Project Firenze

Tyler Peterson (Tepper MBA 2010) spent a dozen years of his life competing against Microsoft working for HP. So his words on the Microsoft experience were of particular interest to all of us here, and here is what he had to share:

Looking back at the Microsoft Firenze Case Competition after a week of introspection (and finals!), I can see that ultimately it has been a validation of my decision to attend business school.  I worked as a software engineer at Hewlett-Packard for several years before deciding to move towards the intersection of business and technology.  I chose Tepper because of the intense quantitative focus, and I and the rest of the Tepper team were able to put that emphasis to good use during the competition.  Our hard work combined with bursts of creativity paid off, and we victoriously headed to Redmond for the Redmond Leadership Experience.

The RLE exceeded our wildest expectations.  The “R” could easily have stood for “real-world” – it turned out to be a live business problem, time-compressed, with on-the-fly teaming and insights from general managers, HR, consultants, you name it.  We addressed a situation not unlike what I expect to face in my new career – “five hours, present to the CTO, go!”  Our team had to react to on-the-fly changes, new information, reorganizations, intense time pressure, and we reacted with aplomb.  It was a great learning experience, and it was definitely fun to put the first semester of business school to work.  Everyone has different backgrounds, and our team did a great job of incorporating those backgrounds, synthesizing the information, and coming up with a strategy which we then presented to the CTO of services, Norm Judah.

The best aspect of the experience was the feedback from Rick Maguire (GM of ITAP and our advisor for the day) and Kathy Ramirez, our very own HR representative, although the entire event was astounding!  I also loved interacting with the best students from other top business schools – we don’t have many chances to do that at Tepper and I’ll take any opportunity I can get.  The case incorporated aspects of the original problem posed to the Tepper teams, and it was definitely exciting to unwind the information and get to the heart of it.  We had great support from the ITAP team, thanks Alistair, Gary, Dana and Edytte!

Thanks to everyone who made this event outrageously successful, and thank you for the piles of time spent preparing as well as the weekend at the office.  Special thanks to Pradeep and the rest of his team for making the whole case competition work!  It definitely improved my impression of Microsoft.  As a former competitor, they’ve always had my (grudging) respect, but now I can safely say that I’m a huge fan!