Corporate culture in a growing IT firm: Corporate workshop with STRV

Each semester our students are called to a corporate workshop wherein Czech, European, and international enterprises seek solutions to extant internal problems. The workshops are a value-added to the curriculum and permit the students to hone their skills based on the attended courses to date. In addition, it permits the participants to encounter contemporary industry issues first hand. During the June session we addressed once again an issue of a member of our 2023 EMBA cohort, this time of Jan Kaltoun who, together with his colleagues and Karolína Zvolská, also our MBA students from presented the issues of their employer, STRV.

Students usually prepare for the workshop by attending an online preparatory meeting and working through the provided materials. This time, however, the focus of the corporate workshop was on corporate culture, one of STRV’s key strengths, and how this can be transferred across different locations. Consequently, we granted the company representatives additional time during their introductory presentation to share their insights, experiences, and enthusiasm with our students.

As always, the company representatives as well as the Executive MBA team supported the students throughout the day, providing feedback and validating their ideas. It was great to see how much the students’ overall performance had improved thanks to the experience they gained during previous corporate workshops. At the same time, the topic was rather challenging because previous workshops had focused on external topics, such as acquisition targets or customer experience, while this time STRV addressed internal, cultural and intercultural topics.

After several hours of hard team-work the students presented their recommendations to the STRV team.

When asked, ‘What did you like about the workshop?’, some of the participants answered:

• Insights into another industry. Working under pressure and finally seeing results coming together.
• Collaboration with the team, work under pressure.
• Topic on culture and teams perspectives.
• To learn about the company was nice, the mixing of the cohorts was an experience.
• The problems defined were well defined, clear and interesting as a topic.
• The topic was different from that in the previous corporate workshops, so it was still engaging.
  STRV is a company that is inspiring and it was great to listen to their story.

If you want to know more about the corporate workshops, you can read our stories about the workshops with OMV, Kaufland,  CE Industries and BENEŠ a LÁT.