Tolle Blog

Any dream will do!

2009-12-16T00:28:00.004+01:00

Well, this is it. The last entry. The 113th and last chapter for me. At least as the official diary writer. This entry is for the friends I made this year in Lausanne.

After a hectic - but good - week with graduation ceremony, the big ball at the Palace Hotel, a few days of skiing in France with some of my classmates - or fellow alumni as I should call them now - we packed my apartment into the car over the weekend and went to my new home in Genova, Italy. My girlfriend moved from Copenhagen to Genova in July, so this is where the next chapter of our lives will be written.

For the past three months or so I have had one particular time and situation in mind. The time was Monday 14 December - i.e. yesterday - at around 8.15 in the morning when my girlfriend had just left the apartment to go to work. I pictured myself making a cup of fresh coffee and enjoying it on the balcony, while thinking about the past and future. I had been looking forward to that very moment with great anticipation and with some anxiety.

So yesterday that moment came. Susana went to work. I had already prepared the coffee. I put on a jacket - it is only 3C degrees here these days - and went to the balcony. The sun was just coming up and the view of the Mediterranean was stunning. And then I asked myself the question that I learned to ask myself this year: 'So, how do you feel, Thorsten?'.

'Well, I don't know', my first thought was, but as I have learned through the work with my PDI 'shrink', it will come out once I try to describe it. So how do I really feel?

Sad? - Not so much anymore, last week I did, sad to be leaving, sad to give up something unique and special that never would come back. Sad to say goodbye to a lot of really special friends. How can they be special if there are so many of them, you may ask. Well, they just can.

Regrets? - Not anymore, again, last week I did have a lot of regrets. Regrets that I did not get to talk much more to many more people in the class, that I did not go out more, that I did not work even harder, pushed myself further, read more cases, did more work in the groups, etc. I then realized that I gave what I had. Perhaps I could have made different choices which would have given different outcomes, perhaps, perhaps not, but I could not have done MORE.

Sense of achievement? - Not really, perhaps I should say not yet. Logically I should feel it. I have just completed the toughest year of my life, in many ways. I think the real value of what I learned only will show once I start putting it to use.

So what DO I feel?

I feel like in a vacuum, a bit of nothingness somehow, not positive, not negative, just being in this very moment without anything that I HAVE to do. A feeling that there is a world out there waiting for me. A feeling of being prepared to go and grab it, but also a feeling that it will not come to me. If I do nothing, nothing will happen. Most of all I feel an underlying confidence that I both can and will grab it. A confidence that I will figure out how.

While moving I came across an old Andrew Lloyd Webber CD that I used to play a lot, it must be at least 15 years old. As I am writing this Jason Donovan is singing 'Any dream will do'. I could not agree more.

It is time to hand over to the new 'generation' at IMD. Thank you to all the applicants, future students, classmates, partners, parents and everyone else that have bothered to read my scribbles this year and thank you for all the feedback and encouragement, particularly when times were tough. It was a pleasure and an honor to be your eyes and ears in the IMD MBA 2009 class room. :-)

Ciao!

Thorsten

Well, perhaps there was some sense of achievement after all! :-)

Genova from our balcony, the home of a new beginning.

Thank you for making this year such an unforgettable one!

It's over!

2009-12-04T22:35:00.000+01:00

'....and with those words I end the MBA program of 2009'. I couldn't believe it when I heard program director Martha Maznevski say those words a couple of hours ago. It can't be over! How can it be! Help, put me back in the bubble! I am not done yet! There are still so many people that I need to talk to!

We still have a couple of sessions with feedback and rewards on Monday and of course the graduation on Tuesday, but that is 'just' the celebrations. The program as such is over! Why don't you get it, Thorsten!?!

Well, why don't I get it. Perhaps because it has been approaching with the speed of a bullet to the very last minute. Even the last few weeks I have not been able to find much time to sit down and reflect on how I want to say my goodbyes and mentally phase into my new life. We have been (and still are) going full speed to the very last minute, like a bullet train that does not slow down before it is too late....

...just like it happened in Montparnasse Station, Paris in 1895.

It has been an emotional day. Most of all because it started with Professor George Kohlrieser's legendary session on 'bonding and grieving', on how to deal with loss and separation. He is a clinical psychologist, a hostage negotiator and professor in organizational behavior all in one. He can basically make people cry on command. When you then add a class full of people that have been through A LOT together the past 11 months and who are starting to realize that they soon will be spread all over the world and NEVER will be together again as a complete class, then you have all the parts needed to make it both a memorable and emotional event.

I am sitting in study room 9 and writing this. Whether a coincidence or not, this is where it all started 11 months ago. This is where my first study group - named Cloud #9 - was born and lived. This was where I for first time met Liesbeth, Misayo, Eva, Fadi, Eric, Kornelius and Juan. I remember like it was yesterday how nervous I was. SO much has happened since then, and what a ride it has been. A ride with ups and downs, high mountains, endless tunnels and sharp turns.

We have a saying in Denmark (I am sure it is used elsewhere as well) which basically says that after a busy period you must take the time to let your soul catch up with you. Although I physically have arrived to December, I think my soul still is working its way through March or something like that. I wonder how long it takes for it to catch up and thereby for me to understand what really has happened to me this year? Probably years!

Thorsten

Wednesday was the Polar Bear's last dip in Lake Geneva.

Today we refurbished the MBA Archway that we created on the first day of class.

Stefano and Albert with their hand prints that have been on the Archway the last 11 months.

Eugene, Joe, Misayo and Young-Ha is preparing the new Archway decoration. The Archway has been given a new meaning that symbolizes our transition back into the real world. We will walk through it on our way to the auditorium to receive our diplomas on Tuesday.
I will not reveal the final result to you just yet. Why don't you come see for yourself?

Seeing CERN

2009-12-02T01:39:00.001+01:00

Yesterday we had the opportunity to visit one of the places that I really have wanted to see eversince we arrived to this part of Switzerland a year ago. We went to the European Center for Nuclear Research or CERN as it normally is called. A 27km circular particle accelerator 100m under the ground in the south western tip of Switzerland and eastern France. In the accelerator - also called the Large Hydron Collidor or LHC - two beams of protons are accelerated to speeds close to the speed of light in opposite directions and are then brought to collisions. The aim is to recreate the conditions that existed when the universe was created with the big bang billions of years ago. Nothing less. The aim is to understand what matter (and anti-matter) is made of. More specifically they are looking for the Higgs boson, which the Standard Model claims exist, but which has never been observed.

Enormous amounts of information is created at the collision, more than it is physically possible to store. CERN is therefore always at the forefront at information technology. That also goes for sharing of the information that is created. Due to the nature of the organization, that consists of thousands of scientists in universities all over the planet it was necessary to create an efficient way of distributing the information efficiently. CERN therefore became the birthplace of the worldwide web.

The visit was arranged by Professor Donald Marchand who has been studying the collaborative decision processes in CERN the last two years and by our own classmate Paolo Guglielmini [Italy], who worked in CERN before joining IMD. It was fascinating to hear both their perspectives!

CERN gathers the best brains from around the world and has several Nobel price winners in its history books. You can clearly feel how passionate the people are at being at the frontier of what mankind knows. They are out there where the building blocks of life, parallel universes and unknown dimensions are part of the everyday discussion.

As Donald said at one point: "These people are every day at the edge of what humans cans understand". One of my good classmates added "and he is not even talking about group dynamics" (referring to our leadership sessions with Professor Jack Wood).

A Spanish scientist explained how a typical experiment typically runs over 10 hours in what to us seemed like a pretty tedious and boring process, but when Fadi Sbaiti asked him: 'So where is the excitement?' he answered with a big smile 'What do you mean?'. How could we not be excited about this? We later learned that they actually had set a new world record that day!

The state-of-the-art control room of ATLAS, the newest of the four detectors along the LHC. ATLAS detects the particles that are created at the collisions of the protons.

Ready for a 3D movie!

Part of the LHC control room.

Paolo Guglielmini telling about how fascinating it was to work at CERN.

A quick jump back to IMD. I have been waiting anxiously for months to take this picture. Juan Benitez (far left) is out of a family with a very special set of names. Juan's full name is Juan Manuel Benitez. Juan's father (far right) is also Juan Manuel Benitez. Juan's brother (nr. 2 from the left) is Juan Nicolas Benitez and there is yet another brother (not here) named Juan Camilo Benitez, so all in all, a family with four Juan Benitez. Amazing, isn't it?
Lately, yet another brother has sneaked into the family. Our classmate Gerrit from Germany (nr. 2 from the right) visited Juan's family last week in Colombia (see below picture) and immediately felt at home. We therefore now call him Juan Gerrit Benitez! :-)

Gerrit with the rest of the Benitez family in Colombia last week.

Thorsten

Football finale

2009-11-29T22:59:00.001+01:00

I had a Friday that was quite unusual. I got up at 3.30 in the morning to get on a 4.20 train to Geneva in order to reach the 6.30 EasyJet flight to Brussels. As I was sitting there waiting at the gate, feeling sorry for myself for being awake as such inhuman hours Fill Niu [China] from the class walked in. He had been up at the same time, been on the same train and was going on the same flight. He looked as fresh as he always does, so there went my excuse for pitying myself.

We slept all the way to Brussels and a little before 8, the time we normally walk into the classroom, we were walking out of Brussels Airport. Fill was picked up by the company he was visiting and I took the train to Antwerp, where I had two meetings. Mid afternoon, I got on the train to Rotterdam for another meeting in a café right next to the Rotterdam train station. Two hours later I was back in the train, now heading towards Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. Everything was going according to whatever little plans I had made......until a passenger on the train got sick and had to be picked up by an ambulance. That took 30 minutes and now time suddenly was in short supply! I ran through the airport and made it to the gate just as they started to board. Back to Geneva, on the train back to Lausanne and at 00.30 I was finally home again. A nice 21 hour work day, good meetings and I avoided staying overnight. It is great to have these high-pace high-energy days from time to time..... as long as you get your rest in between.

Saturday and Sunday have been passing at a much lower pace. More and more signs of the closing of our MBA experience is starting to appear. One of them is the arrival of parents, brothers and sisters that are coming in for the graduation on 8. December.

Today was the last round of football in Parc de Milan. Our Sunday morning football is one of the things that I will miss the most. There were weeks - particularly during the building blocks - where is was the only thing that kept me going, the only short-term reward I had in sight to get through the week.

There was a great show of people today, so we were playing 11-on-11 or something like that. After the game our fearless and tireless football captain of the year, Joost Mackor, had invited us all out for a beer. The Sportsbar was closed, so we ended up at the White Horse, having beers and burgers. The team presented Joost with a picture of the silver-medal-winning MBAT team duly signed by the team members. Both on and off the track Joost has been the driving force behind the team. Thanks Joost, from all of us!!

Thorsten

We had a great game today!

Today's orange team. It is Yury's dad in the back with Yury's daughter.

Sometimes you can shake a camera so much that the picture actually becomes good. I was just about to delete this picture when it occurred to me that it somehow pictures a memory. The blurred but good memory that our Parc-de-Milan days eventually will become.

Of course this diary entry must finish with the team's grand achievement.
The MBAT 2009 Silver medal, Paris 9 May 2009.

Vision to reality

2009-11-22T15:28:00.003+01:00

A great guest entry by John Rohan, the dad of one of my good classmates David Rohan. I include it here because I shows how the IMD impact goes far beyond the MBA students.

Recently my wife and I had a very enjoyable lunch at IMD and met Thorsten and in our discussions, I mentioned that I had previously attended two IMD courses for executives. On hearing that Thorsten was looking to start up his own company, I mentioned to him that, after attending my first course at IMD, I made a major change in my career, which most of my friends and family thought was very risky, if not crazy. Thorsten has now asked that I might repeat some of that story for the IMD Diary.

The reason for our visit to Lausanne was to visit our son David and Kate our daughter in law. As many of you would know, David is a 2009 MBA student.

The first IMD course I attended was in the early 90’s and was entitled ‘Vision to Reality’, nearly all the 45 or so attendees were from different countries, very like the composition of the current MBA class. All attendees were at, or about to move to managing director or executive chairman levels. Whilst some of us had MBA degrees others had worked their way up from the ‘coal face’ without any formal qualifications, however all were generally successful business people.

As all IMD participants know, IMD is very different to other business schools. One example which really brought this home to us was a remarkable lecture by an Indian Professor from Harvard on the effects of subliminal advertising on TV, (Incidentally he was not advocating its use). He mentioned at the start of his lecture that during the hour lecture, he would put everybody to sleep during that lecture. As you would expect this group of relatively hard nosed business people thought this was impossible. He gave a very good and interesting lecture to a minority as he succeeded in hypnotizing all but two people to sleep, in the hour and woke them all up at the same time at the end of the hour.

We all learned a lot about ourselves and human behaviour in general and most of us came out of the course believing that up to that stage in our careers we had only tapped a small part of our real potential and we came away with the healthy belief we could achieve anything.

When I came to the Vision to Reality program I had been running companies for about 15 years and had been working my way up the corporate ladder over that time. At this stage of my career, I was running 42 companies in Asia, the Pacific and America, for one of Australia’s blue chip organizations with over 3000 employees and this group of companies had been growing successfully for the previous 3 years.

Shortly after returning from the program I was approached by Vodafone UK to become MD of Vodafone Australia and to build and run a digital mobile network. There was no office, no people, no network, no product etc. I accepted the job and I am sure that my then, recent experience at IMD had much to do with this decision.

Within 6 years the Australian business went from zero to $1Billion turnover and from 1 to 2500 employees. It certainly helped that the digital mobile market in Australia doubled every year for those 6 years and as I said to Thorsten in Lausanne, that business success is also sometimes helped by a little luck and fate.

In these tough economic times I am sure that many of the 2009 IMD MBA graduates will have needed to accept new positions which are probably more risky and not quite in the career direction or in the country that they might have wanted. I hope my positive experience of making what seemed to be a risky career change gives them some confidence for their own success.

I wish all the 2009 MBA participants all the best in their future careers.

John Rohan

Chillin'

2009-11-21T00:47:00.000+01:00

It has been a relatively light day, where I got a lot of small practical things done, canceling insurances, delivering stuff for dry cleaning, etc. Nothing really major, but just nice to get going on all the things that have piled up. I went to the school for lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon there.

We went to the Chinese place again for dinner. It was just as packed as last time! It is as if all of Lausanne have discovered this place at the same time. The food - particularly the dumplings - is great and the price absolutely reasonable.

A lot of people are out of town this weekend, some have gone skiing and some are visiting friends around Europe. As you probably can sense from this Diary entry I don't really have much to write about. The reason is that there is actually not much happening. And you know what, for once that is actually very nice!

The bright summer colors are gone, but that does not make the the landscape around Lausanne any less beautiful.

And the sunsets have not lost their colors at all.

Are you liable for your tweets?

2009-11-17T23:56:00.000+01:00

Are you liable for your tweets? That is what the headline on cnn.com currently is asking. In the article the paper goes on to ask 'Can the law keep up with technology?' It describes how a number of people have faced law suits because of the statements they have written on their twitter accounts. The article goes on to philosophize that the laws governing free speech online generally are five years behind the technology. The technology needs to develop first before you can design laws to govern it, the argument seems to be. Sounds reasonable to me.

Interesting article, I thought. Even more interesting, I thought, that I actually read it. And took the time to let it sink in. Something have changed. It is not like I haven't gotten my share of news. Particularly after Jean-Pierre Lehmann's class on Global Political Economy I made sure that I subscribed to some RSS feeds on the different part of the world news. A very efficient way of keeping up with the high-level news. I barely made it further than the headlines, though. Until now.

I feel that I am in the process of resurfacing after a very long dive and I am starting to rediscovered things that I used to enjoy. Such as reading the news. Only three weeks ago I discovered that the information center at the school actually keeps the main Danish business newspaper 'Børsen'. There is nothing better than grabbing a cup of coffee and a Bounty chocolate bar and then spend half an hour after class reading the news. Not because I have to, but because I can.

It was mostly Danish news and business news used to read, but the Global Political Economy class (and probably the IMD environment) has changed that. Right now I enjoy following Obama on his trip around Asia and the talks about the upcoming climate summit in Copenhagen. The International Herald Tribune delivers 90 papers to the school every day in attempt to get us to become so accustomed to the paper that we will buy it afterward. I probably will from time to time.

Friday freedom

2009-11-14T00:11:00.002+01:00

What do you do when you have stared yourself blind on your business plan and no longer can come up with useful answers? You call some of your classmates with experience in the field into a meeting, you explain the problem and a couple of hours later you are on your way again with your head full of new input and - most of all - a new solution to your problem. That was what I did today and it worked wonders! Thanks guys!

We have this and the coming two Fridays off. I was not in Lausanne during the 'On-campus recruiting' weeks, so this is the first week day where I have not had class or group work since I arrived in Lausanne. What a wonderful feeling of freedom to walk around in town and feel the fresh pre-winter air in your lungs as you walk up the steep pedestrian street. I spent the afternoon running some errands. Amongst other things I went up to get my official 'Departure Certificate', which basically is a letter stating that Switzerland acknowledges that I am leaving the country. As I walked up there I discovered several new places; stores, nice restaurants and a big movie theater. Places that I had no clue existed and that I definitely would like to frequent. It is somewhat ironic, though, that I only see them on the way to pick up my departure documents.

My girlfriend arrived early in the evening and we went out for Chinese with a bunch of people from the class. When we arrived at the place there were two other tables with IMD students already there. A popular place, indeed! And their dumplings were fantastic! The feeling of the fact that this year is about to end has started to settle and we have realized that if we are to go and have all the coffees, beers, dinners and other get-togethers that we talked about the whole year, then we need to do it NOW!

Eugene Cha [Korea], Juan Benitez [Colombia] and Tony Jamous [France/Lebanon] enjoying some of the good Chinese food.

Nicolas Denef [Belgium] and Suchir Swarup [Canada/India].

Handstands and hamburgers

2009-11-10T23:19:00.001+01:00

Like Kristin I am also attending the class on India and China this week. The class is taught by Professors Anand Narasimhan and Winter Nie, who are from India and China respectively. Today Professor Nie (pictured above) taught a case about how the relatively small Chinese company Alibaba successfully kicked global giant Ebay out of the Chinese business-to-business e-commerce market in a couple of years.

Alibaba was forced to use new and unproven methods to overcome the massive financial advantage Ebay possessed. One of the things Alibaba did was to teach their employees how to do handstands. The idea was that to get them to see things from a different angle. Chuks Onunkwo is not Chinese, but was happy to show how they do handstands in Nigeria. Eric Vergara [Thailand] (and the rest of the class) is watching.

