Students Pound Sand in Pursuit of Their MBAs
They aim to be captains of industry, men and women who will steer the ship of capitalism through the rough seas of the 21st century. So how do 140 UC Irvine business administration students learn to get the best out of their employees, to run the most efficient businesses?
On Friday, class convened near Lifeguard Station 5 in Huntington Beach, where professors told the first-year master’s students to build sand castles. For tuition of $22,250 a year, they were pounding sand--or, as the assignment said, building a “Free-standing Micro-Aggregate Structure.” Understanding the obfuscation of business-speak is built into the assignment.
The exercise was supposed to let students make decisions about flexibility and specialization, worker training and planning. This type of business simulation game is not unusual for budding MBAs, but they don’t often get a chance to simulate at the beach.
Eventually, the graduate students will learn the theory that guides decision-making when they are building corporations instead of sand castles. “They’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, now I see. That’s what I should have done,’ ” said business professor Reynold Byers, dressed in red swimming trunks and sandals.
On this overcast day, though, these students were taking sand castles as seriously as the stock market. They were divided into 25 teams that lined the beach, not far from the water where surfers and dolphins were otherwise occupied.
The assignment’s premise was that a company needed five sand castles made to specifications, complete with towers, walls, bridges and a moat.
Each team had to decide what tools to use (buckets, molds and shovels), assign jobs and estimate how long construction would take. Each student put in $1, and the winning team would split about $120.
Complicating matters were the students assigned as safety inspectors, who fined a team when someone stepped out of an assigned job--if, heaven forbid, a structural finish expert hauled water, invading the territory of the hydrologist. And when they finished, teams would lose points for structural defects.
Who knew building sand castles could be so complicated?
Xavier Minakawa’s team was trying to decide how close to the ocean to build, to save time hauling wet sand to their construction site. They wondered if the tide would come up and flood their work. Having surfed Huntington that morning, Minakawa knew high tide was at 6 a.m. and that it was going down.
“It pays off to be a surfer sometime,” he said.
As the students turned into construction crews, Marty Bell, dean of student services, turned to Byers and said, “The poor saps don’t know what’s going to hit them.”
There was a whistle.
The pretend company was changing the specifications of the castles. Three towers instead of five, another bridge was added, two entrances had to be punched in the walls, and the moat needed water.
Then came a tough decision. Each team had to fire one person because of a “reduction of resources.”
Those laid off were handed a slip of paper. “We regret to inform you that your position has been eliminated. Please gather your personal belongings and leave the team now.”
Severance pay was $1.
After nearly two hours, the castles were complete, most of them. “We’re the Kmart of castles,” said Elliot Kato, pointing to the holes in the wall and the not-so-perfect towers. “We did it fast and cheap.”
Kato’s teammate Margaret Juergens turned to the immaculate sand sculptures next door. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “I want to go live there.”
If the castles she admired were worthy of Beverly Hills, the ones Kevin Forde’s team built would be at home in a slum. Only one castle was completed. The others looked like ruins of an ancient civilization. Equipment problems, said Forde, a civil engineer before returning to school.
His team couldn’t get the sand to stick together, so instead of using molds, they tried custom building. Looking at the work of art next door, Forde said dismissively, “They’re just pre-fab. There’s nothing going on there. We’re like artists. We had all these ideas in our heads. We just didn’t have time to implement them.”
