MBA Consulting Project

Jakarta Blog: March 27 – Ahmed, Chanda and Sumi

Consulting on the bus and the Batik Day!

This was our last business day in Indonesia. We started at 8 a.m. at the hotel to finish up our slides. At 12 p.m., the bus was ready for us, but we felt we still had to polish our presentation. As we were wrapping up, many last-minute cool ideas on how to represent and crystallize our work popped up. Professor Surya advised us to use the technique used by big consulting companies: continue working on the bus.

So our Bothell Consulting Group refined and reviewed the slides on our way to the customer. See Chanda working on excel charts at the back of the bus? She found this really challenging as the bus bounced through the streets of Tangerang; Matt concurred.

At the Soekarno-Hatta airport, we had our final round table discussion in Lion Air’s meeting room. Since it was Friday, business casual was the dress code: almost everyone from Lion Air showed up in Batik (Indonesian Shirt). Our goals were to explain our initial plan and how it evolved in order to accomplish our objectives as we continuously uncovered new information. In addition, we wanted to offer some early insight on the tools we developed as we collected data each day, and to gain their feedback on the steps we propose to take over the next 8 weeks.

On Friday eve, we headed out for an Indonesian dinner, courtesy of Professor Brooks, with careful menu pre-selection by Bapak Groza. We started with freshly-made coconut water drinks, with real pieces of coconut to chew on. Ahmed is holding one bag of three different snack appetizers: his one had the texture and taste of savory malt balls. Matt and Chanda are happily eating the fish cake wrapped in banana leaf, while Elly looks on.

Fried fish was placed quietly on the table and was received with mixed reactions. A few screamed in surprise; others felt the fish looked like it was staring at them. Hannah kindly broke the fish apart for the squeamish so that we could taste it, while Alex, Elly and Eric were brave enough to try the heads. We can say this is a side effect of 5 consecutive, 14-hour days of continuous consulting and observation activities.

(Clockwise from bottom left: Eric Higson, Hannah Huang, Chanda Sperry, Eleonora Akopyan, Chris Alexander, Professor Surya Pathak (in Indian Batik), Professor Brooks Gekler, Alex Thompson, Ahmed Ibrahim, Annie Sumi Nam. Missing: Matt Wattleworth (is taking the picture))

After dinner, we planned a picture sharing session to exchange photos and begin building a collage to remember the trip. However, upon arrival at the hotel, everyone was so tired that we deferred the idea in favor of calling it a well-deserved night. Sumi and Chanda made one last ditch effort to see if the advertised swimming pool was merely an illusion, or if it was actually real. In the 10-minute diversion from Brooks and Surya’s “Schedule Revision 347,” we proved the swimming pool indeed existed, complete with poolside geckos and swimming frogs. Much like a trip to Bali, the pool wasn’t included in ANY version of Brooks and Surya’s schedule for ANY student on ANY day regardless of ANY line of reasoning one might dream up. If a student were to produce a waterproof laptop and commit to running regressions poolside, Brooks and Surya’s “Schedule Revision 348” would have magically appeared to divert all regression-running activity to a location as far away from the pool as possible. Proper analysis (free of potential contamination from water-borne insects, frogs and geckos) followed by process mapping of all activity leading up to the decision to perform regressions of any kind near a water source would certainly have precluded any thought of sleep for students, regardless of intent. Thus, poolside activity was inadvertently “off the table,” without necessarily being forbidden. Tomorrow would be another day; our final day to see Jakarta and find Batik scarves and shirts, as well as wood instruments, cat scat coffee and other souvenirs for our friends and families back home.