The beautiful autumn colors and the winter coats have come out, but that cannot keep an MBA class off the ping-pong tables. Here it is Henry Low [Singapore] and Juan Benitez [Colombia] on the left playing Eric Vergare [Thailand] and Ilya Syshchikov [Russia].

Yury Vasilkov [Russia], Carsten Bremer [Germany] and Fill Niu [China] had their birthdays Sunday and Monday. That was celebrated yesterday at the White Horse pub with cold beer and dart games. Since birthday cake does not go very well with beer, Valeria Pavlyukovskaya arranged for birthday hamburgers. Here the three gentlement are joined Chia Chia Lim [Singapore].
Carsten is from the old East Germany and has his birthday on 9 November, the same day as the Berlin wall came down in 1989. That was his 13th birthday. He has both memories and very interesting stories from that time. We tend to forget that these events are not very far away. In fact, they are part of the people that are around us every day.

Mind your map

2009-11-06T23:20:00.000+01:00

I have been putting a lot of hours in my business plan over the last couple of days. I collected a lot of the information for it in Hong Kong and Singapore back in September, but then came a month of ICP with travel and intensive days in the dungeons, so I never had time to write it down. It would have been better if I had written it down earlier, though. You loose a lot of details when you have things in your head for too long, but at least I remember all the general principles.

I guess I am also starting to panic a little bit. The end of the year is drawing near. Just like everybody else is on the hunt for a job, then I need to create this job for myself. It is not really that different. I promised myself and a potential investor that I would have my business plan ready by mid November. I am glad that I made this commitment; it keeps me on my toes. I guess I also panic, because as I write, I realize what a monstrous task I have in front of me. There is such an endless amount of things to consider, when you want to start on your own: Where do you register the company, where do you find investors, who do you hire to help you, where do you find them, what are the risks, how do you mitigate them, etc, etc. I try to stick to the big picture, but it is not easy and I still get lost in the detail too often.

Luckily Johan Jansén-Storbacka (Sweden/Finland) showed me some mind-mapping techniques and tools the other day. That has been a huge help in getting the whole thing organized. Thanks, Johan! The perhaps greatest benefit of all is to get all this stuff out of your head and down on paper. That is the benefit of the writing process.

Well, I better get back to work!

Ciao!

Thorsten

A business tour de force

2009-11-03T21:05:00.003+01:00

We are having a business tour de force this week with no less than 18 speakers coming through in five days. Seven of them were there today: Bombardier, Deloitte, IKEA, Dell, Kuehne & Nagel, Boston Consulting Group and PubliGroupe. All of them world class players in each their field. The overall subject is change management in different forms.

All of it is done as live cases, which means that the companies present a business situation or dilemma that they have faced. That could be anything from a spin-off of the company to the roll out of a new global strategy. We ask a few questions and give our shot at a solution. We then hear how the company actually solved the issue and what the result was. Interesting stuff which at the same time gives good insight into a lot of different companies.

Monday morning we turned in our last leadership paper, which was our last large assignment (as far as I know). Due to the presentation of the live cases we don't have to read cases in advance and there is no more group work either. This means that I have been home at 6pm the last two days, WITH NOTHING TO DO! Weird, very weird. I almost don't know what to do with myself. Can you imagine, today I even read the newspaper!! I mean, the real paper version! The one that you easily can spend an hour reading while you are sipping a cup of coffee! Great feeling, but at the same time I almost feel guilty for not doing anything! Luckily I have the diary today, so the shock is not too great, but what about tomorrow? :-)

Thorsten

Deloitte and IKEA live cases presented by Luis Gallardo and Patrick Lindvall respectively.

Stefan Minder from Kuehne & Nagel presenting how he revamped their sales force. It was great to see someone from my old industry - transportation and logistics - on the podium.

Movie Night

2009-10-31T01:18:00.004+01:00

We had movie night tonight. Although it was very cosy with popcorn, coke and beer there was also an intellectual element to it. After the last two days teachings on 'Ethics and Social Responsiblity' Professor Michael Yaziji showed Al Gores well known movie 'An inconvenient truth' and Marc Achbar's 'The Corporation'. The former tells the story of the biggest challenge of our time, Global warming, while the second is about how corporate greed and lack of ethics and moral can leads to exploitation and human misery. The latter is a very anti-business movie, but it is nevertheless very relevant, particularly in a business school.

What I liked about both movies is that they don't end as doomsday wisdom. Al Gore's movie ends up concluding that we already have the necessary technology to turn the corner and bring our CO2 emissions back 1970 levels. All that is required is mix personal and political will, not more technology.

The yearbook committee is working serious overtime these days. They have collected more than 15,000 pictures and hundreds of pages of data from participants and partners, which they now are compiling into a book that we all will keep as a memory for many years to come. The hard workers are Adrian Smaranda (nearest), Rasmus Figenschou, Sylvain Cabalery, Manisha Mediratta and David Rohan (behind the screen). They get moral support from MBA2009 dog-of-the-year Kizomba. Thank you guys for the amazing work. We know how many hours you are putting in it and we all appreciate it!!

Thorsten

Crisis management

2009-10-28T02:32:00.003+01:00

It was Monday morning in the study rooms. The external professor was running late (or so we thought) so we were just sitting in the study rooms doing a few emails, a cup of coffee in the hand, no rush. Then the phone rang! Weird, the phones in the study rooms normally never rings. They are used to call out. It was a journalist from BBC! And he wanted to know what we were going to do about the toxic material we had leaked into the river?!?! Huh, say again! What river? What material?

Then the other phone ring. We looked at each other very confused. It was a teacher from the local high school, who wanted to know whether they could still visit the plant despite the accident we had. School? Plant? Accident? You've definitely got the wrong guy, I am just having my morning coffee while waiting for the class to start. Leave me alone.

The phone rang again. Silence, confusion, more silence. Johan slowly picked up the phone, not knowing what to expect. It was the farmer from up the river who wanted to know whether it still was safe for his cows to drink from the river? Huh??? OK, this was not fun anymore. What was going on? Perhaps we should read the papers that had been left on the table in the room. 'You are the management team of Company XYZ..... accident...... possible leakage......'. We looked at each other in horror. For a couple of seconds the room went dead silent. Then we all jumped to our feet at once, two people went to the white board and started scribbling down the information we had, others started working on press releases and emails to the media, the employees, the customers, etc. Johan was immediately appointed spokesperson, a role we didn't envy him as he time and time again was fed to the hungry beasts (journalists) outside the door.

From there on it was just four hours of fire fighting. We were bombarded with phone calls, emails, sms'es from our boss and DVDs with news coverage from the local media. Protesters were hammering on our door and journalists were barging in at no warning. What a mess! What a Chaos! All extremely well orchestrated by crisis management expert Tom Curtin and his team of very, very real BBC journalists.

In the afternoon we saw the videos that had been made during the hectic morning, so we could hear what we really said. Ouch! We would have been slaughtered by the public if it had been the real thing. It was particularly fascinating to hear from the BBC journalists themselves, what they actually are looking for when they interview. In the afternoon it was wrapped up with a session on 'Brent Spar', very much an example of how not to do it.

Thorsten

There was real Swiss cheese fondue for lunch today....

...which was a big hit, as you can see.

Execution and Change

2009-10-23T22:58:00.003+02:00

This week we have been back in the class room again for the first time in what feels like an eternity. It took some adjusting to move from the small ICP teams, where you decide everything yourself and back to the class room with pre-readings and discussions in the auditorium all day. Nevertheless, there was something comforting in being back, like meeting up with old friends for the first time in a long time. So much catching up to do! The fact that the we are back, but relieved from the excruciating pressure of the building blocks, makes both the classes and the days in general very enjoyable.

The subject was 'Execution and Change' and was directed by Professor Maury Pieperl. The class had many parallels to Leadership and Leading People classes, but focused specifically on leadership in periods of great change. A very interesting subject which (as the picture indicates) really got the class going.

Baby lineup of some of the MBA children that are in Lausanne with their Moms and Dads.

Two of the latest proud fathers with their daughters Bruna and Kavya.

From left to right the proud parents Isabella and Corinne with their daughter Camille followed by Swati and Prashant with their daughter Kavya.

Tutto bene!

2009-10-21T00:40:00.004+02:00

Here we are, Stefano and I on the way back from Milano to Lausanne. We were lucky to get onboard one of the new fancy trains with airplane seats, power plugs and a restaurant that serves fresh-brewed coffee. It makes life so wonderfully comfortable.

We have been in Milano to talk to Father Kizito - founder of the Koinonia organization - and to the Amani organization - the primary source of funding for Koinonia . We felt that it was important that they also knew about the things both we and Koinonia had been through, so they can provide Koinonia with the optimal support. Our message was well received and we now only need to debrief with the MBA2008 class to bring the project to an end. That meeting is planned for Friday.

Stefano is from Milano, so we stayed with his parents while there. Here it is from left Fratello Stefano, Sorella Marta, Papá Fabrizio, Mamma Marina and one of their guest for the day. Gerald Lo was also there, but is unfortunately not captured here. We really enjoyed the hospitality of the family and the excellent cooking of Mamma Marina. It was a piece of Italy, like taken out of a movie.

The Giussani family lives in a charming high-ceiling apartment in central Milano. Stefano is the 4^th consecutive generation engineer in the family and surprised us by showing his hidden talent on the family’s piano!

It was also quite an experience for a northerner like myself to experience another of Stefano’s talents: Some real Italian driving in Milan rush-hour traffic! I know now why the Italians produce such great race cars: It is in their blood!

Ciao!

Thorsten

A picture from Kenya on Friday after we had our last workshop. These are the people from Koinonia and IMD that formed the core team during the project.

Ruslana and Eva under a beautiful purple-flowered tree at the Karen Blixen house just outside Nairobi.

Out of Africa

2009-10-19T01:58:00.002+02:00

We finished our assignment in Kenya on Friday afternoon and started our journey back already the same evening. We had a few hours to spend before the flight, so Gerald and Stefano went to one of the rescue centers to spend some time with the kids, while Ruslana, Eva and I wanted to see the Karen Blixen museum. Karen Blixen, who is one of the most famous Danish writers, spent a good part of her life in Kenya. You may have seen her in the movie 'Out of Africa' which is about her life in Africa. She had a farm at the foot of Ngong hills and today that whole area - the south west outskirts of Nairobi - is simply called Karen.

Eva and Ruslana are tough negotiators and decisive women, so since they could not agree with the taxi driver on a proper price for our trip to the Karen Blixen house they decided that we should go by Matatu. Matatus are small jam-packed vans that the locals use to get around. They are very inexpensive, but in terms of comfort and security they leave a lot room for improvement. The ride was an interesting experience and we eventually made it to our destination, or so we thought. Instead of being in the museum, we had ended up in Karen Blixen's house, which had been turned into a restaurant and coffee bar. It was too late to try to get to the museum, so instead we sat down and enjoyed a good Kenyan coffe and the biggest slices of chocolate cake I have ever seen.

Less than 24 hours later I was attending my Grandmas funeral in Denmark. A lot of people had showed up and the whole family was there. Although it was no fun to carry the coffin out then I still felt that I had been through the worst when I had visited her in the hospital the week before. I had said my goodbye and now we were 'just' completing the journey with her. She left with dignity and in the evening the whole extended family gathered for dinner at my uncle and aunt's place, so for one last time - as countless times before - she managed to bring us all together.

Thorsten

Baking buns

2009-10-15T01:06:00.005+02:00

I arrived in Kenya late Sunday night just in time for me to start the new week together with the team. They had done a fantastic job last week. Most of all they had brought together the Executive Council of the organization and with them defined the high level issues and the 'operational' vision and mission statements for the organization. A grand achievement that will provide a lot of clarity and guidance to the organization in the future and to the rest of our work here. It is important to note the word 'operational', meaning that it is separate from the 'spiritual' vision that Koinonia has a Christian community. One of the most interesting things about this project has been the question on how to bridge this gap between spirituality and day-to-day work. They don't teach you that at school!

Having established the overall objectives for the organization we prepared a workshop that should align the many initiatives with the overall vision. We made some adjustments to the framework that we had used during our first visit here......

...and asked the managers of the individual units to fill it in again. This time the objectives came from the overall organization, not from the units themselves.

A couple of them shared their filled-in framework. It became much clearer how both Social Initiatives and Income Generating Activities can pull in the same direction in support of the overall Koinonia vision.

Last night we met MBA2008 Jesper Hornberg and his friend Petter, who are in Kenya on a project of their own.

Early morning at Baraza Café where we have our breakfast every morning. Baraza is one of the Income Generating Activities under the Koinonia umbrella that serves the purpose of generating income for the social initiatives such as the children's homes.

Today Wednesday we took the next step in bringing the overall vision down to the level of the daily work. We did that by conducting a workshop on process mapping. The objective of the workshop was two-fold: To teach process mapping as a tool and to help Koinonia understand some of their own key processes better.
We needed a simple and recognizable process as an example to teach the very basics of process mapping. Inspired by my dad, who frequently surprises his family with freshly baked buns, we used the process of 'baking buns' as example. That proved excellent to get the points across.

We then split the Koinonia people in smaller teams and asked them to do a process map of a restaurant visit. Each of them were given roles such as host, waiter, cook and manager in order to spice up the discussion. The objective was to teach how to do an integrated flow chart for a process that involves multiple parties.

Next step was then to map Koinonia's own processes. Here Eva and Evelyn are working with the managers on the HR process 'Hiring-to-retiring'.

Helen from the Kivuli Centre - one of the children's homes - took the lead on mapping perhaps the most core of all processes in Koinonia, the reason for their existence, how to 'Integrate a child'.

The 'Integrate a child' process became center of an intense debate, which immediately pin-pointed some of the key issues that the organization is facing with its integration process. This is where the real power of processing mapping lies: Bring people from different parts of a process together and ask them to map their own work and you will be amazed about the understanding it creates. The issues with the process will unavoidable show up.

We were (again) amazed about the passion with which the Koinonia people speak of helping the children in Nairobi. This is much, much more than just a job for them. This is what they live for!

Monday evening I received the sad news that my grandma passed away. In the middle of these sad circumstances, I am so relieved that I made it home last week and managed to see her alive for the last time. When we left her on Saturday I said 'See you later, grandma'. I could not make myself say 'Goodbye', neither did I believe it was the last time. The funeral will be on Saturday, so when the rest of the team goes to Lausanne on Friday I will be heading back home to Denmark.

Thorsten

A sudden turn

2009-10-07T01:32:00.002+02:00

Sunday evening I received the sad news that my grand mother had been hospitalized with a brain hemorrhage. Since noone knew the status or where it was going my parents recommended that I should still go to Kenya as planned the next morning.

Monday morning I met with the team at Lausanne train station and we went together to the airport in Geneva. After having checked in we received news that the situation with my grand mother had worsened, so instead of getting on the plane to Nairobi, I got on one in the opposite direction, back to Denmark.

My Mom and my youngest sister, Helene, were already there when I arrived at the hospital. My other sister Anne arrived later in the evening and today my brother came by train. All of them live in the other end of the country. It has been a couple of tough - but at the same time good - days. Tough, because of the gravity of the situation, but also good as the family very quickly came together. Not that I doubted that it would, it just warmed to see it happen as it always has.

My grand mother appears to have stabilized physically now, but other than that we seem to have lost her. She is no longer able to speak and only in a short glimse from time to time does she seem to recognize us. The old, calm and clever eyes are still there, but they will probably never again tell the stories they used to. My grand mother was born in 1920 and has lived a long life with three children, a 62-year marriage with my grand dad and an incredible amount of friends. It is a tired and happy old woman who says her goodbyes.

The last couple of years she has told us a lot of stories from a time we have never really known: About how it was to be a child in a small provincial town in Denmark in the 1930s and how it was to be a young couple in Copenhagen during World War II, sitting out some of the coldest winters in recent Danish history in an unheated apartment and in a society where everything was in short supply. We loose so much when these people leave us, yet we forget to ask or to listen when we still have them.

I will spare you a long philosofical tailspin on the meaning of life and death, although I have done quite some thinking on the subject the last two days. Let us just remind ourselves that we must live our lives in a way so that when we one day are taking our last breaths, then our loved ones will gather around our bed, sad because we are leaving, but also happy because we got the most out of our life. Do not wait until you loose someone to get an overdose of this realization, but make it a small part of your everyday life.

Thorsten

Decompression and recompression

2009-10-04T19:00:00.002+02:00

I feel, it has been a pretty tough week. As tough as an average week in the building blocks. Coming back from abroad and being dumped straight into classes and the ICP project with a Friday deliverable to the clients.

This weekend my girlfriend was here. There is nobody that like her can make me relax and we immediately went into 48 hours of eating, sleeping and day dreaming about the 'normal life' that we soon will be leading again.

Taking it easy for a weekend is a sin in IMD language and always comes back with a vengeance. The last leadership paper is due tomorrow morning at 8.00 and I still have quite a distance to go on it. On top of that I need to get my suitcase packed again; tomorrow morning at 8.42 the train departs from platform 4 to Geneva from where we via Istanbul will find our way back to Ngong Road in Nairobi.

Life is good, but man, why does all the good have to back stacked so close.

This afternoon we went to the Open House at the Trimoto Harley-Davidson dealership in Cortaillod not far from Neuchatel. The trip was arranged by Christian Steiger from IMD, who also arranged the motorbike weekend into the French Alps a month ago. Christian is a passionate Harley maniac with several bikes in his garage.

My own bike is a bit egoist-bike, a bar-hopper if you want. It is a so-called naked bike with no backrest, a minimum of a backseat and as little equipment as the law allows. Not the most comfortable thing to be a passenger on. It is actually not even comfortable for the driver, if you go more than a couple of hours.

My girlfriend and I have therefore been talking about renting a real touring bike for a vacation trip. So when we got the chance to take one of the big Electra Harleys out for out quick spin, we took it. Here Jean-Claude explains all the ins and outs of it.
This bike has more buttons than the keyboard on my computer. Here is radio, CD-player, MP3-player, intercom, cruise-control, heating in the handles and a host of other luxury items. The only button on my own bike is the start-button, so it took me a while to figure this one out.
It is Christian Steiger standing in the back.

And off we go, just for a quick 15 minute trip. We were immediately convinced that this is the way to tour a country. On this kind of bike you sit so comfortably that you just can go on for hours and hours. We agreed that we next spring will explore our new home country Italy on a big comfortable motorbike like this one.

Back again! This bike is so heavy that it helps with an extra hand when you go backwards.

