The Fishbowl MBA

Cold calling – when MBA professors pick a ‘volunteer’ and quiz them at length about the readings of the day – is the much-feared hallmark of many MBA classes. Here’s six strategies for dealing with it.

It will happen sooner or later: you will be sitting in the classroom, slightly drowsy and nursing your morning coffee, when you suddenly hear the professor call out your name: “So… Mike! Could you please walk us through your analysis of today’s case?” What follows is either A) a chance to show your intellectual prowess because you prepared well, or more often B) a painful and protracted interrogation flaunting your ignorance in front of all of your friends and classmates.

This is the practice known as ‘cold calling’, and most professors use it with varying degrees of glee. So why does it exist? According to one book on how business schools work, the point of cold calling is “to prepare you for the frequent real-world scenarios when you’ll be put on the spot and forced to answer unanticipated questions about a project”. This answer is very MBA-like in that it sounds fancy and profound, yet entirely misses the point.

The real purpose of cold calling is to terrorize you into preparing for class. Professors know that you will not have time to prepare well for all classes, and hence will do their utmost to ensure that you are prepared for their class. And from a student perspective, cold calling is the equivalent of playing Russian roulette with a 60-chamber gun and one live bullet, only you pull the trigger several times per day. You know that sooner or later you’re gonna get it, which has a rather wonderful way of focusing your attention.

There are several ways of dealing with cold calling. You can, of course,

1. Give a good answer

However, in many cases the good answer – or any reasonable approximation thereof – will completely elude you. Maybe you didn’t understand the question. Maybe you didn’t understand the case. Maybe you didn’t even read it. In that case, there are several options. You can, for instance:

2. Bullshit

If you have been a management consultant, you know what I am talking about. Bullshitting takes many forms, but a frequently used version is to ramble on for a long time, preferably using long drawn-out sentences with lots of fancy buzzwords in them. Hopefully, when you bullshit, the professor will hear a key word somewhere in your ramblings and chose to build on that, perhaps even moving on to another victim.

Of course, not all questions can be answered by bullshit statements, and some of the more experienced professors are adept at calling out bullshitters. (Also, an accounting class question like “What should it say on the debit side?” is kind of hard to bullshit your way around.) What you can do, however, is to:

3. Ask a counterquestion

One approach is to ask the professor to specify the initial question, giving you a moment to think about what to say. A better way is to ask some specific question that elaborates on the previous discussion: “Sorry, Professor, but I am in doubt as to how you would account for, say, intellectual property rights under the framework you just showed us.” If the question makes sense, the professor will sometimes pick up on your question and forget the initial cold call.

Should this not work, however, you can:

4. Answer a different question

This technique is being used by professional politicians all the time. The best ones completely ignore the question they are actually being posed, and just launch directly into their pre-prepared answer to another question.

This works in class as well. The thing to remember about professors is, they have a lot on their mind when they are teaching a class. They need to keep track of the session, they need to focus it on where they want the discussion to go, and they also need to listen carefully to every single statement that the students make. If your answer makes sense in the context of the case, they will often shift their focus.

An important detail here is that you shouldn’t start your sentence by saying “I wanted to answer another question, namely…”, as this gives the professor a chance to stop you. Rather, you should launch directly into your statement: “I actually see the problem as being the marketing strategy of the firm. When they use direct marketing, blah blah…” If executed well, only the most adept of professors will manage to catch you.

Of course, you can only go so far by bluffing. On occasion, your best option is simply to:

5. Make a joke

If cold called, try this: point at another student and say “Why, that question is so simple that I will defer it to my assistant, Paul.” Or find some way of making a funny comment. However lame the joke, if it makes the class laugh, you are likely to get away unscathed. It is, of course, just a humorous way of telling the professor that you don’t have an answer, but surprisingly often it can get you off the hook.

Wit is an elusive thing, though, and you may not be capable of dreaming up a funny answer in time. Should all else fail, your best option may simply be to:

6. Say you don’t know the answer

Simply admit that you don’t have a clue, or that you haven’t read the case or done the exercise. The professor may grill you a bit for passing the buck, but unless it becomes a habit, your grades will probably not suffer significantly. You can always come back strong in the next class.

There are, in fact, only two cardinal sins in cold calling, namely silence and guilt. A three-second silence as you gather your thoughts is normal. But at the four-second mark and onwards, your silence becomes loaded with heavy and dreadful significance, making it clear to everybody that your panicked search for an answer is coming up empty-handed. Passing on a question immediately is way, way better than passing after 10 long seconds of stony ‘deer caught in headlights’-type silence.

The other cardinal sin is to show excessive guilt over not having an answer. You won’t leave much of a bad impression if you make a simple and sincere matter-of-fact statement like “I’m sorry, but I didn’t manage to read the case yesterday – our two-year old was throwing a tantrum” (or “we had to finish a submission for the Marketing class” or whatever). Most professors privately accept that students cannot be well prepared for every single class; we’re all adults, after all, and adults are sometimes just too busy to do everything. No biggie there.

But the same statement, soaked in guilt and wrapped in near-tearful excuses, leaves an entirely different impression. It’s like catching a four-year old with his hands deep in the cookie jar. If the boy looks terrified and guilty, you know that he knows better. But if the kid pretends that, why, having my hand in the cookie jar is perfectly normal and could happen to everybody with short arms, stubby legs and an unsated desire for cookies – those are the kids who somehow tend to get away with it. In class, as in life and cookie jars, a little bit of panache can go a long way.

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