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The Wharton Veterans Club

June 5, 2001

Deals & Deal Makers

Wharton Offers Students
A Tough Course in Combat

By KARA SCANNELL
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

QUANTICO, Va. -- Jean Huang steadies herself, standing tentatively on a three-inch-wide rope bridge. Several feet below is a stream; above her is a rope partially lined with mines. With every shift of her body, the unstable rope bridge on which she is balancing sways. "I do not feel confident here," she says.

"Take your time," says Ali Syed, a member of Ms. Huang's four-person unit.

Time is in short supply. The squad's mission is to ferry a 20-pound can of ammunition across a stream before advancing enemy troops arrive, and the going to this point has been rough. Ms. Huang inches forward as Tom Bevan, another squad member, waits at the far end of the rope bridge. He grabs Ms. Huang's hand and helps her scramble to safe ground.

Another tough morning of training for America's latest batch of Marine Corps candidates? Not exactly. These are M.B.A. candidates from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, of Philadelphia. In an effort to acquire leadership skills, 88 Wharton students -- 55 men and 33 women -- have ventured to the tough-as-nails Marine Corps Base Quantico for a one-day run through Officer Candidates School, or OCS.

The few, the proud, the yuppies. At a time when thousands of M.B.A.s are minted annually, and when top business schools compete aggressively to produce the most sought-after graduates, Wharton is betting a little taste of life in the trenches will be a valuable experience to those students who volunteer to go (it isn't a mandatory part of the curriculum).

The simulated combat mission that tested Ms. Huang and her unit is a physically and mentally challenging part of the Marines Corps' Leadership Reaction Course, a regime designed to develop decisiveness and teamwork to enlisted men and women.

"It gives them an opportunity to exercise decision making in an uncertain, chaotic environment," says Major Patrick N. Kelleher, operations officer at OCS. Under these conditions, he says, "the easiest thing becomes impossible."

Much like corporations that send executives to Outward Bound wilderness programs, Wharton during the past five years has put students in a variety of settings -- from the lower slopes of Mount Everest to the battlefield of Gettysburg -- to teach them the leadership skills that textbooks can't.

"This is an area where tangible experience is essential for nailing down principles," explains Michael Useem, professor of management and director of the Center for Leadership and Change at Wharton. Wall Street securities firm Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., hoping to recruit a few good M.B.A.s for corporate takeover wars, financed the excursion. (Lehman declined to say how much it paid the Marines to put students through the drills.)

Playing Marine-for-a-day is a chance for Wharton students to experience the challenges of staying composed in stress-filled situations. For this reason Wharton, known for grooming some of corporate America's top analytical thinkers, shipped this group of students here on an early-spring day. It is why Stephanie Ralph, a second-year M.B.A. student, finds herself sweating soon after arrival -- even though it is just 40 degrees outside.

Two buses filled with students pull into the quiet Quantico campus shortly after dark. Quickly, the students are thrown off-guard as a marine in fatigues and a park-ranger hat boards the bus and barks out orders. Students scramble off the bus and line up in formation. With drill instructors breathing down their necks they run to a pile of gear and pick up their equipment for the next day: a helmet, canteen, canteen-cover and utility belt.

Any hesitation on behalf of the students is met with in-your-face taunting from the instructors. The upshot: It is almost always better to do something than to do nothing. The experience also tested how well they maintained their composure under chaotic circumstances. Later, Ms. Ralph says she "was freaking out."

Adds Rahman Rezal, a first-year student, "Any cocky aspirations went out the window that night. We were humbled."

In business, physical endurance often is as important as mental sharpness. For the students, as with Marine officers-in-training, that means a run through Quantico's combat course. "The course is designed to take you beyond your self-imposed limits," says Col. George J. Flynn, commanding officer of OCS.

Of course, Wharton students get only a glimpse of the rigors military officers endure during a 10-week stay at OCS, which one officer describes as "one of the worst experiences of my life. If I had to do it again, I probably wouldn't."

On the students first mission -- to rescue an injured hostage before enemy troops return -- Mr. Syed is briefing his "troops" and designing a plan of attack. It will be the mission's undoing. The five minutes it takes to detail their strategy eats up half their allotted time. The only way to reach the hostage is through the sewer pipe in a bed of mines. The exercise seems simple enough: use a wooden plank to shimmy down to the pipe and use it again to reach land and the hostage.

But the 200-pound body is hard to lift, much less transport through the pipe. More than 10 minutes pass; in real life they would have failed. "The students tended to look for the best plan; whereas [Marines are] more willing to go with a good plan and compensate for the lack of the plan with a physical approach," Major Kelleher says.

Transferring the esprit de corps of the Marines to the corporate world can be difficult, some students say. Jessica Mozeico, a second-year student, says she "kept wondering how do you instill that emotional connection, because you don't have a sense of loyalty" in the business world, as you do in the Marine Corps.

On the combat course, the students run up against a host of daunting physical tests: climbing an 18-foot wall with an 18-degree incline; inching across a rope 20-feet above the ground -- on their bellies; crawling face-down through foul-smelling mud, beneath curls of barbed wire, using only their elbows and knees. Or, fording the Quigley, a four-foot-deep stretch of 50-degree swampy water the students wade through to complete the mile-long combat course. "The smell of the Quigley ... I won't forget for weeks," says Andy Stack, a second-year student.