Kenya calling

2009-10-02T20:41:00.002+02:00

It has been a couple of long days as we have been preparing the end-of-phase-2-presentation and planned the work for Phase 3. Luckily, doing these two things is very much one-and-the-same process. Quite a heavy process, though. It entails the usual iterative discussions, post-it notes and drawing upon drawing on the white boards. Over and over again, a process that is so tiring when you are in the middle of it but which is the only way to bring the real problems to the surface and consensus to the group. It is always very nerving, because you constantly are up against a hard dead line. Afterward follows the relief from the pressure and the tiredness of having been going flat out for a period. It is all covered by a feeling of either joy or frustration depending on how it went. Today it went well, the clients (which is last year's MBA class) expressed their appreciation and we feel on the right track as we move on to the next phase.

Next phase is again called Kenya, starts Monday morning in Geneva airport and lasts for twelve days. We have planned the next rounds of workshops there. The focus is this time much less on digging up information and much more on finding solutions together with the people in the organization. It is three weeks since we left Nairobi and in that time Koinonia (the organisation we work with) has been working with the frameworks we gave them. We look forward to learning what they got out of those exercises.

We chose to order the abundance of information that we had obtained during our first Kenya voyage by first writing the information on post-it notes.....

....then ordering it in complete silence....

....until we arrived at a few overall groups.

Finally, we drew up how the different groups are interrelated and we had a good picture of how to approach the issues.

The beginning of the end

2009-09-30T01:29:00.003+02:00

There are more and more signs of the fact that the IMD bubble eventually is going to burst. Today Regula from the MBA Office took us through the different procedures for exiting Switzerland, canceling insurances and leaving our apartments.
Regula and the rest of the MBA Office are the grease that keeps the MBA machine running. Everyday they fix dozens of small and large practical problems. They handle everything from a grumpy landlord to an unclear phone bill with a smile. They made sure that everything went well when we entered Switzerland and IMD and they are now helping us through the door in the other end.

Today was the day for the monthly partner lunch and the partners also joined the 'Exit IMD' session with Regula. Here Henry's wife Kelly [Singapore] is here learning how to do an apartment exit the Swiss way.

Rasmus [Norway] has all year been collecting quotes for the yearbook. Today he became yearbook material himself when expressing his concern about the excessive cleanliness of the apartments that is required upon departure: 'If there is one thing I have learned about Switzerland, then it is that it is all about......spots!'. Who can argue with that? :-)

The graduation party committee has started their work and Joost, Karim and Wouter presented the initial work. Judging from the hats it can only be a blast! :-)

Time to catch up

2009-09-28T01:12:00.001+02:00

I have just come back from Genova. As a customer with Trenitalia today, I was very positively surprised. Instead of being stuffed into one of the usual 30-old year noisy cars, they deployed a brand new, silent train with seats and entertainment systems that looked like they were stolen from an airplane. Nice! I spend the time to catch up with almost three weeks of unanswered emails. Needless to say that I only got half way through it.

It was great to spend two days with my girlfriend and my parents. We took it easy and did not anything at all. I really enjoyed it and hated having to leave again. I am so tired of constantly being on the move, never to sleep in the same bed for more than a couple of days at the time. While I know I will miss IMD when I am no longer here, then I also look forward to getting back to a somewhat normal life, a life where they days have some kind of rhythm and routine. Not too much, of course, but enough to feel that you actually have a home.

The first signs of things coming to an end are becoming obvious too obvious to be ignored. This weekend I moved my motorbike to Genova with the intention of not bringing it back, committees for the yearbook and graduation have been established and on Tuesday we have a 'move-out' session with the MBA Office on how we exit the country again. Exit?!? How can that be? We have barely started yet!

For the next day and half we will be back in class again for the first time since the building blocks ended. I really look forward to that, it is like the family coming together again, even if it is just for a little while. There are too many people that I haven't seen for the past two months!

Tour de Southern Europe

2009-09-26T00:53:00.002+02:00

It is 23.00 here in Genoa, but I feel like it is much later.... or earlier in the morning. Perhaps I still have a bit of Singapore time left in me. Out there it is 5.00AM now.

Yesterday morning my parents picked me up in Frankfurt airport. They left Denmark on Monday and had via Bremen taken the trip through part of the Rhine valley. From Frankfurt we drove west towards Strassbourg, where we caught the so-called Alsace Whine Route. The route goes through 170km of vineyards at the foot of the Vosgian mountains, small picturesque villages with colorful houses and flowers everywhere. It looks like it is straight out of a fairytale. We had apparently hit the peak of the harvesting season, so everywhere we met these tall funny looking grape-picking-machines and tractors with trailers full of grapes. We went into a small place to buy some wine, but they were so busy harvesting that they barely had time to serve us. We got our wine, though, and we also found small places where we could get bread, cheese and sausage, so finally dinner was secured. French dinner that is. Awesome!

Alsace has throughout history been thrown back and forth between Germany and France, but since 1919 it has been in French hands. The German influence is still significant and everywhere you see names that are a mix of German and French. Just take the small town of Dambach La Ville as an example, or Haut-Koeningensburg – and old castle on mountaintop where we stopped by. In the late afternoon we found the highway back to Lausanne, had our awesome French purchases for dinner and went straight to bed.

This morning I had the pleasure to show my parents around the school. They saw the dungeons, the powernap room, the auditorium, the canteen and all the other places that have been the center of our lives for the past nine months. Most of all they met the people I have been working so closely with. I have been gone for three weeks, which is an eternity at IMD. Trying to catch up with everyone on what had happened during those three weeks proved impossible. I will have to spend all of next week doing that.

In the afternoon I got on my motorbike and headed off towards Genoa with my parents in the car behind me. My girlfriend now lives in Genoa in Northern Italy and I will be moving here when done in Lausanne in December. This was a good time to bring the motorbike here for good. I am out for a big part of October and if we get into November it gets too cold and too risky to move it. The six hour drive was quite an experience. Particularly the winding road on the way up to the St Bernard mountain pass reminded me of the motorbike trip in France only a month ago. We started with sun and 22C in Lausanne, were hit by 12C and rain on the Italian side of the St Bernard tunnel and ended up with 26C upon arrival here in Genoa.

Now I have a day and a half to catch up on things with my girlfriend, my parents, my email, my homework for next week and all the other things I have neglected for the past three weeks. There is no such thing as a full-off weekend just yet.

Q & A

2009-09-22T20:03:00.000+02:00

I am sitting at the Starbucks in the new giant ION shopping centre on the fancy Orchard Road in Singapore. The whole ground floor is packing with brand new stores with Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Armani, Patek Philippe and the likes. From the ground floor the mall goes four stories DOWN, not up. In the basement there is the typical Asian food court. I got myself a ‘Nasi kuning ayam merah’ which is Indonesian and/or Malay for ‘Yellow rice with red chicken’. Another reminder of the good ol’ times in Indonesia.

Yesterday I treated myself to a trip to the movies. I used to do it regularly, but it is almost a year ago I went last time. I saw Tarantino’s latest creation ‘Inglorius basterds’ about an American Jewish hit squad working under cover in Nazi occupied France. As usual with Tarantino you leave the cinema with a funny feeling. It leaves you thinking, but you don’t really know about what, because the movie did not teach you anything. Nevertheless, I enjoyed my first evening off in weeks and the first movie theatre trip in a year. And I did not even fall asleep!

My trip here in Asia is coming to an end. I have a meeting tomorrow for lunch and tomorrow evening I head back to Europe. The trip has been an intense learning experience, as intense as a week of building blocks at IMD. Hong Kong overwhelmed me with a lot of new questions and things to consider while Singapore answered a lot of these questions. The reason being that in Hong Kong I mostly met customers, who listed an endless amount of requirements I would have to fulfil if they were to buy my product. In Singapore I mostly met suppliers who offered solutions that I did know existed and I met seasoned industry experts who could give me the high level perspective on the forces in the industry.

My parents are right now working their way down from Denmark to Lausanne by car. We agreed that they should pick me up on the way in whatever airport whereto I could get a convenient (=cheap) flight. That ended up being Frankfurt, so they will pick me up there Thursday morning and we will drive to Lausanne together. I look forward to seeing them again. I actually even look forward to driving with them to Lausanne. It reminds me of the trips in Germany we used to do as a family when I was a kid.

In half an hour I will meet an old colleague at Harris’ on Robertson Walk. Almost exactly one year ago this was where I met my coming classmates Henry Low (Singapore) and Sylvain Cabalery (France) for the first time. It seems like it was only yesterday we were sitting there at the high tables outside the bar enjoying a cold beer. On the other hand, if I look at how much has happened since, how much I have learned and how differently I think, it seems like it must be ages ago. Who did this to me? :-)

Business with style and a smile

2009-09-20T14:03:00.001+02:00

It has been another change of scenery. Not as drastic as the one from Nairobi to Hong Kong, but still I cannot help noticing the differences. I am now in Singapore, sitting with a glass of red wine in my friend Nicolaj's apartment overlooking Robertson Quay from the 13th floor. We are still within the old English empire so the electrical plugs are still the sames as in Kenya and Hong Kong and they also drive in the wrong (left) side of the road.

Both Hong Kong and Singapore are to Asia what Switzerland is to Europe. They make a big part of their living functioning as a regional hubs and tax refuges for the big international corporations. All three of them administrate an amazing amount of wealth despite the fact that they produce few or no physical goods. But they do i very differently and I particularly like the way the Singaporeans do it. Just like in Hong Kong and Switzerland everything is very well organized. Public transportation (for some reason always used as a measure for public administration of countries) works like clockwork and you are very safe whereever you go. There is more space in Singapore, so the city is not as build up and congested as Hong Kong, but on the other hand it does not having the enormous natural beauty of Switzerland.

What I like about the Singaporeans is that they do it with style and with a smile. They take their time to enjoy what they do. It is not a matter of just delivering a service in the most effective what, but it is also about how you do it. Take the taxi drivers for example. In Hong Kong they will take you from A to B in the fastest, shortest and most effective way without cheating you. You will be thrown around on the backseat as they take the turn in order to reach this goal.

The taxi drivers in Singapore will also go the shortest way without ever cheating you (sometimes it is even hard to get them to accept the tip), but they will do it with a big smile, cracking jokes and telling you about the things they think you should see in their beloved city. They are always in a good mood and if everything else fails you can always talk Premier League football with them. One of them even showed me his ManU tattoo on his shoulder one time. The taxi drivers are a good representation of business in Singapore. It is all about business, don't get that wrong, but it is the way it is done that I find appealing. Much more than in Hong Kong and Switzerland.

Dennis, another old friend of mine, is also here, so the talk goes on the old days and what has happened since we met last. I was out here for the Formula 1 last year, the first F1 for both me and Singapore. The city is now preparing for its second race which will be held this coming week. Unfortunately I will be gone by then, but at least I had the experience already. Another weird thing about being here is that it feels like I was here yesterday. I can remember everything we did and all the details. I just cannot get it to fit in my brain that it was a year ago. Another one of those scary reminders of how time flies.

We are heading to Boat Quay for Indian food, then to Robertson walk to catch some other friends that are there for tonight's Premier League game.

The World Capital of Business

2009-09-18T22:56:00.004+02:00

What a week this has been? I have never had one like it, that is for sure!

It started with the networking meeting Monday and Tuesday on the Kowloon side of the city. Lots and lots of information and input from the more than 50 people (and potential customers) from all over the world. Tuesday evening I moved to a cheaper hotel on Hong Kong Island. A 4-star hotel in central Hong Kong for what equals USD 40 per night. Sometimes you are just lucky!

Since then I have basically just been doing one thing. Meeting people! One after the other, non-stop. Meetings that have been set up through IMD classmates, old colleagues, friends, connections on www.linkedin.com or through people from the network meeting. A good share of the people I have met have been Danes. I guess like most other nationalities we stick together and help each other whenever we can.

When I first got to Hong Kong I felt that everything was so rushed, too much efficiency to really be enjoyable. Somehow this efficiency absorbs you and you become part of it. You are grabbed by the flow and fall into the rhythm of the city. I have never done so many meetings in such a short period of time as here. Everything is so close, you never spend more than 15 minutes going anywhere, very often it is just around the corner. At the same time everything is so focused on business that you can set up a meeting in a matter of hours. I have met people here who makes their living out of ‘just’ knowing and connecting people. Like Nokia! One meeting constantly leads to the next, “I have this guy you need to meet” people say all the time. It is like you find a little piece of rope in the sand, but as you start pulling it becomes longer and longer and eventually turns into a net. As you try to reel it in it just gets bigger and bigger. I have discovered an amazing amount of things the last week – a whole new world, actually - and still I suspect that I have only seen a fraction.

Today I took the one-hour train ride to the Chinese border, got a visa and then ventured into Shenzhen, a city that in 20 years has transformed itself from a sleepy fishing village to a fifteen million people production facility! I had set up two meetings in Shenzhen, one with a local company and one with an multinational company with an office there. Of course I wanted to get the information from the people that I met, but most of all I wanted to get a feel for China. I have heard so much about this place the past ten years, but I had never been there. There is only one way of experiencing these things and that is by going to see for yourself. As a foreigner in China you are a completely blind and deaf. You cannot understanding anything people say and you cannot read the sings. Neither can they understand you. You just hand over a note or a business card to the taxi driver with the address written in Chinese and then hope that he takes you to the right place. Today he did.

Tonight we went for a few drinks with an amazing 25th floor view of the Hong Kong skyline. It beats Manhattan by miles. It is just such much wider, bigger, more colourful and spectacular.

The hotel is fully booked tomorrow, so in a few hours I need to pack my things again and go to my friend Morten’s place, where I will spend the last night. We are heading out on an all-day boat trip tomorrow arranged by the Swedish community here. The smart thing would be to stay back, sleep and get some work done, but I don’t want to miss this chance. Tomorrow night there are new parties waiting and Sunday morning I head off to Singapore. I might actually have another very early morning meeting on the way to the airport, so is the Hong Kong way! And in Singapore there is another 5 meetings lined up so far with more on the way.

I guess I have said before. The second half of the year is no less intense than the first, it is just much more fun because you are doing it to yourself. It is still only a few hours of sleep per night, but it is OK because you are in charge yourself. It is happening because you cannot stop chasing opportunities. It is driven by excitement, not by force or fear! I love it!

LIVING IN LAYERS

You are not in doubt that Hong Kong always has been in lack of space. Everything is in layers. The places where people live...

… and where they work.

Even the trams….

the busses….

and the boats are in layers!

Business, business, business!!

Sunset over Hong Kong Island seen from the Kowloon side…

and a part of the Hong Kong skyline just as the lights start to come on.

At the Bruce Lee platter on the ‘Walks of fame’.

In Shenzhen. Five years ago this area was a swamp!

From Cool Kenya to Hot Hong Kong

2009-09-13T20:41:00.004+02:00

Wow, what a change of scenery it has been.

- From dry and cool (22C) Kenya to hot and very humid Hong Kong.
- From the dusty roads of the Nairobi to the busy waters between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island.
- From the bunk beds on Ngong road to the 8th floor on Harbour Plaza hotel.
- From the desperate poverty of the Kibera slum to the Ferraris and high rise office buildings.
- From the wide and bright laughs of the Kenyan’s to the complete absence of even just a little smile from the people of Hong Kong.

It is amazing that you can travel between two such extreme contrasts in less than a day. Kenya was a first for me and so is Hong Kong, so I have the privilege of exploring them both with eyes that have not yet been coloured by experience and opinion. The only things I can see that they have in common are that they were British colonies and that they therefore drive in the wrong (left) side of the road and use the same electrical plugs.

In Friday’s diary entry I asked why Kenya is so underdeveloped, when there are so many smart and hard working people in the country. A number of different Kenyan’s (from old colleagues to the taxi driver that took me to the airport) have replied to that questions and they all say the same:

What Kenya is lacking is leadership!

What they mean by that is that the Kenyan government is too busy lining their own pockets to help their country develop. There is no doubt in my mind that if Kenya had a Nelson Mandela they would leap out of poverty as quickly as South Africa is doing it. They already have everything else that it takes.

The next two weeks there are no classes and no project. The time is reserved for job hunt and on-campus-recruiting (known as OCR) where a large number of companies will come on campus to conduct interviews. I will be spending those days in a somewhat different way, though.

I have chosen to start my own company upon graduation and am therefore working on a business plan that I aim to have ready in November. I have conducted most of the operational analysis, but now I need to know whether the customers will want to buy such a product at all. That is why I am in Hong Kong!

An old friend of mine (a Belgian that I met in Indonesia, who now lives in Hong Kong. Long story, I know) is hosting a networking meeting for 50 people from 28 countries that all are potential future customers of mine. They are here to get to know each other and I am here to get to know them. The networking meeting will run over the next two days. Tomorrow they will do a lot of short 5-10 minutes presentations and Tuesday morning I have been given a 15-minute slot to present my idea. It is obviously a truly unique opportunity to be able to pitch your idea for fifty customer representing most of the world. I am not doing a sales pitch, though, but am purely here to get an idea of what it is I need to deliver for them to buy my product. To truly understand your customer, as they say.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I have set up a number of other meetings with potential customers and a supplier in Hong Kong and Shenzen. Over the weekend I will move to Singapore, where I have set up a number of similar meetings. Sounds expensive, but with the exception of these first three days (where I need to stay at the hotel for the networking meeting) I will be staying with old friends, so it is actually not that bad.

All day today I have been working on my presentation for Tuesday and the questionnaire for the subsequent interviews, so I have not seen anything of Hong Kong yet. I hope I can find some time on Saturday to do that.

Now I better call my girlfriend and go to bed. The jetlag has hit me harder this time than it usually does.

Thorsten

Welcome to the worlds second largest container port!

This is the view from my hotel. Notice the constant fog. It is very, very humid here.

Exactly the same skyline, just taken at night. Hong Kong is one big island of colourful light!

Next time, Nairobi!

2009-09-10T23:45:00.006+02:00

I am lying here on my bunk bed at Shalom House after four very intense days here in Nairobi. I am trying to make up my mind about what I think of what I have seen. So far, I don’t really know to be honest. There is a lot to digest.
I guess what you automatically do when you see things that you cannot relate to is to anyway compare it to what you know. Comparing it to Europe does not make any sense. Comparing it to South Africa where we were only a few months ago or to Indonesia, where I used to live, comes closer, but still does not really hit the mark. Both of these countries are more advanced than Kenya.

The main questions that keep popping up in my mind is: Why? Why is this country burdened with such heavy poverty and so great social problems? I have met so many smart and capable young people the last few days, so many souls hungry to learn and to improve. So why isn’t it happening?

