Penske Taps Business Students for Real-World Consulting Challenge

As a leading transportation services provider with more than 70,000 employees worldwide, Penske is a shrewd assessor of talent. So when they needed to find an untapped market in the North Jersey/New York region to establish their presence, they turned to the Feliciano School of Business.   

Associate Professor of Management Te Wu led an experiential-based course that tackled Penske’s problem. Eight students, divided into three teams, vied against each other to come up with pragmatic recommendations and also win a top prize of $1,000. 

Instead of a structured syllabus, Wu led discussions on how to execute a strategy, such as: how to find information, do research, and come up with deliverables. Students learned how to set up a project schedule, establish milestones with deadlines, and how to ask smart questions of the Penske executives in a Zoom call that did not waste their time. Most importantly, Wu pushed them to set a threshold for quality that would reflect well on the students and their efforts.

Wu spurred students to prepare for and even welcome the uncertainties that pop up in the business world – and to adapt. “Good professionals ought to be trained to deal with ambiguity and fuzziness. Not that they’ll get everything right, but they’ll try different things. Embracing this degree of fuzziness is extraordinarily uncomfortable for our students, but that’s what the course is about. They’re supposed to figure it out.”

Each team put together a 10- to 15-minute PowerPoint presentation and written report for Penske executives at the Montclair campus. The winning team, consisting of a sole student who divorced her assigned team, took first place because of her polished delivery, analytical presentation and diligence. While Penske took the competition seriously, they did not execute any of the recommendations. Rather, they used it as a recruiting tool to find outstanding students for potential employment.

Perhaps the ultimate value of the course was fostering good judgment in students, whether in reading a room or preparing for a project in a thoughtful, rigorous way. “At the broadest level, it gives students a taste of what management consulting is like,” Wu says.