
international consulting on a practical basis, not just with traditional
textbook learning. Lodish recruited foreign business schools to both
help find companies which could benefit from the student consultants
and lend their students to be part of an international team effort.
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