HIV and AIDS is perhaps part of the answer because of the way it rips families and communities apart. Kenya has the same problems with crime, corruption and climate change (there is a severe drought at the moment) that many other developing countries face. But it still does not add up. There is something missing in the equation. This country should be doing better than it is! Why isn’t it?

Tomorrow we are leaving Nairobi again, but only for a while. We will be back in three weeks to continue our work. Hopefully the impressions will have had time to settle by then.

Thorsten

Monday: Stefano explains some of the things we have learned over the past few weeks to the Koinonia management team. Afterward Ruslana went on to explain the framework that we are working with.

We split the Koinonia managers in smaller groups and asked them to fill in the framework for their own social projects or business units. They took to the task with great enthusiasm and quickly learned the concepts. Here Eva is overseeing one of the groups.

Esther, Ann and Helen working on their frameworks. The Kenyan women seem to be very strong and with important roles in both Koinonia and in the Kenyan society in general. Esther is the day-to-day manager of Koinonia. Ann and Helen each run one of the children homes.

Tuesday we went around to visit the social initiatives in Koinonia. Ruslana and Gerald are here getting a tour of the dispensary.

Wednesday we went around to all the so-called IGA’s (Income Generating Activities), which is NGO terminology for ‘business unit’. Here Stefano and Ruslana are learning how Harrison runs the computer school Shalom IT.

Today Thursday we then visited four other organisations to learn how they do the same things that Koinonia does. This gave us a lot of very useful input. Here we are talking to Father Sebastian – an Indian Catholic priest – who has been working in Africa for 20 years and now runs the Bosco Boys home in Nairobi. The place is both a home and a school for 300 boys, who all have been saved from a life on the streets of Nairobi.

Let’s not forget why we are here. This is two of the girls at ‘Shelter Children Rescue Center’, which we also visited today.

And here are a couple of the boys at ‘St. Paul’s Children Home’. The new Karate Kid has been found.

Eva is making new friends in the process.

Lea Toto as part of the Nyumbani program delivers health services such as medication, nutrition and counselling to HIV patients. They have an impressive 5000 patients enrolled in their programs now.

Kenyan’s are not without humour. ‘CAUTION – Driving School - Driver under instruction – In god we trust…….’

Stefano and Gerald battling with the mosquito net. Quite an entertaining event!

Exhaustion and Excitement

2009-09-04T23:56:00.003+02:00

I am back in the train to Milano. As we pass the border to Italy the steward in the train always comes around with the cart with food and drinks. I bought a cup of coffee and a sandwich and found it a bit amusing that alone the process of paying for it was done in three of the four official Swiss languages: German, French and Italian:

Steward: Das is zehn frank sechzig, bitte.
Thorsten (handing over the money): Bitte sehr
Steward: Merci
Thorsten: Merci
Steward (with a smile): Ciao
Thorsten: Ciao

I don’t speak Italian nor French, but as you can see you get far with ‘Merci’ and ‘Ciao’, particularly in a cosmopolitan community like the Swiss.

I will be spending the night in a hotel in Milano with my girlfriend who is coming up from Genoa. Tomorrow morning early we get on the plane to Amsterdam and then on another one to Bremen. Here we take a rented car to southern Denmark to attend the wedding of a friend of mine. After the wedding we drive back south across the German border to a hotel in Flensburg. After a few hours of sleep we drive to Hamburg, where my girlfriend takes a flight to Barcelona and I get on a flight to Istanbul. My girlfriend and I have come to the point now, where we are just happy whenever we can get a few hours together in an airplane or in a car. Sleeping together is complete luxury even if it only is for a few hours at the time.

In Istanbul Airport I meet the rest of my ICP team, who has flown in from Geneva, and we fly to Nairobi to start the work with the Koinonia organisation there. After Nairobi I go straight to Hong Kong and later Singapore on my own to talk with some people there. So all in all this is the start of a three-week journey, a journey that I somehow feel will mark the opening of a new chapter in my life.

As you can probably sense, this IMD life is constantly throwing me back and forth between feelings of exhaustion and excitement. There are times (usually when I haven’t had a full night’s sleep for weeks) where I just dream about a normal life, sleeping in on Saturday morning, making a REAL breakfast and a good cup of coffee, taking time to read the newspaper or perhaps go for a run or a game of football. Like normal people do, you know. At the same time I don’t want this constant stream of new input, impressions and learning to end. It is like a drug that makes me high and makes it easier to work through the nights.

I already know now that I will miss it when it is gone!

Delivery and Celebration

2009-08-29T02:19:00.002+02:00

It has been a long and intense day. I just made it back after the latino party arranged by all our South and Central American classmates. It was an evening full of good food, home made caipirinhas, great rhythm, swinging hips and most of all good fun! Thanks to all the Latinos for a great evening!!

Today was also the phase 1 delivery of our ICP project to our client. We have been over the presentation again and again this week and today was no different in that respect. Our project is somewhat different from the rest as our client is not a company, but last year's MBA class represented by a panel of 5-6 people. We felt that the presentation went well and that we are on track before we move into the next phase, albeit there still is tons of work awaiting us there.

The MBA classes of 2003 and 2008 are having their reunions in Lausanne this weekend. We will use this opportunity to have the final football match between the 2008 and 2009 classes. It will be a match of epic proportions. Each team has won a match each, so this third and last match is of the utmost importance. I will unfortunately be missing it as I in a few hours will be heading out on a weekend motorbike ride arranged by IMD staff member Christian Steiger. We will be going around the lake and into France. I have been looking forward to this trip for weeks. I can wait to cruise through the valleys and climb the mountain passes.

Misayo Matsumoto (Japan) and Albert Schultz (Germany) enjoying South American food and a Mexican beer.

Chuks and Uche showed their daughter Isabella for the first time. Isabella was born only hours before Chuks got on the plan to South Africa with the rest of the class. Here they are flanked by Wouter Naessens (Belgium) and Natalie. Wouter and Natalie got married during the summer vacation.

So far this years IMD class have delivered nine babies and there is more on the way!

The partners entertained with a Brazilian dance.

Tonight was the birthday of Manisha Mediratta. According to Mexican traditions the birthday 'child' gets the first hit at a socalled pinata filled with candy. The only catch is that you have to hit it blindfolded. Alejandro Salcedo (Mexico) gives instructions to Manisha.

Rasmus Figenschou (Norway) ended up giving the Pinata the final blow with one of the tubes used for recycling paper cups. Then there was candy for everyone.

Ryo Abe (Japan), Oren Yehudai (Israel), Joost Mackor (The Netherlands), Yuri Vasilkov (Russia) and Valeria Pavlyukovskaya (Russia) under the empty Pinata

Dungeons & Dragons

2009-08-26T02:32:00.003+02:00

Dungeons & Dragons, that was the name of a very popular game when I was a child. You could get it both as a role play and a computer game. Somehow those words are coming back to life, but with a very different meaning.

The dungeons are the dungeons, nothing new about that. Generations of IMD students have shed their blood, sweat and tears down there. And it is all still there, at least it smells that way some times. :-) We are spending the whole day in study room 7 these days, trying to squeeze some of all the ambiguity out of our ICP project on Street Children in Nairobi. We have built up a frame work to help us understand how NGOs work and we have now started calling other NGOs to plot them into the framework and get reference points. That way we can much better understand how our organization, Koinonia, operates. These days we even have some additional help as Daniel Brosseau from last years class helps us fill in the framework. Daniel spent six weeks with Koinonia back in April and May, so he has a lot of the information we need. Now that we have created the framework and understand the NGO 'industry' better, it has become much easier to understand the situation in Koinonia. When first introduced to the project in May it seemed a bit overwhelming.

And what about the Dragons? Well, I was talking about our internal ones. Such as the fear of needles. Here we are yesterday getting our vaccinations for Kenya. Gerald takes it pretty easy, though.

We kept the doctor busy for more than an hour. It was no easy task to put together the vaccination 'menu' for a Malaysian, a Romanian/Israeli and a Dane that were going to Kenya. In usual Swiss style it all worked like clockwork, though, but came with a steep price tag.

It is late August and 33 degrees in Lausanne. The picture is even taken at 5 in the afternoon, so it has undoubtedly been even warmer earlier in the day.

Thorsten

Laptop dating

2009-08-24T01:15:00.003+02:00

Have you ever heard about the concept of laptop dating? I didn't think so. If you type 'Define: laptop dating' into the Google search window you will get the answer 'No definitions were found for laptop dating'. Wikipedia cannot help you either.

The concept of laptop dating was discovered and named by my girlfriend and I. Over the last two years we have developed and refined it to an art form. It is very simple, you have probably tried it already. You take two very people that have a lot of work to do, but who still would like to spend time together. You sit them down on the sofa, feet on the ground (or on the table) and then you just let them work. From time to time they can hold hands or ask short questions, they take turns at getting up for drinks and whoever gets hungry first gets up and cooks. Simple and efficient, pathetic and beautiful. Pathetic because your body has been reduced to something that only is there to carry your head and your hands around and beautiful because it is a means to survive. Togetherness for modern day students.

I've spent the weekend in Genoa, Italy, where my girlfriend now lives. It was her birthday, so we went out to celebrate with a dinner, but other than that we just laptop dated. She is both working and studying, so with two students in the couple this has become our way of coping. Albeit it has its charm and despite that we still can laugh at it, then we can't wait for it to be over.

Her parents were there as well, so I was welcomed with Spanish tortilla and croquettas, my favorite Spanish food. I even got some to bring home, but I have eaten them already. They were just too good!

The train ride between Lausanne and Genoa is absolutely breathtakingly beautiful. It zig-zags its way between lakes and mountains, through tunnels and over bridges for four hours straight. The Italian part of the trip is even more beautiful than the Swiss part, which I didn't think was possible. You should give it a try if you are in the neighborhood one day.

Two days with Uncle Ralf

2009-08-19T02:02:00.001+02:00

It has been two very intense days with Uncle Ralf, a.k.a Professor Ralf Boscheck. We have been working on setting up a framework for this somewhat peculiar 'industry' called 'NGOs' or more specifically 'Human Aid organizations dealing with street children'. Based on what we have learned so far we have defined the 'market', the 'competitors' and so forth. As with businesses we need to look at how the money gets in and how it is spent, but that is also the end of the similarities. For example, for a Human Aid organization it is not the 'customers', i.e. the street children, that pays for the services, but instead it is the donors who often have a different aim than the children.

On the 'operational' side we are looking at how different visions affects the choices an organization must make: 'Do you want to give as many children as possible the minimum that is required for them to move on with their lives' OR 'Do you want to create a heaven for a relatively small number of children, that then gets all the help you can provide'. Your brain will tell you that the first option is better, your heart will go for the second option if you are in Kenya where it all is happening. If there is one thing that has become clear so far, then it is that this project will be a battle against the dilemma of balancing brain and heart. The people that work in these types of organizations are there because of their good hearts, so we must be very careful not to come with a super rational mindset.

Ralf is a fountain of knowledge and a Duracell rabbit with new batteries. We worked full days, but frequently and intentionally sidetracked into other interesting discussion. He never ran out of energy. It is fascinating to hear these views and have a person of his caliber one-on-one (or one-on-five). He loves to provoke, to rattle the cage and see what comes out. Unless you are really trained and used to academic or political debates, it can be very hard to keep up, though. Nevertheless, it has been a couple of incredibly insightful days that drained me for every drop of energy I had. I have been sleeping very well the last couple of nights. And so I will tonight!

Sov godt!

Perfect morning

2009-08-15T08:34:00.001+02:00

It is the perfect morning on my balcony. Birds singing, a cup of coffee on the table, the air still cool, no noise from the road because it is Saturday, feet up, laptop in my lap, ready to write.

It has been a great week. Presentation technique, Advanced Finance and Negotiation skills. All of it very relevant, all of it very well taught. There are naturally different preferences and perceptions by the people in the class, but to me the Negotiations workshop stood out. It is probably the best training I have received in my life! Ted, Tom and Eric from CM Partners led us through 'The ladder of inference' and 'The Strategic Compass', the most important tools when negotiating. Simple, but very effective. The sessions were illustrated with rich examples and role plays played out in front of us.

All three of them have done lots negotiations at the top-top level, between governments, between major international corporations and in hostage negotiation situations. It was incredible to see how much they were in control of every situation. They would put the heat on each other in the role plays, but still they would evade the tough questions gracefully and redirect the conversation to where they wanted it to go. Impressive, very very impressive.

I have always thought that being a professional negotiator was someone doing hostage negotiations, and that mostly in Hollywood, but now I see how these gentlemen and their skills are the make or break of a deal, also in a business setting. Our personal impact will be enormous, if we can just do a fraction of what they can.

There was an incredible aura around these gentlemen. You had a feeling of being around someone that was absolutely world class in their field, someone who possessed an enormous natural authority and who was so much in control in the situation that you felt they could get you to do anything. In the words of classmate Simon Brunner (Switzerland): 'Could you imagine negotiating you salary with these guys? You would end up paying to go to work!'

Thorsten

What does sun look like for a whale?

2009-08-12T02:05:00.002+02:00

What does the sun look like for a whale?

This week the class divided in three. One group does Presentation Skills, another is working on their Negotiation Skills and the last is learning Advanced Finance. Each course is two days and then we swap. That makes the usual six day week.

I have been working on my presentation skills this first week. The course is run by the one-man army Steve Knight. Journalist by training and broadcaster by heart Steve has done broadcasting for many different people and institutions, amongst others the British Forces in Gibraltar and The Discovery Channel. The course in itself was excellent, but the presentations that people gave were intriguing themselves despite that the content was not the main aim. The course started with everyone delivering a one-minute presentation about a subject they were passionate about. I did my speech on motor biking in the Swiss mountains. The subjects otherwise included subjects such as
- making omelet with passion (courtesy of Peter Griesmayr, Germany),
- getting married on Bali with your whole family around you (Sylvain Cabalery, France),
- making a real Brazilian barbeque (Bruno Portnoi, Brazil),
- taking time to enjoy the local beverages when you visit new places (Ryo Abe, Japan),
- seeing the sun from the point of view of a whale (scuba diving) (Vladimir Korobkin, Russia) and several others.
Allegedly Brad Moldin (US) did a speech on the subject of 'Bullshit'. Unfortunately, I did not hear it myself, so I will have to get him to repeat it at the White Horse one of these days.

Second and third round presentations were done in groups and again included intriguing subjects such as 'France and the burka' and 'Swiss Banking secrecy laws under pressure'. Steve was cheering us along in his positive and energetic way, while improving the way we put the message across:
- 'Don't chase around like a tiger in a cage',
- 'You are standing like you are about to start a gun fight',
- 'Keep eye contact with a person in the audience for 5 to 8 words at a time',
- 'Don't turn your back to the audience, do the weather man instead',
- 'Slow down!'
- 'Speed up!'

It may sound harsh, but it was done in a very positive atmosphere and I think we all needed to hear these things. We have probably heard most of it before, but you forget once you are in front of the crowd and your heart starting pumping faster and your hands get sweaty. Of course everything was video taped for us to review.

From the present to the future

2009-08-10T02:59:00.001+02:00

It has been a relatively quiet weekend with beautiful weather and friends visiting. Still I have had quite a bit to do, so I have not really been the good host that I would like to be. I have been blessed with very understanding friends, though, and I have apparently managed to lower their expectations to a level, where it is not a problem that I am not much around. They just use my place as a base and stroll around Lausanne or drive around Switzerland on their own. It is great we can work it out that way!

Thinking back on the first week of 'part 2' of the IMD program, the thing that strikes me the most is the mental switch from worrying about the present to worrying about the future. It used to be the everyday stress of the class that would keep us pre-occupied. Now it is the search for our dream. CVs and cover letters go out by the dozen and interviews are being planned both on-campus and away. It is now that the game starts, the game that Career Services have been warming us up for the past six months.

Professor Jean Pierre Jeannet (standing far right) took us through four cases on world class football teams and emphasized the many things that modern business leaders can learn from these teams. To mark the event some wore the team jerseys of their own favorite football teams.

Global mindsets

2009-08-08T00:25:00.004+02:00

We have had a relatively soft landing after South Africa. We have been in the class room all week with Professors Cyril Bouquet and Jean Pierre Jeannet working through the subject of 'Managing within global companies'. We have been through two cases each day that have stressed the importance of approaching problems with a global mindset in today's world of business. Today we had a really interesting case about the Swiss America's Cup team, Alinghi. It was the story about how they in a period of 37 months build both a team and a boat in landlocked Switzerland and moved it all to New Zealand to bring back the most prestigious trophy in the world of sailing.

Most of all the case was an example of how much building a high performing sports team resembles building a high performing business team. Tomorrow, we will continue down the same road with cases on Manchester United, Juventus, Real Madrid and Ajax Amsterdam. I will be wearing my AaB jersey tomorrow. Never heard about AaB? I don't blame you. It is my club in Denmark.

I have my apartment full of guests this weekend. 5 of them, actually, if you include my girlfriend. They have chosen the perfect time to come. I took this picture when I was out biking in the vineyards east of Lausanne the other day. The picture is taken with my phone and does not at all justify the amazing colors; the vineyards are completely green and the lake has a very deep blue color. It is an absolutely breath taking view. It is equally breath taking trying to climb these hills by bike. Eventually I had to give up and walk. Anyway, if you have been considering visiting some of you friends in Lausanne, NOW is the time to do it. I am afraid that in a months or two nature will start preparing its winter coat again.

Bye Bye Mandela

2009-08-02T17:15:00.004+02:00

Old man, you did well.

The country that you have fought for is amazing and the direction in which you have sent it brings more than just hope - it brings firm belief – that a glorious future awaits South Africa.

Over the past two weeks we have visited the sites that tell the story of South Africa, the Apartheid Museum, the Hector Pieterson Museum for the Soweto uprising and your own house, which – whether you like it or not – has become yet another symbol of freedom and the fight that it took to get it. We have lived in fancy Sandton City with its shopping malls and posh hotels that few can afford. We have seen the unfortunate souls in townships and squatter camps and looked the HIV children of Cotlands in the eyes. Despite the sad sad circumstances, we saw nothing but big bright smiles. We were welcomed by thousands of singing, dancing and smiling souls in Soweto’s Grace Bible Church and we saw the roots of the country - its amazing nature and wildlife - in Pilanesburg National Park.

Not least, we have worked closely with the entrepreneurs of South Africa who produce anything and everything from diamonds and tractors to beds and hydraulic fittings. As much as soldiers and politicians are the heroes of the past, these passionate business men and women are the heroes of the future. They are the ones that will bring South Africa to the next level. We were told the huge success story of MTN, Africa’s first true multinational company, and we know that many more will follow.

