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The 10th Atlantic Cup polo challenge involved not just intense competition on the playing
field, but also a serious session in the classroom, reports Crocker Snow Jr
U S PA
The latest Atlantic Cup was played last
autumn between Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard
and Yale, hosted by Harvard at the Myopia
Hunt Club north of Boston, on Saturday 23
September. Between the Friday semi-finals
and the Sunday finals, five or six players from
each visiting team travelled to the Harvard
Business School campus in Cambridge/
Allston to take part in a truncated B-School
case study about the Argentinian polo gear
and apparel company La Martina.
With its classy logo of duelling polo
players, the enterprise had been the subject
of a full-scale Business School case study
in 2015, entitled
La Martina: Leveraging
Polo’s Luxury Lifestyle,
authored by professor
Anat Keinan. Three years later, it was revised
around the core question of whether La
Martina should ‘stick to its knitting’ by
focussing on polo equipment and clothing,
or keep expanding step by step into more
luxury lifestyle clothing lines.
The polo-playing students were given
a 12-page summary of the case beforehand,
and most absorbed it on an hour-long minivan
trip from the polo activity north of Boston, less
than one third of the time that the average,
sleep-deprived B-School students spent.
Harvard Business School professor
Josh Lerner put the players through their
paces ‘They weren’t half bad considering the
situation,’ Lerner remarked afterwards.‘They
didn’t do the same number-crunching that
MBAs typically do, but as polo players they
had a much more nuanced approach to the
subject than the standard MBA.’
After two hours of puzzling the business
dilemma, the student athletes were asked
to decide whether La Martina should stay
as a niche business or keep pushing out and
away from its exclusive polo-related focus.
The outcome was almost a hung jury:
six in favour of sticking to polo, eight arguing
that the polo world is too finite and La Martina
must continue to evolve beyond it, and two
or three were undecided.
‘Not too surprising,’ said Lerner.‘Most
MBAs opt for scale and a “getting big fast”
strategy for most enterprises.’
La Martina CEO Adrian Simonetti,
who was present at the original classroom
wrap-up in 2015, was unable to attend
this sequel. Had he done so, he might have
argued the votes. ‘Polo is and will be our
