Wake Forest MA in Management Students Win Competition to Help End World Hunger

LOUISVILLE, KY – A team of Wake Forest Schools of Business Master of Arts in Management (MA) students took home the grand prize in Yum! Brands’ TAKING PEOPLE WITH YOU Case Study Challenge in Louisville, Ky on April 9.

Students were challenged to develop a proposal for Yum! Brands, parent company of KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, around the issue of global hunger as part of the Company’s World Hunger Relief efforts. Students were tasked with leveraging the principles of Yum! Brands Chairman and CEO David Novak’s new bestselling book, TAKING PEOPLE WITH YOU: The Only Way to Make BIG Things Happen, to provide strategies to solve world hunger.

The Wake Forest team was comprised of students Larry Gordon (University of Dayton); Nick Miller (University of Michigan); Eric Plummer (Princeton University); Gabriela Scarritt (Brown University); and Anthony Tuttle (North Carolina State University), who will earn their Wake Forest MA degrees in May.

Wake Forest competed against MBA students from Northwestern University (Kellogg), University of Southern California (Marshall), University of Michigan (Ross), and UCLA (Anderson). All five campuses held local competitions with Yum! executives participating via the web, and the winning team from each campus traveled to the Yum! Restaurant Support Center in Louisville, KY on April 9 to compete in the final round.

The Wake Forest team was judged to have the best overall proposal. Yum! Brands honored the Wake Forest students by making a $250,000 donation on their behalf to the United Nations World Food Programme.

“I am extremely proud of how our students embraced the challenge of advising Yum! Brands on how to address world hunger. They should be commended for using their creativity and business knowledge to develop an innovative solution to a critical social issue,” said Steve Reinemund, Dean of Business.

Derrick Boone, Academic Director of the Wake Forest MA Program added, “I am so proud that our Master of Arts in Management students performed so well alongside seasoned MBA students from some of the nation’s top business schools.”

The 10-month Master of Arts in Management program at Wake Forest University is specifically designed for recent liberal arts, science and engineering graduates to broaden the focus of their undergraduate studies by providing business coursework and experiential learning opportunities. Information on the Wake Forest MA program may be found here.

You can find out more about Yum! Brands’ World Hunger Relief campaign at www.fromhungertohope.com.

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