When asked to define South African leadership my team quickly agreed on the three words: Forgiveness, inclusiveness and optimism. Forgiveness for the pain of the past, inclusiveness of all races, religions and colours in the prospects for the future and an incredible and forceful optimism that cannot be held back.

You will show them all of this in the FIFA world cup next year, where you have invited the whole world to your home. We know that you are preparing hard and we know that will do great. Just be yourself.

See you soon!

Delivery

2009-07-29T00:54:00.003+02:00

Today was delivery day. Delivery of the projects we have been working on the past week. Judging from the many stories I have heard from my classmates South Africa have made an impact on us all and judging from the very same stories we made an impact on South Africa. Maybe not as a country, but for the entrepreneurs we have been working with. It is incredible how much you as a group can pick up, process and feed back in a week once you really set your mind to it.

The last two days we borrowed a room in the office of our host IDC, where we could digest and process the information we absorbed over the past week. For some reason, it did not feel much different than the dungeons back in Lausanne.

My concerns about us knowing absolutely nothing about hydraulic fittings evaporated already the first day and this week became an awesome demonstration of the power of a multi-skilled team. Eric – our financial genius – drew up a complete financial model from scratch and helped Peter sort some outstanding issues with his bank. Stone – our engineer – made a model that allows Peter to accurately calculate his production cost of each product, which ensures that the prices are set correctly. Stone also made suggestions to how Peter can make very significant improvements to the utilization of his machines. Shibu – our marketing wizard – draw up a plan for a more structured sales process than Peter has today. Myself, I got really good at getting coffee for everyone ☺ We wrapped it all up in a business plan that Peter can take to his bank to help him refinance his existing business and obtain new capital for his planned expansion. That was our deliverable and Peter seemed very happy with it.

Eric and Stone trying to get the financial and operational figures to match.

Delivery of the business plan took place at ‘The Mug & The Bean’ coffee shop. Here Shibu and Peter are discussing the marketing plan. Please note the huge cup of coffee in the front. This is on the menu as a so-called ‘Serious Cappuccino’ and consists of almost half a liter of warm milk and coffee. Not only in America!

What better way to end it all than with a team phoon in front of the Mandela statue on Mandela Square here in Sandton City. From left it is myself, our entrepreneur Peter, Stone, Eric, Shibu and our driver Sharl.

We had lunch at a Thai restaurant today. My teammates apparently thought I needed to relax and bought me a massage in the restaurant. For the equivalent of 5 dollars you get about 20 minutes of massage of neck, shoulders and arms before and after you eat. I could really get used to that. Although we were in a Thai restaurant the girl proved to be Chinese. As Stone and her started talking in their native tongue we learned that she was from a place in China not far from Stone’s and that she had migrated to South Africa a couple of years ago to work. Interesting, I thought, that someone would migrate to find work in a country with 25% unemployment. Stone explained that many Chinese go abroad these days, most of them to set up their own businesses, though.
We have also experienced the diversity of our group in a culinary way this week. Thursday Shibu treated us for Indian food, Friday Stone treated us for Chinese and today Eric took us out for Thai. There are unfortunately very few traditional Danish restaurants outside of Denmark, but I can always buy you a Carlsberg! ☺

South Africa is now seeing the rise of a new term: ‘White poverty’. This little exhibition was set up today across the street from our hotel.
The poster reads: ‘…poverty in South Africa no longer has an exclusively black face….. Poverty is becoming less of a racial issue and more of a South African problem…. Having been deprived of their previously ‘privileged’ position, the white poor are now seeking new ways to adapt or at least survive.’
In some bizarre way this is a good sign. Not that people get poor, but than when there is poverty, that it is evenly split among races. This is the precondition for eventually bringing South Africa out of the poverty!

Less than 50m from where the previous picture was taken we found this display of material wealth. Aston Martin, Lamborghini and Audi R8 in front of the posh Michelangelo Hotel reminds us that South Africa still is a country full of contrasts.

Umoja – The spirit of togetherness

2009-07-27T02:37:00.001+02:00

What a weekend it has been! Apartheid museum Saturday afternoon and the Mandoza musical in the evening. Up early today to spend the day in Soweto, first attending a church ceremony, then visiting the museum for the Soweto uprising, Mandela’s house, lunch at a Soweto restaurant and finishing with a visit to the Cotlands hospice and orphanage.

The apartheid museum gave an almost too real description of the rise and the fall of the apartheid regime, the principles behind and the cruel and unjust measures that were required to maintain it. Afterwards you can only ask yourself how it was possible to justify and build such an inhuman system.

A quote that shows how the apartheid politicians saw their role. In a TV interview one of the politicians even argued that the apartheid model had proven its worth and that it should be used in other places in the world. Let us be very happy that this never happened!

The beauty of the South African solution is that it starts and ends with reconciliation. The South Africans (at least the ones I have met, both black, coloured and white) truly believes in the ‘Rainbow Nation’ - where all colours live together as one – as the only way to a better future. I think they have gotten it so right! This picture shows the exit from the Apartheid Museum.

In the van on the way back from the Apartheid Museum.

Saturday night we attend the Mandoza musical. Also this story was build up around the freedom struggle and the liberation. It showed how the music and dance evolved with the historic events from tribal life to today’s rock stars and it described the important role music played to keep morals high when times were tough. It was an incredible display of energy and joy! We have nothing like this in Europe! The buckets on the head of these ladies says ‘Umoja loves you’. Umoja means ‘The spirit of togetherness’ in one of South Africa’s 11 languages. Don’t ask me which one.

This morning started with a ceremony in the Grace Bible Church in Soweto. The church must be able to seat at least a couple of thousand people. The ceremony almost felt like a continuation of the musical the night before; full of energy and happiness! The speeches were both spiritual and very down to earth including both the current economic crisis and yesterday’s rugby game where South Africa beat New Zealand.

We met these two guys on our way.

Our two guides for the day, Thomas (left) and Ben. Born and raised in Soweto. Ben showed us how you in Soweto tell the minivan taxis where you are going only by the use of hand signs.

Do you need a new set of tires? You can get everything done on the streets of Soweto.

What surprised me the most was how developed Soweto was. There are shopping malls, stadiums, schools, hospitals, good roads, water and electricity. Here is the local Nissan dealer. It is, after all, also a city with four million people.
By the way, did you know that the name Soweto comes from ‘South West Township’, which again stems from the fact that Soweto lies south west of Johannesburg.

This picture shows the absolutely worst part of Soweto. This was actually what I expected all of it to look like, but according to Ben it is only 10% of the people in Soweto that lives like this. This number is even decreasing as the South African government makes progress on its Residential Development Program that has build houses for several million people.

How about a couple of nuclear reactors in your back yard? They are not active anymore, but you can get a bungee jump from the top for fifty dollars.

Our guide Ben in front of the monument for Hector Pieterson at the museum for the Soweto uprising in 1976. The uprising was a protest against the government’s decision that education must be done in Afrikaans, a language that neither teachers nor students amongst the black population understood. The police opened fire on the crowd and 69 people (officially) were killed. Hector Pieterson was the first one to fall. He was thirteen years old.
‘I have also been throwing rocks at the police around here’ Ben said at one point. Another reminder of how recent all this has happened.

We paid a quick visit to Mandela’s house. There is not much too see there other than it is very small.

Lunch at a restaurant in Soweto. They apparently got our name wrong, so here are the three IMC ladies Valeria [Russia], Misayo [Japan] and Yadira [Colombia].

The last stop on the road was the Cotlands hospice and orphanage. The children at Cotlands are mostly from families where the parents are either sick with or dead from AIDS. Most of the kids themselves are also HIV positive. Although the circumstances are so sad Cotlands is a wonderful place to visit. As everywhere else where you have kids around there is lots of energy and desire to play. The older kids (3-5 years) were ready to play when they saw 70 daddies and 20 mamas walking in. For more than an hour we all played around and had some good old childish fun.

In their worst year Cotlands had 87 deaths. Last year they had one. The difference is the treatments that now are available. The children live longer, which creates new problems as they now must have support for a much longer period. A ‘winners curse’ as our Economics Professor Ralf Boscheck would call it. Although a positive problem, it is still a problem.

Cotlands had an IMD ICP team working with them last year. They mentioned several time that the team had had a major impact on them and that they still were implementing the recommendations that the team had made. We had already heard about the IMD/Cotlands project from the IMD side, but we took this opportunity to get some input from Cotlands as well. We got some good ideas and suggestions that we will bring with us to this year’s similar project with Koinonia in Kenya.

The Spirit of South Africa!

2009-07-25T01:18:00.001+02:00

Who would have thought it would be so cold in South Africa! Not me, that is for sure. We have hit the coldest period of the year on the Southern hemisphere and with Johannesburg being far inland the temperatures get quite low, around zero degrees Celsius at night and around 15 degrees during the day. That does not sound particularly cold, but in South Africa the houses do not have any heating!! The argument appears to be that this cold period is so short – max. 2 months – that it is not worth to put in heating. Most people therefore wear their jackets indoor these days. We have learned to adopt that fashion.

We have continued our work with Peter – the owner and manager of the company we work with. We visited three of his customers yesterday and have also had two meetings with his bank. Eric – our financial wizard - have been digging into the numbers, while Stone – our engineer – have had a look at the machines and the manufacturing processes. Meanwhile Shibu and I have been trying to combine input from the customers and Peter’s vision of where he wants to take the company into a coherent strategy with a very concrete action plan. The trick is now to bring all three pieces together into a package (in the form of a business plan) that Peter can use both for his own reference and to raise capital for further expansion.

Today we had our second guest speaker, Ivon Johnston, who has been working in and with the South African government for many years. She told some moving stories about what South Africa has gone through, but most of all she told the story about what all of us already have felt – the spirit of South Africa! It is a spirit of optimism and joy that will not let itself be held down by the many very serious problem the country is facing. It is a spirit of reconciliation and compassion, not about revenge, hatred or blame. It is a spirit that recognizes what happen in the past while insisting on focusing on the future.

There is one name in particular that embodies this spirit. We keep hearing it again and again. It is mentioned by our guest speakers, by the entrepreneurs and workers in the companies, by our drivers and by other people we meet. It is used to name everything from streets to shopping malls. The name is Nelson Mandela. He is nothing short of a prophet here. His birthday is a national holiday. Had it not been for his vision South Africa would not have achieved the tremendous improvements that it has over the past 15 years and it would not be heading in the positive direction that it is. I cannot imagine what South Africa will look like in 15 years, but it will for sure be an amazing place!

Thorsten

Shibu James [India] having Chicken Licken (the South African equivalent of KFC) for lunch.

Stone Gao [China] and Peter discussing the manufacturing process of a particular component.

Stone and Peter discussing manufacturing while Eric is crunching the financial numbers.

The modern version of the classic problem of ‘how to fit a square stick in a round hole?’ This one is called ‘how to fit a Swiss electrical plug into a South African socket?’

Yesterday our team had Indian food for lunch. From left it is our driver Sharl, Stone Gao [China], Thorsten Boeck [Denmark], Eric Vergara [Thailand], Peter and Shibu James [India].

One of the teams is working with a company that has developed a special x-ray machine. They had pictures taken of them selves and asked the class to guess who is who. A very entertaining exercise!

Ivon Johnston telling the story about Justice Beki-beki, who was given the death sentence, but saved by the fall of the apartheid regime. He later became a lawyer, a leader of the election process in the Northern Cape province and a member of the international body that monitored the elections in the US.

Tonight’s sunset over Johannesburg as it looked from our hotel. The sunsets are very dramatic and beautiful in the way they paint the whole sky red. The picture does not do reality justice at all.

Sawubona!

2009-07-22T02:31:00.001+02:00

Two days ago I sat on my balcony in Lausanne. What a change of scenery there has been since then!

Sunday evening we met in Lausanne and via Geneva and Zurich we made it to Johannesburg by Monday morning. I asked for a seat by the emergency exit on the plane and was the lucky to get it! That is major deal breaker for me. It is the difference between sleep and no sleep. With enough space to stretch my legs I slept 7 of the 10 hours from Zurich to Johannesburg. I couldn’t have had a better start.

There was a lot of catching up to do on the way. The class has been spread around the world in the past three weeks. Combined we must have visited at least 50 countries. Around 25 people had gone to South Africa early, some individually and others in a trip organized by our native South African, Lisa Bridgett. Stories about cage diving with 4-meter sharks outside Cape Town were already spreading!

Chuks and Andres waiting to pass security in Zürich. Chuks had just become a dad less than 24 hours before the picture is taken!

Arrival in Johannesburg! Some more rested than others.

Our welcoming team. As the width of these two gentlemen indicates they are here for more than just driving us around. They are employed by a security company that takes care of all our transportation and security. All of them have a past in the army or the police.

Yesterday afternoon we met the companies that we will be working with. Here is the rest of my team Stone, Shibu and Eric with Peter [left] from Profast Hydraulics, the company we will be working with. Peter is a true entrepreneur and selfmade man who over the last 15 years has worked his company up from being just himself to employing 15 people and a number of advanced CNC machines. The company produces hydraulic fittings (primarily for the South African mining industry) and components for the construction industry.

Our stay in South Africa has come about as a result of the cooperation between IMD and the Internal Development Corporation (IDC). IDC is a government-owned but self-funded institution that provides financing for entrepreneurs in South Africa. Their aim is to stimulate the growth of the economy and to support the black economic empowerment.

IDC welcomed us with a great dinner with lots of traditional South African music and dance. That got everybody out of their chairs so we could dance along. Great fun!

Wendy Luhabe has been the person bringing IDC and IMD together. She is chairman of IDC and on the IMD board of directors. Here she bids us welcome at the dinner.

On the way out to the Profast factory today we drove by this billboard. Notice Wendu Luhabe on the far left. According to our driver, Sharl, Wendy is a well-known and very public character in South Africa. Please also note Sir Richard Branson (third from the left). Apparently they are having a leadership summit on South African entrepreneurship in Sandton – which is where our hotel is – tomorrow. I guess this just proves the relevance of what we are doing.

We spent all day today with Peter and Sharl. They took us around to the different sites where Profast operates.

We saw the machines and the products and we spent the whole days asking questions in order to understand Peter’s business and the concerns he has. Here it is Hendrik by one of the CNC machines.
We have tried to combine today’s learning with the skills we have amongst the four of us in order to find out where we can do our deep-dive over the next three days. With only a week to complete the whole project we need to take a very pragmatic and realistic approach to where we can add value. It means prioritizing, thinking on our feet and acting quickly. The great thing about this short time frame is that it gives you a bit of a kick. This is not a project that will drag on for months and where you have to collect vast amounts of information. Every hour counts and there is not a moment to waste if you want to do an impact by next Tuesday. Well, the impact may only happen over the coming months, but the frame for it must be set by Tuesday. The keyword is ‘impact’, doing something that really makes a difference. I am very excited and feel we are off to a good start, but there is still 6 days to go – and at the same time ONLY 6 days to go.

Every evening we will be sharing the day’s learning with the class. Judging from today’s session it sounds like everybody are working with companies just as exciting as ours. The companies covers such diverse products as restaurants, construction, pharmaceuticals, diamonds, public toilets in Soweto and a lot more that I haven’t had the chance to hear about yet.

This week have we replaced the White Horse with the bar in our hotel, but it is just as cosy. From left it is Richard Dove [UK], Albert Schultz [Germany], Ope [Nigeria] and Rasmus Figenschou [Norway].

And in case you were wondering: ‘Sawubona’ is the South African version of ‘hello’. Directly translated it means ‘I see you’.

In Transit

2009-07-19T15:52:00.000+02:00

I am back on the balcony, back in Lausanne. Thinking, thinking, thinking. I feel much better than when I left Lausanne three weeks ago. The batteries are recharged and the connection to the outside world has been reestablished. At the same time it is also clear that mentally I never managed to leave Lausanne and IMD behind. Questions about what actually happened during the first half of the year kept swirling in my mind. The feedback from peers and professors - received the day before we went on vacation - kept popping up. Some of it was encouraging, some of it was not. And why was that? What situation was behind each message. Are there any regrets? Yes, definitely! It is clear that I have missed out on some obvious opportunities. That cannot be redone - that time will not come back - but I can make sure that I find a better path for the second half. I have boiled it all down to a few points that I want to improve on. A few goals that I want to reach.

I arrived in Lausanne yesterday after a week on Malta with my family. It was very hot and humid on this little island in the Mediterranean, so I have enjoyed the chill of Switzerland for a change. The last 24 hours have been spent unpacking, doing laundry and catching up on emails, so I am ready for the next trip. We are leaving for South Africa in a couple of hours.

In Johannesburg I will be working with Eric, Shibu and Stone in a small company (10 employees) that produces hydraulic hose fittings!!!! I wonder how a trader of financial derivatives (Eric), a sales guy from Procter & Gamble (Shibu) and a shipping guy (myself) will get our hands around that subject. We will probably be relying quite a bit on our only engineer (Stone).

This complete lack of knowledge of what awaits us is also what thrills me. We will just go and see what hits us and then take it as it comes. This is an experiment, a first ever for a business school as far as we know. I hope it becomes a huge success and one that can be developed further in the years to come. I can not wait to take the plunge!

I better start packing.

The Spanish Bird

2009-07-06T00:28:00.002+02:00

The display above the door says ‘Velocidad 301 km/h, Temperatura 28C’. We are onboard the AVE – Alta Velocidad Espanola – the Spanish high speed train. AVE is also the Spanish for ‘bird’. We are on our way back to Barcelona from Madrid, where we have paid a quick visit to Susana’s family and friends.

The AVE is a show of brutal force and extreme elegance at the same time. Stick your head close to the window and you get an immediate feel for the speed and the power of this machine. Lean back and have a quiet conversation, watch the James Bond movie on the screens or walk down to the canteen car for a Bocadillo (a Spanish sandwich) or cup of coffee. I know Kornelius, the BMW engineer in our class, would have loved this ride. Technology at its edge!

The train does the 621km in 2 hours and 43 minutes. We fly by the major cities of Zaragoza and Tarragona – no time to stop, we have a schedule to meet. And it will be met. If we are as much as a second delayed we will get 30% of our ticket refunded, if we are more than 5 minutes late we will get all of it back. How is that for reliability? Not even the Swiss can beat that!

It brings thoughts of the Danish rail system to my mind. Many of the tracks are more than 50 years old and as soon as the temperature creeps above 25C they have to reduce the speed to 40km/h in some places because the tracks expand too much in the heat. In comparison, the AVE still runs at 300+ when the temperature is 45C. Obama came for a ride not long ago and concluded that the US needed something similar. May I should ask Danish Prime Minister – Mister Rasmussen – to do the same. We could definitely learn a thing or two.

It will be the last night in Spain. Tomorrow morning we are off to Denmark to visit my friends and family. We will also be meeting up with my Indian classmate Ajay Lakhwani and his wife Kanika, who are touring Scandinavia these days. They have just arrived in Copenhagen after taking the beautiful overnight ferry trip from Oslo.

It is 21.30 and we are rolling into Barcelona. It does not look like we will get any money back this time either.

Hasta luego!

The AVE upon arrival i Madrid. A mean machine!

Sun, Sombrilla and Sun Screen

2009-07-03T18:45:00.004+02:00

Todays was the first day I really felt fresh when I got up. I had slept eight hours and got out of bed without the alarm. Until now I have been sleeping at least 10 hours everynight plus a couple of hours for siesta. I hope this means that I now have caught up and can return to a normal sleeping pattern.

Wednesday my girlfriend Susana and I met with classmate Juan Benitez [Columbia] and his girlfriend Tatiana. Tatiana is also Columbian, but is studying in Barcelona. We met in the nearby town of Sitges, which is renowned for its fine beaches. The heat wave that is covering the rest of Europe is also felt here, so it quickly became too warm for the 'Giri' (Spanish slang for a foreigner, in this case referring to me) on the beach. We strolled around the beautiful old town before we sat down and enjoyed a real Catalonian paella in one of the street restaurants.

Juan and Tatiana by the old church in Sitges.

Paella Marinera, the way it is done in its home country.
Heave stuff on a warm day, but very 'deliciosa' as they say around here.

Yesterday Susana and I went to the beach again. This time the 'giri' (still me) covered himself in a thick layer of factor 50+ sun screen (others would probably call it sun BLOCK) and hid in the shade under the 'Sombrilla' (beach umbrella) that we had brought along. Being on the beach and under the sun this far south (compared to Denmark, of course) is a somewhat delicate matter for me. I turn red like a boiled lobster in a matter of minutes, then I spend several nights sleeping on my stomach because my back is all sore. Then it all peals off and I am more pale than when I started. So better to overdo it a bit with the protection.

Siestas, not power naps

2009-07-01T01:37:00.000+02:00

To be honest I have not done much over the past couple of days. I have just been enjoying the warm humid Mediterranean air that encourages you to just hang around in shorts and flip-flops and keep yourself in a vertical position to the extent possible. I have swapped power naps with siestas. Same concept, but very different execution! I am trying to fall into the rhythm of my little pueblo here. As they say in Spain, there are more people on the streets at 3 in the morning than at 3 in the afternoon. All the shops close during the middle of the day, so why not siesta your way through those hours. Great concept.

I went for a run today at 8pm when the temperature had dropped sufficiently for a Scandinavian to venture out. I went down to the river bed that runs at the outskirts of the town. It is completely dried out at this time of the year, so it is a great place to run. It took me out under the highway and into mountains on the other side. 'Mountains' may be a relative word here. The locals would probably just call them 'hills', but being from Denmark I insist that they indeed are mountains. I found a dirt trail that took me up-hill (because you cannot say 'up-mountain') and after about 20 minutes I found myself standing on a ridge looking into the next valley. Here was another little pueblo with white houses and what from the distance appeared to be a church. The sun was setting and it looked so quiet and peaceful. I had not met anyone on my way and there was not a single person to be seen anywhere. It became one of those few quiet moments, where you remind yourself that life is more than the fast lane on the information-superhighway. Next time I will make sure I bring a camera.

My Little Pueblo

2009-06-29T01:46:00.002+02:00

It is past midnight and the air is full of drums, music and fire crackers. The streets are packed with people, some are dancing through the streets, others are watching. I am not in doubt that I have left Switzerland. 'My Little Pueblo' (pueblo = village) as I like to call St. Pere de Ribes (located 30km south of Barcelona) is celebrating its 'Fiesta mayor'. Most towns in Spain have a Fiesta Mayor, which is the celebration of the saint of the town. In the case of St. Pere the saint is Saint Peter.

St. Pere de Ribes is technically too large to qualify as a 'pueblo', but to me it is just that. It is like taken out of a movie; narrow streets and mediterranean style houses, a little square in the middle with a catholic church that rings its bells every 15 minutes. Life happens at a pace here that cannot stress anyone. On top of that I am enjoying the local food and a lot of sleep.

Thorsten

'Castellets' - the human castles - is another Catelonian specialty. The castles I saw them build yesterday were 8 'stories' high, the top level manned by two 6-year old kids. You can see one of them on the way up with a red helmet near the top on the left side.

The 'Collas', which are groups of neighbors and friends, prepare dances with drums and firecrackers. The firecrackers - that look like cigars - are placed on the end of a stick and lit. They spin and spread sparks everywhere before they explode with a large bang.

A dragon spraying fire is another of the local traditions.

Giant dolls dancing is a tradition of Eastern Spain.

Vacation!!!

2009-06-27T05:31:00.008+02:00

It has been a couple of very busy days, but now it is finally reality! Vacation is here!

Thursday was the last day of OWP. I finished the day with an interesting case on Google and Baidu with Professor Didier Cossin. Baidu is a Chinese search engine that is beating Google at its own game by dominating the market for internet search in China.

Thursday during lunch we presented the Industry Analysis of our ICP projects. Many of the executives during lunch stopped by to have a look and provide input on their own industries.

Joe Nai [The Netherlands / Hong Kong] and Alex Rubio [Brazil] are ready to present.

Minli Zhao [Germany] and Myriam Vacher [France] with 'customers' in each of their industries.

Thursday evening the Scandinavians had arranged for midsummer party at the lake. We were lucky with the weather which stayed dry and warm. It was a great evening in the company of good friends.

You can get a feeling for the atmosphere in this video.

Henry Low and Chia Chia Lim [both Singapore] preparing dinner.

Of course there was also 'Sækkeløb', which best can be translated to potatobag race. Here Rasmus Figenschou [Norway] is sending off Kristin Sherwood [American] and Chia Chia Lim [Singapore].

No midsummer party without a midnight swim! Here the swim team is ready to get in the water.

Friday morning was a debrief on OWP in particular and on the first six months at IMD in general. The debrief was done as hundreds of short one-on-one interviews, which then was condensed into a number of Top-10 lists, such as 'Top-10 Buzzwords', 'Top-10 Learnings on Leadership', 'Top-10 Learnings on Learning' and so forth. There were many original and funny contributions, which combined with the relaxed atmosphere in the room created a lot of laughs.

Soon we found ourselves saying our goodbyes before we are dispersed all over the world. It was amazing to hear how much travelling everybody have planned. Most people seem to be visiting at least a couple of countries on their vacations and many of us will be either travelling or meeting with class mates all over the world.

The founders of Bacula Systems - the company for which we did our startup project - had invited our team and partners for lunch at CEO Jack Griffin's place. Jack and his wife Caroline have a beautiful house right on the lake.

Jack took us for a ride on the lake and showed us some of the amazing mansions on the lake, amongst others those of Formula One star Michael Schumacher and the Bonaparte family.

The startup project team and partners. It was great to leave the project with this celebration and the feeling of a job well done.

Thorsten

Long days in the dungeons

2009-06-24T01:13:00.001+02:00

It has been a couple of long days in the dungeons. We have been through the industry analysis time and time again, discussing for hours and hours. This world of Humanitarian Aid organisations is really an odd size for us and although the picture is starting to take shape it feels like there is still quite a way to go. The learning process is complicated somewhat by the fact we are taking turns in running off to different sessions in the OWP program. We are therefore seldom able to have the whole group together at the same time.

I had my second OWP session today, where I attended Jean-Phillippe Deschamps' class on innovation. The case was on the company DSM, which stands for Dutch State Mines despite the fact that the company is not state-owned (anymore) nor does it have any mines. It is specialized in life sciences and performance materials (whatever that means). The case was only a couple of weeks old; some of things in the case actually happened while we were here at IMD! It does not come much more fresh than that!

I particularly like hearing the inputs from some of the senior executives in the class room. You can sense that they speak with a lot of experience. Sometimes they come up with insights that are new to me, but most of the time they use more or less the same arguments and solutions that we would have used in the MBA class room. I find that comforting as it means we have had some realistic discussions in class over the past six months.

And not to forget, in four days I will be in Barcelona with my girlfriend, T-4.

Our Professor in Global Political Economy, Jean-Pierre Lehmann (center) hosted a discussion during the lunch break yesterday. The subjects was global warming, food and water scarcity and their connection to world trade. Jean-Pierre had as usual brought in a panel of experts on the subjects. Unfortunately time was short, so the session only became a bit of an appetizer to these huge subjects.

Stefano Giussani [Italy] as we have seen him the last few days actively engaged in digging out new insights about Human Aid organizations.

Passion is contagious

2009-06-22T02:18:00.003+02:00

The post-exam decompression has continued with a relatively light and rather social weekend. Friday night my second study group, a.k.a 'The Zen Army', met at Simon Brunner's place to celebrate the birthday of Alex' wife Fabiana. Alex mum and sister is also visiting Lausanne these days and joined the festivities. As Fabiana said: It was an evening with good food, good music and good company.

Last night the team from my startup project met at Slava and his wife Luba's place. The startup project is over, but that should of course not keep us from celebrating. Luba had made great food and we ended up discussing global politics from the Obama election to the conflict in Georgia. Both Slava and Luba are Russian and although Slava with his 27 years are one of the youngest in the class, both he and Luba still have some memories from the communist days in the Soviet Union. It was fascinating to hear these stories told by someone that young who had experienced it first hand. A reminder that this past is not so far away. We ended up drinking all Slava and Luba's wine (including the one we brought ourselves) and playing X-Box until 3AM. Another great evening!

The IMD campus is buzzing these days as the school is hosting its annual Orchestrating Winning Performance (OWP) program. 250 executives from all over the world are joining this event where the professors also teach their latest research. And for the first time the MBAs are participating, which is a great priviledge.

I took part in a class today, where Professor Bettina Büchel taught an interesting case on implementing strategic change. The case was about Julie Gilbert, an executive at Best Buy who started the so-called Women's Leadership Forum (WOLF) with the aim of growing women as leaders, capture more female buyers and much more. Not an easy task in the male dominated consumer electronics industry, but it became an incredible success that led to a cultural transformation of the company.

We had been told that there would be a guest speaker and in the middle of the session Julie was asked to come to the front. She had been sitting among us all the time without us knowing it! We just thought that she was one of the participants of the program. She spellbound the class for more than an hour with the stories about what she went through with WOLF. There is nothing as contagious as good old-fashioned genuine passion and Julie was full of it! Even a big guy like me could not help thinking: Go girl!

Julie Gilbert telling the story about how she created WOLF.

Even the IMD cafe is decorated with flowers during OWP. Here it is Eliane from the cafe (bottom right) together with the usual suspects (from left) Joe Nai [Hong Kong / The Netherlands], Walid Sahyoun [Canada/Italy/Lebanon], Myriam Vacher [France], Ricky Zhou [China] and Sebastien Guery [France].

Rebound

2009-06-19T21:00:00.005+02:00

rebound: a movement back from an impact

Now that we distanced ourselves a bit from last weeks exams it has become a little clearer what happened after the exams. Whether it was a reaction from the stress of the past 5 months or just the intensity of the last few weeks peaking with the exams, the energy level in the class had dropped to zero Monday morning. It was as if we all had made a deep exhale together and could not really start breathing again.

I walked around like a zombie most of Monday and Tuesday, like a spectator to my own life. I was going through the motions and I heard the words that were said, but nothing registered. The ship was sailing, but there was nobody at the rudder. I felt like I had not slept for a hundred years and I could not concentrate on anything for more than a minute at the time. If there is anyone out there that can describe what happened, please do let us know.

In retrospect it is probably good that we have been in the dungeons most of the week. Teaching us in the auditorium would have been a pure waste. The energy curve has been steadily rising over the past few days, but it is nowhere close to pre-exam levels.

Thursday we presented the first draft of our ICP industry analysis to each other. We taped our presentations on the walls in both the foyer and the auditorium and then walked around and gave each other feedback. My group harvested a lot of good comments and suggestions which we brought back down into the dungeons. The first big test on this project will be on Thursday where we will be showing our work to the executives visiting campus for the big OWP program that runs next week.

We ended the week this afternoon with an interview for our industry analysis. Jemilah Mahmoud and Manu Gupta have each built their own human aid organizations in Malaysia and India respectively. They were in Geneva for a conference and were kind enough to spend almost two full hours with us explaining the ins and outs of their 'industry'. The meeting was very conviniently held at Starbucks.

ICP Team Koinonia getting first-hand input from Jemilah Mahmoud and Manu Gupta on how NGOs work. (NGO = Non-Government Organization)

Stefano Giussani [Italy] teaching Corinne Avelines [France] the NGO value chain.

The auditorium was buzzing with presentations and candid feedback.

Simon Brunner [Switzerland] presenting the first draft of their industry analysis.

Myriam Vacher [France] explaining industry trends and drivers.

Shibu James [India] gives his feedback to one of the industries.

T minus 10

2009-06-17T02:11:00.002+02:00

If I was an airplane I would be grounded on suspicion of metal fatigue, that is for sure.

The exams definitely got the best of us. It was as if we had been climbing a mountain for five months and had given everything we had during the last week to finally reach the top. We enjoyed the view from the summit for a day - ate and slept a lot - but then to our horror discovered that we were not there yet. There was still another two week hike ahead of us.

Whether consciously or not I had definitely told myself that once we were past the exams then I could roll through the last two weeks and straight into the holidays with very little effort. Reality has proven very different. We have kicked off the ICP projects at full speed while still finishing the last individual assignment and the case-writing for the startup projects.

Once you mentally have thought you were there and have started relaxing, it is almost impossible to get your heart beat and your energy level back up to the previous level. You felt it very clearly in the class room yesterday morning, when the first phase of the ICP project was introduced. It just did not really register that we had to get back to work. I had to be a mistake.

What you need to get through these kind of periods is a target. The weekend ahead of us is already lost to the cause in terms of preparation for and participation in the OWP program. I have therefore fixed my eyes on Friday the 26th of June at 12.00 noon. Ten days from now. That is the time we are let loose for our three weeks of summer holidays. I am SO ready for it and I sense that I am not the only one.

T minus 10.

Jellybrain and a jolly-good ride

2009-06-13T00:22:00.005+02:00

'Jellybrain' one of my classmates just wrote in his Facebook status field. I know exactly what he means. A six and a half hour Finance Exam marathon just gets the best of you. Particularly when you already have done twelve hours of exams in the preceding two days plus whatever studying you could fit in. Just to add insult to injury there was 50 pages of pre-reading for tomorrows Strategy exam waiting in our mail boxes. At least it will be the last one.

Already yesterday I had had it with exams, so I decided - against all logic - to take my motorbike out for spin. It had been more than a month and half since I last took it out, so I was surprised when it started. Inspired by Kelley's Diary entry on Monday I went out East along the lake, past the Lavaux vineyards, through Vevey and Montreux before stopping for an Ice Cream in Villeneuve.

While eating my ice cream I decided to head up into the nearest mountain, which happened to be this one. There is nothing better than motorbiking in the mountains. You just feel that you are flying up the small winding roads. Before long I caught myself humming the song 'Country road, take me home, to the place...'. I think you know which one I talking about. It is an old classic that both John Denver and Olivia Newton-John have had success with.

As I went up the road became smaller and steeper and the temperature quickly dropped. I did not expect to meet anyone up there, but to my surprise there was a typical small Swiss Inn at the top. This is the view from their terrasse. I am definitely going there again, even if only for an ice cream! The picture is taken with my phone so it does not do the view justice, but you can sense the curvature of the lake. Lausanne is in the right-hand side of the picture although you cannot see it.

Coming from little 'flat' Danmark I cannot help being amazed how people like the Swiss adjust to living in such a vertical world where everything is either up or down. I passed this little mountain railway station next to a tunnel through a cliff under a house! All of it of course at a significant incline!

It was a great and really reenergizing ride albeit it only lasted a few hours. I have promised myself to do it again soon. Then again, that is what I have been doing for the past three months......

Thorsten

Hanging out on the lawn during yesterdays lunch break between the Marketing and Global Political Economy exams.

Henry Low [Singapore] and Rasmus Figenschou [Norway] talking while Lisa Bridgett is watching from the back.

Exam preparation!
Fadi Sbaiti [Lebanon/US], Wouter Naessens [Belgium] and Jodie Roussel [US].

Brad Moldin [US] and Oliver Freiland [Germany] enjoying a cup of coffee before diving into the Finance exam.

The Finance exam was a killer. Here we are around four hours into it.

The reward was a cheeseburger at the harbour front.
On the left: Olivia Assereto [Italy], Marco Simons [The Netherlands] and Carsten Bremer [Germany].
On the right: Ope Adejoro [Nigeria], Yury Vasilkov [Russia], Valeria Pavlyukovskaya [Russia] and Thorsten Boeck [Denmark].

Accounting, my old friend

2009-06-09T18:33:00.004+02:00

There is nothing like having an old friend over for coffee. Today I am with Accounting, my old acquaintance from Building Block 1. We are discussing the same things that we talked about back in March, cash flow statements, ratio analysis and a little bit of Balance sheets. A few new topics - management accounting and relevant cost - have also sneaked into our conversation.

Yes, the exams are here. Five of them within the next four days to be exact. We kick off with a double tomorrow, Accounting in the morning and Global Political Economy in the afternoon, four hours of each. Then it is Marketing, Finance and Strategy over the following days. That does not leave time for in-depth preparation of all of them, so it is all about focusing your resources on the things that are right for you!

Finance is the big one for me this time. The biggest chunk is about assessing the financial health and the value of a company. Not really rocket science, but just an awful amount of details to understand and memorize.

I have said it before and I will happily say it gain: The exam period is a piece of cake compared to an ordinary week at IMD. Yes, the pressure is still there and so are the many hours with your head in the books or in your laptop. But you have much more control of your time as you don't have to coordinate your work across three groups and balance a million other things at the same time. I have slept a lot since Friday and I am getting some real quality reading done now that my head is not pounding from lack of sleep.

I have had a couple of other things to take care of as well, though. I have spent part of today finishing the end-of-course innovation paper, which is due tomorrow and I had lunch at the school with the other Scandinavians. We are arranging a mid-summer party on the last day before the class goes on summer vacation in a little more than two weeks. In the Scandinavian countries mid-summer calls for a bonfire. Whether we ever will get that through the Swiss authorities remains to be seen, but we will definitely give it a try!

