Martin has an excellent proposal to deal with the free-rider problem in business school groups. This is quite common and has affected every single person I have ever known who has attended business school.
The most common reaction I have seen used at Insead to counter this prevalent condition is to fire the offending members. This is tricky only in the case where groups are set by the administration - and those groups mostly suffer through. Groups who self-assemble tend to be more proactive about the problem - one of my friends just fired half of her team because they weren't pulling their own weight. It was done in a lovely manner - by email: "We've noticed that you haven't been doing much work on our project lately, so we assume that you are not really interested. We've decided to finish on our own, and wish you the best with your own endeavour."
Harsh but effective. I like Martin's solution, but fear that people would be vindictive against people they didn't like, as opposed to evaluating just their contribution. All things considered, this is a minor point, and I like the proposal. Keep us posted on adoption progress!
12:05:48 PM 
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