By Griffin Dowdy '18
This fall, the Student Leadership and Ethics Board (SLEB) hosted its inaugural SLEB Business Ethics Case Competition to provide Columbia Business School students with an opportunity to further develop their skills as leaders and ethical decision-makers. Students from both the full-time and Executive MBA programs were tasked with developing a structure for an internal compliance system meant to prevent ethical violations at a fictitious bank. Five teams presented their ideas to an expert panel of distinguished judges, including Professor Bruce Kogut, Director of the Bernstein Center, Greg Farrell ’98, Investigative Reporter at Bloomberg News, and David Jensen, Partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
Due to the caliber of the ideas and presentations, the judges selected not one, but two winning teams whose cash prize was sponsored by PwC. "Students from both the full-time and Executive MBA programs were tasked with developing a structure of an internal compliance system meant to prevent ethical violations at a fictious bank."
Congratulations to members of the winning teams for all their efforts and exceptional ideas: Sam Cialek ’19; Bel Gu ’19; Emmett Lamb EMBA ’19; Diana McKeage ’19; Ariel Merrick ’19; Anna Smukowski EMBA ’19; Alex Wall MBA ’19. Competitors: Benjamin Bergman MBA '18; Kate Cha MBA '18; Charlie Drain MBA '19; Seth Goldwasser MBA '19; Kristiono Kristiono MBA '18; Joycerine Lee MBA '19; Venkat Rajaraman MBA '19; Mary Lansden Rees-Jones MBA '19; Zifan Yang MBA '18.
A special thanks to all the students teams, SLEB members, faculty, staff, judges, and particularly our sponsor PricewaterhouseCoopers, for their help in making this first case competition a huge success. For more information, please visit our Student Leadership and Ethics Board homepage.