Growing Citrus, Growing Ourselves: Tuck Onsite Global Consulting in Buenos Aires

My OnSite team was a blend of three Tuck students and three students from the IAE Business School in Buenos Aires. Our challenge? Help a citrus grower in Argentina figure out whether it should enter the U.S. market with one of its products. Our client was one of the ten organizations around the world that hired teams of Tuck consultants to conduct strategy and analysis projects as part of Tuck’s OnSite Global Consulting course.

My partner on the IAE side was Flor. She has a beautiful laugh and an inquisitive mind, and I was thrilled to work with her. But I had underestimated the challenge of doing work when all we had to bridge the thousands of miles separating us was a tenuous connection on Skype. And it was compounded by the differences that existed between us even though almost everyone on the team had previous cross-culture work experience. My Tuck classmates and I prepared agendas and work plans with timelines for each meeting. To our IAE teammates, however, our “plan-ification” tendencies seemed stifling—they left no room for creativity—and even felt a bit dictatorial. In turn, we wondered, “How does work ever get done in the absence of structure?”

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Read more from Nancy Yang T'17 at the Tuck360: MBA Blog.