RLE - the Redmond Leadership Experience is what the winners win for their efforts in Firenze|USA. While the details of what happens at the RLE will have to be shrouded in enigma at this point, I thought shots of where the action happens might be blogworthy...

Professor of Business Strategy at Tepper, Prof Jeff Williams was one of the professors who held special classes for the 1st year students who were participating in Firenze. When asked on the value that Firenze was having on the participating students...

The Cornell team within hrs of being crowned as champions turnaround this beautiful photo taken at the entrance of their school at dusk (or lighting that is similar to that time, since you never know this time of the year in the east coast)

The Judges from the Dynamics BG came back from Denmark (most of them), while some took the call from Hong Kong and ultimately after a lot of fun and deliberation have announced the winners. The winning team from Cornell is: Team 12: ...

While Firenze|USA has been ebbing towards a frenzy - Firenze|China has been the quiet project that will ebb while the US version shall recede... Nevertheless it is encouraging to see some media coverage already happening in both English and Mandarin press...

Kiran Surapaneni - the president of the Biz & Tech club at Tepper who has been along with Manish Grover and Deepthi Kapila instrumental in their 100% yield rate, the strong faculty participation and incredibly execution of logistics sent in a flickr...

The champions of Firenze were finally recognized late this week. The decisions were very close but in the end quite unanimous which is exactly how we would like it. Tepper's Champions were from Team Tartans: Jerome Leonard Rawls Robert Irwin Voigtmann...

The ITAP Team loved the presentations they got from Tepper. Here are some comments from the judges: · “Tepper has again aced the grade!” · “Overall a phenomenal response. It has taken so long to respond because we wanted to ensure that we adequately...

And so we have the finalists from Yale as well. The following teams have made it to the finals in alphabetical order in the Sharepoint product group case: Effectivators Fellowship Phoenix SOMSolvers

Johnson teams - Team 1, Team 12, Team 7 and Team 8 have made it to the finals. Team 9 had a honorary mention and impressed the judges a lot as well. Congrats finalists. The finals is later this wk. The judges were very happy with the quality of...

The judges from the Microsoft Services - Dynamics Team came back and announced the 4 finalists that they believed should go on to the next round.. Congratulations - Team 4,6,8, and 14 !!! The consolidated feedback for all teams are being created...

"Am About a third of the way through...so far impressed with some of the original ideas that have surfaced." said one of the judges for the ITAP case given to the Tepper students. When probed around he elaborated - " there is ...some real clever thinking...

Over the last wk we have been collaborating on a joint press-release between Microsoft and CKGSB for Firenze|China. The press release will be out of SIngapore and focusing in China (obviously). The last few edits happened over this wkend (Seattle time...

The judges are getting around to reading the submissions of the Firenze participants. Early this morning I got an email commending the quality of submission of the Johnson-Cornell students. " Is there any way we can have more than 4 teams make it to...

Really cool stuff. This. Initially what we had planned to be a US univs tussle with Chinese univs has now begun to look like a global melting pot of sorts in Beijing. At current stand here is the list of univs participating. The cases were sent to the...

Whiteboarding is something we do at MSFT all the time. Right from asking interviewees to show us what they really mean to whiteboarding session led meetings - its a pivotal communication tool. This foto among all the fotos we received at Firenze deserved...

To increase collaboration effectiveness while at the same time flaunting some of the super-cool technologies we have at Microsoft Dusko decided to use Skydrive to get all the universities to post their decks into and eventually collaborating that internally...

Professor Rousseau shares her thoughts on Firenze and the applicability of evidence based management. Here is an excerpt from the interview. The Microsoft case is known for its emphasis on research so much so that 25% of the grading is based...

Deepthi Kapila writes in from Tepper - " These students worked so hard, availed themselves of the opportunity to meet up with the profs and even the business librarian who visits Tepper once a week mentioned how there was a spike in people asking for...

Team Zen Tech Partners Kill some trees to make a wall of strategy.... and then realize that they might as well have used Office 2007 instead. Yes, they are a PC :) Mark Prince from Team Zen Tech Partners writes.... "Now that we've sent in our slides...

Each year over the last 3 years, Firenze has had a few casualities measured in the yield which is the difference between # of teams signed up to participate and # of teams eventually submitting their strategy presentation. Tepper for the 3rd year in a...