"Mud, Marines and MBA`s"-The Obstacle Course
Wednesday, May 18, 2005SUSIE GHARIB: Ask a Marine officer what you learn in the corps and he or she will tell you it`s all about leadership. But just how do the Marines test their people for leadership qualities so they can improve? A group of MBA students from the Wharton School experienced the answer first hand. Jeff Yastine has more in the second part of his series, "Mud, Marines and MBA`s."
JEFF YASTINE, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: Tom Vonreichbauer is going on to an analyst`s job at Ford, once he gets his MBA at Wharton. But at this moment, he`s thinking about what lies a four- hour bus ride away at the U.S. Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia.
TOM VONREICHBAUER, WHARTON MBA STUDENT: I`m very much looking forward to learning kind of the way that the Marine Corps does things. I`ve seen them on the cover of newspapers and magazines all over the place and they definitely - they have a way of training people to be leaders.
YASTINE: But few of the students can guess what`s lies in store.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Good evening everybody. My name is Colonel Lou Rachel. I`m the commanding officer here at the officer candidate school.
YASTINE: And then...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Get outside! Let`s go, hurry up, outside right now, move, get out! Now! Go, go, get out! OK, go, go!
YASTINE: These students will eventually graduate and head off to jobs on Wall Street and elsewhere, but for now they`re treated much like any other bunch of officer candidates by their Marine drill instructors. It`s intense. Confused looks from some, while others appear to love every minute of it. And there is a reason why students experience the chaos and confusion. A lot of them want to know how we do business here. So we`re going to let them experience it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What is the problem with you? Failure to follow simple instructions!
MAJOR DOUGLAS LUCCIO, CO-COMM, OCS, USMC: And part of it is if we`re going to talk to them about leadership, we`re going to show them, from start to finish, an abbreviated version of what we put the candidates through. So by experiencing it themselves, in some ways they have a better understanding of the product that we come out with, which is a commissioned officer.
YASTINE: This is where Marine officer-candidates and these MBAs have their leadership skills tested.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Looks like there are booby traps in the water here.
YASTINE: The corps calls it the leadership reaction course, a series of outdoor, open-ended rooms and inside each, a puzzle.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What we can do is put some planks from here on to the -- these towers in the middle of the water.
YASTINE: For example, how do you get your team across a water barrier like this one without getting wet? Or how do you to climb up a wooden wall like this without touching the areas painted in red.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: One of you go over my shoulders, you`ll pass it up.
YASTINE: Every team and its leader, has just a few minutes to figure out a plan...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Are you OK?
YASTINE: ...put the plan into action, and see if it works. A few minutes later, a critique by an observing Marine officer.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Remember the 75 percent solution executed quickly is better than that 1 percent solution executed two days later.
YASTINE: The experience is an eye-opener for MBAs like Jan Eskildsen, whom we met last night.
JAN ESKILDSEN, WHARTON MBA STUDENT: That`s what we learned: making quick decisions and getting your people onboard and letting them know what your solution should be.
CAPT. CHRIS TOLLIVER, ASST OPS OFFICER, OCS, USMC: We`re here to see the core leadership qualities they have. Are they able to manage their time? Are they able to task appropriately? Are they able to determine the strength and weaknesses of their group and then use them accordingly? Because what I`m thinking we can do is we can pick up that barrel right there and get the rope, we can slide it.
YASTINE: A crash course in corporate leadership. Jeff Yastine, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT, Quantico, Virginia.
