Army Crew in the Harvard Business School curriculum

[bloomp]

A relative of mine in a MBA program had to do a writeup about the situation faced by the Army crew coach back in 2002. The JV continually thrashed the varsity eight and the assignment was to discuss the pros and cons to three options for the coach at the end of the season. Should you simply switch the titles on the boats (JV becomes varsity and vice versa), switch rowers, or try to fix the degrading attitude of the varsity rowers? The coach left the situation till the four days prior to whatever Army's "national championship" was, so that was the biggest issue of them all.

Pretty interesting scenario and I was impressed that Harvard used it as part of their curriculum... It's a PDF so I can't readily share it, but if you're interested I can email it to you, just PM me.

[sul]

A relative of mine in a MBA program had to do a writeup about the situation faced by the Army crew coach back in 2002. The JV continually thrashed the varsity eight and the assignment was to discuss the pros and cons to three options for the coach at the end of the season. Should you simply switch the titles on the boats (JV becomes varsity and vice versa), switch rowers, or try to fix the degrading attitude of the varsity rowers? The coach left the situation till the four days prior to whatever Army's "national championship" was, so that was the biggest issue of them all.

Pretty interesting scenario and I was impressed that Harvard used it as part of their curriculum... It's a PDF so I can't readily share it, but if you're interested I can email it to you, just PM me.

Just PM'd you.

This is not an infrequent event. Been through this sort of thing myself,
seen some of the most respected coaches faced with it. Seen it
in HS, college, and nat'l team.

[Slim]

http://www.joneslabs.com/e/cis550/Cases ... 20Team.pdf

[bd_sculler]

From http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/30/news/ne ... /index.htm

(FORTUNE Magazine) - Col. Stas Preczewski, coach of the Army crew at West Point a few years ago, faced a baffling problem. Through extensive testing, he had developed objective criteria to rank his rowers. He then put the eight best - his dream team - in the varsity boat and the eight others in the junior varsity boat.

The problem: The JV beat the varsity two-thirds of the time. The situation, as explained in a Harvard Business School case, was that the varsity was full of resentment over who was contributing most, while the JV, feeling they had nothing to lose, supported one another happily.

One day Preczewski lined up the varsity crew in four pairs. He told them they were to wrestle - no punching - for 90 seconds. There were no clear winners: Each man was discovering that his opponent was just as strong and determined as he was. Preczewski then had them change opponents and wrestle again. By the third round they were choosing their own opponents - "One guy would point at another and say, 'You!'" Preczewski says. Finally, one of the rowers started laughing, and they all piled into a general brawl. Eventually someone said, "Coach, can we go row now?" From then on, the varsity boat flew.

[insertwhittynamehere]

I assume the National Championship race the story refers to is Dad Vails. Anyone know how they did that year at Vails?

[JCrew]

Dartmouth went through something similar when my dad was a coxswain there, I believe it was at the end of the 1966 season. Either the Varsity did something to piss off the coach or else the JV was beating the Varsity - end result was that they were swapped by the coach for IRAs. End result, the JV entry (former Varsity boat) went on to win gold (possibly Dartmouth's first heavyweight gold at IRAs).

[loblaw]

I assume the National Championship race the story refers to is Dad Vails. Anyone know how they did that year at Vails?

One of my non-rowing friends contacted me this week about this as she is doing an eMBA through Cornell and this case came up. It rang a bell because 2002 Dad Vails was Dowling's Yugoslav Express!!!
After reviewing it, my guess was that it was all probably bad to mediocre rowing and most likely the coach wasn't a great judge of rowing ability so may have inadvertently created the problem himself. Also, if a varsity crew is getting beaten by their JV a week before the championships, winning is probably off the radar for everybody no matter what you do so just let the JV at least have a chance at winning the JV race maybe.

Interestingly, the results of that year are the only ones scrubbed from the Row2k and Dad Vails website (maybe because of the course?). Also, the course actually mentions that they did some team building wrestling exercise and they "flew" after that but when I finally managed to track down the results in my old back issues of Rowing News....turns out the Varsity crew got destroyed and were like 30 seconds out of the final and finished deep in the petite final (11th). Meanwhile the JV crew was about 15 seconds faster by raw time and came in 3rd in the JV race.

The course's fairytail ending was made up! I told her to get her money back.

[Almostflipped]

As I recall from that year and a later discussion with him, he never attempted to tinker with the lineups after it became glaringly obvious that he was entering the faster boat in the JV events. Ladies and gentlemen, this is called pot hunting and the Harvard case study is just good media spin.

[fullmetal]

Object lessons in small unit cohesion might be worth hashing out the hard way in the academy rather than working around for the sake of a grand final finish or trophy. Hope those rowers figured it out.

[Norm]

Been there. It’s usually called “having two JVs”

[loblaw]

I just can't believe that this MBA case study is fictionalized. What are the ethics of that?

[fullmetal]

I don't know if the instructors are making claims as to complete veracity of events. This might be one of those stories that gets stretched to suit another purpose, leaving only 25% of the story true to life. Rowing will become a mainstream sport when non-rowers stop telling tall tales about rowing lol.

[bz]

FWIW:

ABSTRACT
The coach of the varsity Army crew team at West Point assembled his top eight rowers into the first crew team and the second tier of rowers into the second team using objective data on individual performance. As the second boat continually beat the first boat in races, the coach attempted to discern the team dynamics causing these aberrant results. By using very clean, objective performance data, the case makes clear that a team can be more (or less) than the sum of its individual parts, but allows students to analyze the factors that make this true.
KEYWORDS
Groups and Teams; Performance; New York (state, US)
CITATION
Snook, Scott A., and Jeffrey T. Polzer. "Army Crew Team, The." Harvard Business School Case 403-131, January 2003. (Revised March 2004.)

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/when-good-teams-go-bad

[Norm]

I don't know if the case as used for educational purposes is very accurate, but I am certain that the basic facts behind it are and the coaches are real.

[Stewie Griffin Should Cox]

So my wife's Uncle is a retired 4 Star Admiral and Commanded the 7th Fleet.

His favorite story to tell me is the Navy crew that won the Olympics in 1952 was indeed not their Varsity eight but a combo of Freshmen and Junior V.

Here is a YouTube video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkVbhLIhqbI