Fwd: Corporate Debate Details

[Siddharth Jhawar]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Finance & Investments Cell, St. Stephen's College <finan...@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 10:26 PM
Subject: Corporate Debate Details
To: finan...@gmail.com

Dear all,

We've been sending you a lot of mails regarding our finance festival on 2nd and 3rd February. One of the key events in the festival is the Corporate Debate, 10.30 AM onwards on Tuesday, February 3, 2009. 

 

The First prize for the event is Rs 4000, second prize is Rs 3000, and the third prize is Rs 2000. Please find below a detailed structure of the event:

CORPORATE DEBATE

 

The Corporate Debate will give debaters a chance to debate about business and the economy, and then in the second round, role-play the Board of Directors of a beleaguered company which they have to save.  

Participation is by individuals, and not teams. There is no cap on the number of teams from a college. 

 

ROUND 1:

 

The two themes for this round are: 

1. Corporate Social Responsibility 

2. Global Financial Crisis 

We've kept general themes to improve the quality of the debate by leaving a larger scope for interpretation by the participant. 

There will be one semi-open motion for each theme. Participants will have to draw chits to decide which motion they will speak on. Speaking For or Against depends on the participant. We will give one hour of prep time, and speaking time will be 3+1 minutes.    

 

6 SPEAKERS WILL GO TROUGH TO THE NEXT ROUND

 

ROUND 2:

 

The six finalists will role-play the Board of Directors of a beleaguered company. A detailed scenario will be given. Briefly, the CEO has declared fraud and there has been an LBO bid by a rival company. Details like the industry in which the company operates will be given a day before the event, on 2 February (please email us requesting for the details).

 

The six directors represent:    

 

1. Government Regulators (SEBI or the Company Law Board)

2. A PSU with large shareholding in the company

3. A private bank with large shareholding in the company

4. The Chief Human Resources and Administration officer

5. The Chief Marketing Officer 

6. An independent director representing interests of the small shareholders.

 

We'll assign these roles in the following way: the person who got the first position in Round 1 gets to choose his/her role on the board. The person who came second then chooses his/her role from the remaining 5, and so on. Apart from this, there's no other way in which the results of the first round will have a bearing on the final results. 

 

Each finalist will be judged on innovation, soundness of proposal, ability to advocate and bargain for your interests.

Another important feature of our debate will be student adjudication. This is because student adjudicators are more willing to judge the debate on the strength of arguments rather than on eloquence, and are more willing to adapt their judgment criteria to the needs of the debate. 

We look forward to your participation in the event. Please spread this mail among others in your college who may be interested in this debate. Do contact us in case you have any queries. And please give us an initial idea about the extent of participation from your college (obviously, those who have already registered need not bother about the last line) It'll give us an idea of the participation and we can arrange the logistics accordingly.  

Cheers,

Shrey Kohli (+91 99113 74739)

Rajarshi Sarkar (+91 99997 10437)

Karan Nagpal (+91 98113 92137)

--
Siddharth Jhawar

(+91-9911490705)