When it comes to leadership, it usually gets subjective and very difficult to evaluate. It is even more so when you have cherry picked one candidate each from a premier B-School for the finals of Olympus. Hence, Olympus was designed to be a gruelling contest, which put every skill required of a leader to good use – testing your stamina and vision. In the early rounds, contestants underwent an essay writing contest; they had interviews with the faculty and corporate leaders and some were even voted out by fellow students.

The on-campus finals of Olympus saw eight contestants – 6 from the IIMs and one each from CEIBS and Wharton. The battle was intense and closely fought over the next two days. None of the participants had a clue about what type of tasks they would face until the start of each event. It was only after the competition was over that the finalists were made aware that the purpose was to test how well they demonstrated leadership skills during situations which could not be anticipated

The competition was extremely comprehensive, testing many different facets of leadership such as quick decision making, business acumen, and diplomacy in diverse individual and team settings. In addition, the evaluation was done by peers, experts and faculty –  in activities including debate, team tasks, physical labour, trading games and live marketing. In the end, it all boiled down to endurance and sense of purpose.

The competition’s most memorable event occurred at three o’clock one morning, where in an abrupt wake-up call, finalists were informed about a role-play, where they were ‘CEO of an Indian company’ and a factory accident had resulted in death of a worker and all the workers were now on strike. Each was taken on motorcycle to a location – where chants of “Down with the CEO” could be heard from outside the door – and were evaluated on how well they could handle the situation.

The scores between three contestants in the final round was extremely close – Joo Yi (CEIBS, China), Harsh Vardhan (IIM C, India) and David Larson (Wharton, US) were separated by just three points! Joo Yi emerged as the ‘The most promising future leader’ and walked away with a whopping INR 150000 as prize money.

It was indeed a memorable event for all the competitors, organizers and every person associated with the event. More about the experiences of some of the contestants, published in their school’s web-sites:

Joo Ohk Yi – CEIBS, China

David Larson – Wharton, US

The link to Intaglio’s Leadership Portal – www.waytolead.co.in

For Jokatimes
Guhan M