Thorsten

The campus is so tranquil these days. People are just hanging around during the lunch break enjoying their Mövenpick ice cream or a coffee from the café.

Even the MBA students crawl out of their dark dungeons during lunch time to enjoy a few energizing rays of sunlight. From left it is: Stefano Cazzulani [Italy], Oliver Freiland [Germany], Seif Shieshakly [Saudi Arabia / Germany], Sebastien Guery [France], Wouter Naessens [Belgium] and Johan Jansen-Storback [Sweden/Finland].

Reunion and Rematch

2009-06-08T02:37:00.006+02:00

If you thought things would slow down after we had the last class on Friday, think again. At least it has not been the case so far.

Saturday morning was kicked off with a Career Services session where four alumni told the stories about their job search and answered questions from the class. From left it is Patrick Wang (MBA2007), OJ Skjelten (MBA2007), Mathieu Pointeau (MBA2008) and Thomas Buus (MBA2007). The overall message of their experiences were: 'Be focused and be prepared!'

The afternoon was spent doing mock-up interviews with a number of alumni who had volunteered to act as interviewers. The aim was to practise our skills of being interviewed and get some feedback, so we know what to improve in the future. And so we did! I had my interview with Dr. Peter Walti from the MBA class of 1979! Although his class is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, Dr. Walti still attends the interviewing session every year. That is the commitment of the IMD network.

Until this point we had occasionally met alumni or had contacted them using the alumni database in connection with our startup projects, but we had as such not really felt the proclaimed strength of the alumni network. That changed completely Saturday evening, where the school hosted a networking event for our class to meet the alumni. More than 200 people showed up! Time flew by until my back and my feet started telling me that I had been standing around talking for five hours straight! For many of the alumni this was also a small reunion with many of their old classmates. Judging from the many hugs that were exchanged they had clearly made friends for life during their year at IMD.

Today Sunday was the day for the long awaited rematch between the 2008 and 2009 classes. On 16 April this year the 2008 class had suffered a humiliating 5-0 defeat so there was much at stake.

The 2008 team including some reinforcements.

The 2009 team including reinforcements from the 2003 and 2007 classes.

The game is on! It was very even and after one and a half hours of play the score was 2-2. In the last minutes before the whistle the 2008'rs attacked with a quick rush to the goal line by Janislav Marinovic [Chile]. Janislav put in a cross to Paul Holmes who scored the winning goal to 3-2. There are, however, witnesses that claim that the ball was out of bounds before it was sent across and that the goal therefore should be annulled. In the spirit of the game the 2008'rs were given the benefit of the doubt and thereby the victory.

This incident has certain similarities to the 1966 FIFA World Cup Final where England met West Germany. In extra time Geoff Hurst hits the crossbar and the ball bounced down on or just behind the goal line. England was awarded the goal by the linesman, but despite much subsequent technical analysis and discussion the two nations have never been able to settle the issue. You can read about it here or watch the video here.

The 2008 and 2009 classes do not want any ambiguity about the results, so a new date was immediately set. On 28 August the two teams will thus face each other again in what likely will be the final showdown!

After the match the partners had arranged for a lunch around the ping-pong tables in Parc de Milan.

Here it is Ryo Abe [Japan and MBA 2009] getting a bite.

3 x MBA2007! In the middle is Sergiy [Ukraine] who plays with us every Sunday. I unfortunately never got the names of the other two gentlemen.

Angela Akamine with a tired son!

Thank you to all of you that coordinated, cooked, transported and in any other way helped make this event so great:
Andres Akamine
Angela Akamine
Barbara Martin (MBA office)
Angelika Vytogiannis
Myriam Vacher
Aude Tavernier
Beate Gensel
Kanika Lakhwani
Chris Eaborn

End of an era

2009-06-06T02:16:00.004+02:00

We started the last day of Building Block classes with Professor Phil Rosenzweig rounding off the 'Critical Thinking' stream. This mini-stream has cut across a number of different classes such as marketing, strategy, operations and finance. Today's class summarized what we had learned in the previous sessions and aimed at preparing us for the ICP projects by reminding us of the traps that are so easy to fall into when we are collecting and analyzing data.

Just before lunch we had an interesting speech and Q&A session with Mr. Ramadorai, CEO and Managing Director for Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), which he has been associated with for the past 36 years. TCS is specialized in IT services and business solutions and is today a USD 6 billion company employing 140,000 people accross the globe.

In the afternoon we had our very last class of the building blocks and it was Leadership Professor Jack Wood that had the honor. The atmosphere in the class was very light. There was a feeling of relief. We are not quite there yet - there are still some exams to go - but we are no longer staring at a distant light at the end of the tunnel. We are actually so close to the exit that we can see what is going on outside the tunnel.

Lisa Bridgett [UK/South Africa] and Walid Sahyoun [Canada/Lebanon/Italy] had arranged for champagne for the whole class in order to celebrate that we had reached this important milestone. Here is a few pictures from that event.

From left: Kornelius Thimm [Germany], who by the way is celebrating his birthday tomorrow, Vladimir Korobkin [Russia] and Christian Cuenot [France].

From left: Paul De Hek [The Netherlands], Stefano Cazzulani [Italy], Karim El-Koury [Austria] and Sylvain Cabalery [France].

Eu gen Cha [Korea], Ricky Zhu [China] and Alejandro Salcedo [Mexico].

Fathers and neighbors! Andres Akamine [Peru] and Walid Sahyoun [Canada/Italy/Lebanon].

We had the tailor Vijay from Thailand come by to take measurements for shirts and suits, which he then will go back to home and have made. A great share of the class stopped by, so we will be looking sharp when we start our job hunt in a couple of months!!

The Polar Bear club is steadily growing. Here are yesterday's participants before they get in. Although the water temperature has increased several degrees over the past two months it is still very cold, so it takes a while to get everyone in as you can see in this video.

Polar bears in the water!

Have a great weekend!
Thorsten

Just another day in the office.....

2009-06-03T02:07:00.008+02:00

Just another day in the office, at least in terms of length and intensity, but as usual a standard day at IMD has some new elements to it. Today that element was the first 'real' meeting in our ICP team. Yes, we have had other meetings already and we have met with the client and with our coach, but this was the first time that it was just the five us 'locked up' in the dungeons with a specific deliverable.

Today's deliverable was a Letter of Agreement outlining and aligning the expectations for the project for both the client and the ICP team. Moreover, we had to come up with a work plan for the first phase of the project. The project is split in four phases, where phase 1 is an industry analysis. But how do you do an industry analysis for an organization who's purpose it is to help the children of the streets of Nairobi? What does the industry produce? Who are the competitors and the customers? And the key success factors? It became obvious that we will need to tweek and turn the framework we have been taught to get useful results, but we are not in doubt that the framework will work. It is just a matter of how we do the tweaking.

My group has spent the last two evenings in the dungeons, where we have been working on the last group assignment for Finance. We are conducting a thorough analysis of the financial health and estimated value of the two food industry giants Danone and Nestlé. The assignment has been heavily driven by our CFO Alex Rubio [Brazil] and by Sato Konagai [Japan], a.k.a. Mr. Framework. The rest of us have been trying to keep up, add value to the best of our ability and learn as much as possible in the process. The assignment proved to be an excellent exam preparation for most of us. Accounting was the heavy exam at the mid-term exams in March. This time it will be Finance I will have to focus on!

The Finance exam was due at midnight and at 23:57 Alex submitted it by email. At 00:01 Finance Professor Jim Ellert replied and thanked us for a just-in-time delivery. No time wasted around here!

Thorsten

Sato Konagai and Simon Brunner, a.k.a the Dalton brothers. It remains unknown whether this was a pure coincidence or they were trying to send a message! :-)

From Shrek to Cinderella

2009-06-01T04:17:00.002+02:00

I just sent in my second leadership paper. 4936 words on the roles that I either take or that I am given in different groups and in different settings. Sounds weird? It did to me as well when we went through the first leadership classes back in January. Transactional analysis, child-parents relationships, group dynamics and power plays. I was skeptical. Were we not over-analyzing things?

Today we use all of this terminology without thinking about it. In describing the roles I have heard about my classmates using such colorful characters as Shrek, Cinderella, Scarlet O'Hara, Curious George and Gandhi. At times it almost becomes philosophical. Just listen to this quote from my paper:

'The tricky thing is that you think that people think in a certain way and therefore you start acting as if they think the way you think they think!'

Did you get that? :-) I hope the person reading my paper does as well.

And now I better get a couple of hours of sleep before we head into the last week of classes before the final exams. I can't believe we are this far already.

'Godnat og sov godt!' as we say in Denmark.

Start-up shut-down

2009-05-30T01:52:00.004+02:00

'So you are giving the software away for free and you want to build a business doing that?'. We were somewhat sceptical when we meet the people from Bacula Systems for the first time on 21 January. There we were, six guys from all over the world who had been working with chemicals, automobiles, fashion clothing, banking and shipping. And now we were asked to help a company doing open source backup software build a business! We barely knew what software was about, not to mention open source. Only Gerald Lo [Malaysia] is from the IT industry, so we had to rely heavily on his technical expertise in the beginning.

Today we gave our final presentation to Bacula wrapping up the past four months of work by summarising the findings and recommendations we have made along the way. There were no surprises for them today, as we have been working with them all the way. Bacula was represented by CEO Jack Griffin and by Kern Sibbald, who has programmed the Bacula software. Both gentlemen have a long career in the IT industry. They were very satisfied with the cooperation we have had and said that they will be making signficant changes to their business model and target customers on the basis of our findings. That is the kind of feedback that is great to receive. Then it has all been worth it!

Along the way we have had to learn the basic jargon of the industry and understand a very complex and advanced product well enough to be able to define how it is different from its main competitors. We have learned the basic drivers of the open source community and the dilemmas that a company operating in this sphere faces. We have spoken to potential customers and partners and have analyzed the ins and outs of the competitors. The process has taken us through countless iterations and involved hours and hours of discussions, but eventually we were able to come to an agreement both among ourselves and with Bacula on how the business should move forward.

Tomorrow at 9:50 we start the grand finale. We will be presenting to a panel of Venture Capitalists, who all have seen thousands of business plans and who are renowned for their ability to spot weaknesses a mile away. We have practised the presentation over and over again. I am certain that Ajay and Cedric - who will be presenting - are rehearsing the lines in their sleep right now. Fifteen minutes to explain four months of work is not a lot. We need to be sharp! Really, really sharp!

4 February 2009. Backup for dummies. This is where it all began. Bacula CEO Jack Griffin was very patient and took the time to teach us the basic technicalities.

7 February - Information overload! Trying to make sense of it all. It just seemed insurmountable at the time.

4 March - Bacula boys at work in the Maersk building, where we spent a lot of time together. From left it is Gerald Lo [Malaysia], Ajay Lakhwani [India], Brad Moldin [USA], Slava Raykov [Russia] and Cedric Jusseaume [France].

Mid March - Finally some kind of framework starts taking shape.

Late May - Sharpening the final presentation!

Koinonia

2009-05-27T04:15:00.004+02:00

Ups, it is the middle of the night and I just woke up on the couch. I did not intend to take that 3 hour 'nap'. The upside is that I feel more fresh now than when I came home a few hours ago.

No two days are the same at IMD, but today was more different than most! Like many other teams we met we the client for our International Consulting Project (ICP). Whereas the majority of the 18 ICP clients are large corporations our team will be working with Koinonia, a relatively small NGO that amongst others runs a number of homes for street children in Nairobi, Kenya.

In the MBA Diary on 21 November 2008 Asier Sinde [Basque] from last year's class was quoted for saying:
"Our visit to Kenya was an eye opening experience that has had a strong impact not only on our year at IMD but also on our individual lives. As a result, we have recently started an initiative to create a fund that will aim at rehabilitating deprived and abused children from the streets and sponsoring them into high school and college in Kenya. This initiative will be implemented through Koinonia, a local NGO which some of us met in Kenya and that is already operating in Nairobi."

The 2008 class decided to help Koinonia by funding a 2009 ICP project for them and today they took another step in fulfilling this promise as they came to hand over the torch to the 2009 class. We are both humbled and honored to be given this task and opportunity and we look forward to getting started. It will be our largest opportunity to date to make a difference in a lot of people's lives.

The 2008's were represented by Daniel Brosseau, Max Sorokin and Svetlana Korshunova. It was obvious from the stories they told that last year's discovery trip to Kenya had made a huge impression on the class collectively. Daniel has just returned from a six week trip to Kenya, where he has been working withKoinonia on preparing our ICP project. He has obviously collected A LOT of information where there was little information to get. This will undoubtedly prove invaluable to get us off to a running start.

The afternoon was a huge information download from Daniel, Max and Svetlana. I think this was what wore me out so badly. The last week have been full of thoughts about our final startup presentations and classes on Financial Derivatives, so it is quite a switch to suddenly start thinking about improving life in the slums of East Africa.

The birds have started singing outside. I think they are telling me to go to bed!

Hand-over from the 2008 class to the 2009 class!
From left: Stefano Giussani [Italian], Max Sorokin [Russian - 2008 class], Daniel Brosseau [Canada - 2008 class], Svetlana Korshunova [Russia - 2008 class], Thorsten Boeck [Denmark], Gerald Lo [Malaysia], Ruslana Zbagerska [Canada/Ukraine], Eva Hubsman [Israel/Romania].

Was it just a simulation?

2009-05-22T18:21:00.003+02:00

The integrative exercise continued today. Third and last day. As Kristin mentioned yesterday we are competing in a virtual universe, where each group represents a company that is competing in the same market. Each company must set and execute a strategy for their product. This means deciding how to position the product in terms of price, quality, advertising and distribution? We need to plan the production, establish new production lines, invest in new technology as well as pay interest, taxes and dividends. All of it is managed on a piece of software that simulates consumer behavior and calculates your profit and loss statement, your balance sheets and not least your CASH! Although the different groups went very different ways in the market we all experienced the lack of cash in the early rounds. In the words of Accounting Professor Stewart Hamilton 'Profit is an opinion, cash is an opinion!'.

The game was very realistic and we had plenty of discussion on the many, many trade-offs that a company faces. In the words of Alex Rubio [Brazil]: 'I used to do this and this is exactly what it is like. The CFO is fighting to keep the company liquid while the marketing manager insists on investing in the brand'. Alex used to be a CFO and he quickly took on the same role in the group, constantly reminding us of our cash restrictions when we wanted to invest in advertising, production, innovation and so forth. A great and intense learning experience!

I am one of seven people hosting a party tonight to celebrate the May birthdays in the class. The party is coordinated by Ruslana Zbagerska [Canada/Ukrain] and will be held a Jodie Roussel's [American] apartment as she has a balcony big enough for all of us. The weather is perfect so I am sure we will have a great night. I have two friends from Denmark visiting at the moment and Jodie's sister is staying with her. The three of them have 'volunteered' to go shopping for us and to prepare for the party in general. So let this be a warning for you if you plan to visit an MBA student in the near future: Expect to be put to work!

It is midnight last night and group 10 is discussing the last details of the industry analysis that were presented this morning.

The case for Wednesday's marketing class was about the Japanese beer industry. The case was an example of how a so-called mature industry suddrenly can start changing dramatically. The class was the last marketing class and after the class Marketing Professor Dominique Turpin had arranged for refreshments, which of course was ........ Japanese beer!

Early birds

2009-05-20T00:10:00.003+02:00

I feel more tired today than I normally do at this hour and I just remembered why. This morning I actually managed to get up an hour earlier than normal in order to get some reading done. I was so tired last night at midnight that it did not make sense to work anymore, so I took the chance and went to bed with the aim of getting up early. That is indeed a chance when you are me because it almost always backfires, meaning that I do not manage to get up earlier after all. I am one of those kind of people that needs the threat of being late for something in order to get out of bed, but then it also works quite well!

The only bad thing about getting up earlier is that you do not gain any time as such. You just get tired an hour earlier than usual. And once it starts it bites its own tale, so I am probably better off going to bed now and getting up even earlier tomorrow.

Thorsten

After class today we met in our startup team to start preparing the presentation for the exam on 30 May. Here it is Cedric Jusseaume [France] (writing) and Gerald Lo [Malaysia] adjusting some of the slides. We have lots and lots of information. The trick is to get it all into 7-8 slides that can be communicated clearly in 15 minutes.

We played a friendly football match tonight against a company in the area. Not because we really have time, but because we took the time. Parc de Milan is an oasis in the middle of the city. I can't wait to be able to enjoy it properly on a day where I have time to spare.

Any given Sunday

2009-05-18T01:26:00.004+02:00

9 hours of sleep at night, football in Parc De Milan at 9am, three rounds of laundry and another two hour nap in the afternoon. Sundays are about recuperation, about repairing the damages of the past week and preparing yourself for those of the coming week. It is not just about your body, but also your apartment, your dirty laundry, your emails and your list of assignments. It is your one chance per week to bring things down from completely chaotic to just overwhelming.

You never get to the bottom of things, but you can get it to a level where you have an overview of what you need to do. That is very good for stress levels in general. This weekend I didn't get quite as far as I wanted, though. Partly because we had a full day of Career Services yesterday and partly becuase of a meeting today with the company from our Startup Project.

The startup project has reached its very final phase. We have delivered several recommendations to our startup company over the past months, which they generally have accepted and implemented. We delivered another two recommendations today that also were very well accepted. We agreed with them that it now is time to stop collecting and analyzing data and start preparing the final handover to them.

We will be delivering our handover to the company on 29 May and we will be doing our final exam presentation on 30 May. The 'jury' in that exam will be a panel of experienced Venture Capitalists that will measure us on how much Real Value we have added to company. The exam will be held in the form of a 15 minute presentation.

15 minutes to present 4 month of work is not a lot, so we better be sharp. Razor sharp! We have tons of information, findings and recommendations. The trick is to destill it into a heavy, but clear, substance that is easily digestible. We have 12 days to do that and to write the 20 page report that goes with it. It has been made very clear that consultancy-like presentations with high-level strategic recommendations will not be accepted. It needs to be down-to-earth, concrete and real value added to the company. Real World, Real Learning!

Daniel Porot held yesterdays Career Services workshop on job hunting. Daniels is a bit of a guru in his field and you clearly felt the many years of experience that were behind his recommendations. I very much liked his fast paced course with a lot very concrete and actionable advice. There were no 'it depends' answers here.
Daniel presented by making drawings on his laptop, which then were projected on the screen. I have never seen this method used before, but it was very effective. He made more than 100 drawings during the 8 hour course. Here you see he his 'Bermuda Triangle of job hunting'.

MBA student at work! I do not have the view of the lake and the Alps that some of my fellow students do, but whenever I can I move out on my balcony. That gives me some fresh air while getting some work done. A good combination. It is warm enough in Lausanne now to sit outdoor all evening and I really enjoy to just sit there and listen to the sound of the rain hitting the trees.

Friday chill out

2009-05-16T00:22:00.004+02:00

It must be at least a couple of weeks since I last was home before 9pm. I can't remember when it was anymore. Today, though, I was done at the school at 4pm and I decided to celebrate that with a trip to Migros (the local supermarket) so I could get some food in my fridge again. I was getting tired of eating oatmeal for dinner, but it was the only thing that was left. After filling the fridge I decided to treat myself to a nice two hour nap. It actually became three hours, but that is OK, I will not have any problems sleeping tonight anyway. Right now I just allow myself to luxuriate in the feeling of 'not being tired'. It is awesome!

I have attended three of the four company presentations this week. I am truly impressed with how seriously the companies take the recruiting of MBAs. Some naturally do a better job than others at selling themselves, but most of them bring very senior executives and IMD alumni from their organizations. One of the companies even brought their CEO! It is nice with a company brochure, but in order to get a real feel for the company you need to hear the real story from the alumni and get a feel for the personalities of the top executives.

A proud father celebrating. Wednesday morning Alejandro Salcedo and his wife Barbara became parents of a healthy 4.4kg boy. We wish them all the best as they start their new life as a family.

Thursday was the last day with Jean-Pierre Lehmann (standing left) and Global Political Economy. A class that has broadened our horizons tremendously and that have been home to some of the most intense discussions on the program. Jean-Pierre started every class with a socalled 'litteracy test' on global political issues. Yesterday he announced the winners. Four of the five have one thing in common: They read The Economist every week.
From left it is Martin Laan [Estonia], Prashant Biwal [India], Johan Jansen-Storbacka [Sweden/Finland], Seif Shieshakly [Saudi Arabia/Germany], Karim El-Koury [Austria].

'Chocolate or Vanilla?' Rasmus Figenschou [Norway] helps out in the ice cream stand. The customers are Chia Chia Lim [Singapore] and Simon Sundbøll [Denmark].

Thorsten

The eternal battle

2009-05-13T01:47:00.000+02:00

I managed to get some fitness done today. For the first time in probably a month and a half. I have lost track. Actually, I don't have time for fitness, but around here time is not something you have, it is something you take. The recent MBAT tournament made it clear to me how much I need to get started on the physical exercise again. My body clearly does not like what it has been exposed to the past four months. Something needs to change, but what? What do I cut away to give time for more exercise?

Sleep? No, that is already at a minimum. I think most of us in the beginning thought we just could cut sleep to almost nothing. That worked only for a few days. Perhaps a few weeks for some. But eventually it catches up with you. It hits you like hammer and you find yourself unable to function in the class and in the study room. You change the strategy and start allocating yourself a minimum amount of sleep every night, a deadline where you HAVE to go to bed whether you are ready or not. That works. Sometimes, at least.

Well, if you cannot increase the number of hours your can work every day, perhaps you can reduce the amount things you do. So you start chopping away from the bottom of the list. This is where the least important things are. You make sure that Skype and Messenger does not open automatically on your computer. That way YOU are in charge of when you can be contacted and you do not get caught in random chats. You cut Facebook usage to a bare minimum and you cut all notifications and subscriptions unless they are crucial to your future.

You stop all the friendly one-on-one emails correspondences and switch to one-way mass communication, either through emails or a blog. You fear that everybody thinks you are too full of yourself when communicating that way, but to your surprise friends and family fully understands what you are going through and appreciate whatever updates they get.

You reduce your grocery shopping to once a week or you buy it online to save time. You start eating bread and coldcuts in the evening so you don't have to spend time cooking. You anyway get the warm meal in the IMD restaurant at lunch.

You can also cut the work you do for you group to a minimum, but that would be very short sighted. You could do the opposite and do a lot of work for the group or even for the class as a whole, but that comes at the price of your individual preparation for class. Not only does that mean risking to fail the exams, it also means loosing a lifetime opportunity to get some real world class knowledge into your head.

Eventually, you have cut everything to a bare minimum. That helps for a little while. Then the school turns the heat up a bit more and you find yourself scrambling again.

OK, so you cannot extend the number of working hours or reduce the amount of work anymore. Well, then productivity has to go up. Although you can walk to the school in 7 minutes, you start biking so you can do it in 2. You set up automatic labeling and filing systems on your mail, so you can flip through it faster. You set up mails on your phone, so you can handle them whenever you may have a spare moment during the day. You try to become more disciplined in always doing the most important things first (instead of doing the things you like the best).

You then discover that you now are so efficient that you barely have time to talk to your classmates. That does not fly either, so you remind yourself not to forget why you are here. Don't loose this unique chance to get to know all these interesting people. So what do we cut then? Exercise?

And so the story goes. Around and around. Constantly challenging your own priorities, borders and discipline. And that is probably the most central piece of learning this year.

It is now 1:30 and I still have two cases to read. I promised myself I would be in bed by 2:00, so I can function properly tomorrow. So do I increase the work hours, reduce the work load or increase productivtivity?

Thorsten

Rugby Defense

2009-05-11T23:40:00.011+02:00

What a couple of days it has been in Paris! So much to tell, so little space. My apologies for this diary being so lengthy.

Friday's success (bronze medals in Petanque and Climbing as well as a football team qualified for the quarter finals) continued Saturday. The Tug-of-War team started out by going undefeated through to the finals, where it beat Cambridge comfortably. The team's strategy - which was based partly on good advice from last year's Tug-of-War captain Bryan Hassin - was very effective. Actually the team won all of its matches in less than 15 seconds!

Juan Benitez [Colombia] added to the number of medals by bringing home a gold and a silver in swimming.

The other schools and their coaches have student bodies up to ten times the size of IMD's to choose from and students that on average are 5-7 years younger, so the statistics are therefore not on IMD's side. The IMD football team had thus already won more than it had hoped to win by qualifying to the quarter finals, but there was much more to come.

We were set to meet the Italian school Bocconi - one of the favorites to win the tournament - so we didn't set our hopes very high. As the game started we managed to keep them at a distance and play some opportunistic football by kicking long passes forward. It wasn't pretty, but it worked. When the referee blew the final vistle, the score was 1-1, and that was even after an IMD goal was disallowed in the last minute because of an alledged IMD 'handball' that apparently only the referee and the Italian goal keeper saw. We won the penalty shootout mainly due to fabulous goalkeeping by Stefano Giussani [Italy] and to our surprise we found ourselves in the semi finals.

In the semi finals we met HEC, who we already had drawn against in the group play. History repeated itself so after a draw, a penalty shootout and more magic from Stefano in the goal we found ourselves in the final. Not bad for a bunch of 'old boys' that just play football for fun on Sunday mornings in Pard de Milan. It reminds me of 1992, when Denmark won the European Championship in football. Noone in his right mind bets on David when he fights Goliath, but once in a blue moon things do not turn out as they 'should'.

The Spanish armada from IESE were waiting in the final. There was not much we could do there and they won comfortably. The funny things was, though, that by the time IESE was done celebrating their victory and everybody had left the place we were still celebrating our silver ecstaticly. There was no end to the joy. It reminds me of the Women's 400m relay in Barcelona in 1992. If you don't know the story then take a look this video.

The supporters following the teams were absolutely amazing. Judging from the amount of noice created by the supporters IMD was by far the largest school out there. During the party Saturday evening IMD was further awarded the price of the 'School with the most spirited team'. Perhaps this video of the Tug-of-War final explains why.

It was hilarious to see people walking around very slowly on very stiff and sore legs today. The spirits were high, though, as it was the good kind of pain. The kind where you know that it has been worth it. The kind that leaves you with a sense of achievement. And above all, it actually feels great to - for once - be exhausted from good old fashioned physical activity.

From left: Jodie Roussell [American], Joe Nai [The Netherlands/Hong Kong] and Misayo Matsumoto [Japan] showing the IMD MBAT uniform.

Minli Zhao [German] in perfect style.

Men's double with Ajay Lakhwani and Shibu James [both from India].

Two of the three members of bronze winning Petanque team: Liesbeth Bakker [The Netherlands] and Christian Cuenot [France]. The third members of the team was Richard Dove [UK].

The Ultimate Frisbee team is ready to go!

The supporters were fantastic!
Here it is Sebastian Guery [France].

Suchir Swarup [Canada/India] in deep thought.

The foosball team from left: Nicholas Denef [Belgium], Alberto Mussi [Italy], Suchir Swarup [India], David Rohan [Australia], Andres Akamine [Peru], Naoto Tsushima [Japan], Gerald Lo [Malaysia/China].

The Tug-of-War team in action. Notice how the supporters are working just as hard as the team.

Tug-of-War Gold!
Kneeling left: Cathinka Sheie [Norway], Anita Yehudai [Germany], Christine [U.S].
Standing left: Chuks Onunkwo [Nigeria], Fadi Sbaiti [Lebanon/US], Gerrit Sindermann [Germany], Yury Vasilkov [Russia], Thorsten Boeck [Denmark].

The fundamental part of what competition soon named 'The Rugby Defense'. Paul De Hek [The Netherlands] and Chris Eaborn [UK].

Stefano Giusanni [Italy], now better known as 'The penalty killer' across major European business schools.

The football silver medals are reality! Who would ever have thought this?

And in between all the sports there was actually time to have a look at Paris. It is an amazing city on a springday when the sun in shining.

You can find many more MBAT pictures here and here

MBAT Day 1

2009-05-11T23:33:00.003+02:00

This is the diary entry from Friday 8 May:

2 bronze medals and the first football team in IMD history to proceed to the quarter finals! That is the result of the first day at the annual MBA tournament. The Bronze Medals were secured by Christian Cuenot [France] and Liesbeth Bakker [The Netherlands] in Pétanque and by Joe Nai [Hong Kong/The Netherlands] in Climbing. I have had the honor of playing on the football team today, where we so far are undefeated. It is a minor detail that we did not win any games either, but the two draws were enough to get us into the quarter finals which will be played tomorrow.

On top of all of this we have had people participating in sports as exotic and different as rowing, volleyball, basketball, fencing, chess, golft, table tennis, baby foot (table football) and then I have probably even forgotten af few. Tomorrow we will add Tug-of-War and Ultimate Frisbee to the list and continue many of the others.

The IMD guys do stand out a bit. We are on average 31 years of age, whereas most of the other 'kids' range from 23 to 27. We tell ourselves that we just bring that much more experience to the game. Whatever that is worth in sports I am not so sure. All I know is that my legs feel very heavy after today's matches and that they (the legs) will complain when I start warming them up again tomorrow.

We will get some more pictures to you later, but here is a couple to start with.

Andres Akamine [Peru] with his son David. David is one of the two children that have joined the MBAT. On the right it is Stone Gao [China].

Waiting for the bus this morning. Nicolas Denef [Belgium] is making the absolute most of his time.

The IMD football team in this years MBAT. We are greatly assisted by veterans Paul Holmes (goal keeper), who is from last years class and, and Chris Eaborn (standing far left) who plays with us every Sunday in Parc De Milan.

Relaxing a bit after the first footbal game. From left Oren Yehudai [Israel], Paul De Hek [The Netherlands], Simon Sundbøll [Denmark] and Joost Mackor [The Netherlands].

From Enron to Biofuels in a day

2009-05-06T02:46:00.005+02:00

It is past 2.00 AM and the lights are still on in most of the study rooms. No, it is not another Integrative Exercise although it feels like it. We are working on a presentation for Strategy with Professor James Henderson. The subject is Biofuels and we will presenting to a company in the industry in 6 hours. We are all at point where we mostly are thinking about our beds, but it will be a while before we can realize those thoughts. My group has nevertheless been kind enough to let me spend some time writing this diary entry.

It has been another one of those days. Marketing and Strategy in the morning, Accounting after lunch, a company presentation and then down in the dungeons to work on the Strategy presentation. Today's accounting class was about the fall of Enron back in 2001. Another fascinating story of just how bad things can go, even in big corporations. It is only a couple of weeks ago we learned how a single man in 1995 brought London's oldest bank, Berings Bank, to collapse.

What is on most of our minds now (apart from tomorrow's presentation) is the upcoming MBA Tournament (MBAT) in Paris. The first bus leaves late tomorrow evening and arrives in Paris Thursday morning. We will be a total of 70 students and 17 partners attending. The MBAT is a mini-Olympics between all the major European business schools. We will be competiting in a large number of sports from football and fencing to basketball and babyfoot (miniature football). I have the honor of being Captain of the Tug of War team.

Sylvain's dog, Kizomba [France], helps out with the Strategy presentation. Left it is Ruslana Zbagerska [Canada/Ukraine], right Alex Rubio [Brazil].

With a background in consulting Satoshi-San is amazing at setting up frameworks for our group discussions. Here we are discussing the potential consolidation of the biofuels industry.

Sunday in Parc De Milan. Joost Mackor, Captain of the football team, with the team strategy for the MBAT. We like to keep things simple at IMD!

Basic tips to survive....

2009-05-05T00:07:00.002+02:00

A great entry from Susana:

My name is Susana, and I am a strong fan of this diary, I read it every night. I subscribed to it at the very beginning of the year and since then, I have not missed it once… I think you may call it a bit of an obsession, on the other hand, since my boyfriend is one of the writers of this diary, I guess I will probably not be asked to talk about it with my shrink.. just yet.

At the moment I am living in Denmark, although I am Spanish, and my boyfriend, who is Danish, is living in Switzerland.. if it sounds weird to you, that is all right. It also does to me. Let me share with you how this works, you can call this entry:

“Basic tips to survive a long distance relationship with an MBA student in times of a financial crisis while you try to be supportive but in reality you can’t wait for the year to end”

1. Don’t try to understand the workload – I am sure some of you may be fans of the famous “Lost” series. Well, the workload of an MBA student is like the black smoke, forget about trying to make sense of it. Yes, you may do like with “Lost” and go to those websites where they try to explain all the loops of the program. You can do the same thing and get his/her schedule and find out about the project and the leadership papers, and the start-up companies, and the trip to South Africa and x, y, and z.. only the students seem to be able to keep track of that!

2. Make sure you are enrolled to a fidelity program for your regular airline company - really. Not only that, in case you lose your job, you will always be able to apply for a job as cabin crew. When the pilot says “Cabin crew, prepare for landing”.. I feel like standing up and joining them, my carry-on luggage is designed to survive all the controls of all the airports of the world and I can get a train ticket from Geneve to Lausanne with my eyes closed. It’s a lot of fun though, you get a lot of time to read your favorite books, or catch up with your emails from work or listen to your iPod or watch some very good movies … without commercials!

3. Be truly supportive – yes, I know, I have also tried the whole “yes, I am really happy for him”, I have even tilted my head to the right and smiled at the same time, just to show how wonderful it really was this idea of his, to live thousands of kilometers away from me. And even then, there are times when it is tough and I wish IMD would not be located in fantastic Lausanne, so he would be able to commute every morning like all those “normal” couples of the world. The truth is that he really loves it and for me, he is not the only one learning every day. You can see him like that pilot from “The Little Prince” stopping to find out that the world is much more interesting, diverse and fascinating than what we were really used to give it credit for.

4. And finally, be prepared for having to endure the bad moments of life on your own.. Like having to watch a Real Madrid – Barcelona game ending 2-6 at the Bernabeu and not having him there by your side!

Anyway, at any time, the experience is really good, it makes me smile when he gets to work with an NGO in Kenya or when he talks about people from all around the world or when, as a partner, I can join the Summit for Responsible Leadership or when he is so tired, that we decide not to go out for dinner and we end up dancing to “The Killers” in the kitchen. ..

Susana

The week in photos

2009-05-02T01:55:00.008+02:00

MONDAY - The Mövenpick ice cream stand has arrived in the IMD restaurant! Eric Vergara [Thailand] and Alex Rubio [Brazil] gets the first two ice creams that are served this year.

MONDAY - Tough negotiations in the Finance exercise. Clarkson Lumber (Group 10) and Northrup National Bank (group 9) are working on an agreement for refinansing of Clarkson Lumber.

MONDAY - After several hours the chief negotiatiors from the two sides can shake hands and proceed with the paperwork. Alex Rubio [Brazil] (left) and Oren Yehudai [Israel].

TUESDAY - The intergrative exercise is on. Sylvain Cabalery [France] and Olivia Assereto [Italy] discussing early designs of the bag.

TUESDAY - Midnight pizza is required to keep the engines running.
From the left:Eric Vergara [Thailand], Yury Vasilkov [Russia], Chuks Onunkwo [Nigeria], Sebastien Guery [France], Albert Schultz [Germany].

WEDNESDAY - My group, now known as the 'Zen Army', presents our bag in a shadow play. We relied heavily on an agressive marketing strategy under the assumption that good marketing sells anything. That proved not to be true.....

WEDNESDAY - 12 bags oozing with innovation!

THURSDAY - Enjoying the sun in a break.

THURSDAY - On 30 April every year the Dutch celebrate the Queens birthday. It is a big event in the Netherlands and therefore also in Lausanne this year. The Dutch had invited the whole class. The only requirement was that you dressed in Orange.
Here it is the entire Dutch representation in this year's class: Back row from left: Liesbeth Bakker, Joost Mackor, Paul De Hek, Marco Simons and Joe Nai. In the front it is Paul's girlfriend Leonie Stolk.
After midnight we could also celebrate Paul's birthday.

THURSDAY - Happy campers. Slava Raykov [Russia] and Joost Mackor [The Netherlands]

FRIDAY - Outdoor coffee after lunch. From left, Alex Rubio [Brazil], Yury Vasilkov [Russia] and Sebastien Guery [France].

FRIDAY - The month of May arrived, which means changing of the seating plan. I am happy to be back on the backrow, better known as 'The Skydeck'. Moreover, I am back on the North Wing of the Skydeck where I also spent the month of February.
Skydeck from left: Albert Schultz [Germany], Thorsten Boeck [Denmark], Bruno Portnoi [Brazil], Liesbeth Bakker [The Netherlands], Stefano Cazzulani [Italy], Oren Yehudai [Israel] and Christian Cuenot [France].
Front row from left: Young-Ha Kim [Korea], Vladimir Korobkin [Russia], Eric Vergara [Thailand] and José Luiz Mesquita [Brazil].

The Dream Bag Marketing campaign - 3 videos

2009-04-29T02:59:00.002+02:00

Here are the three videos we used in our marketing campaign for bag in the innovation challenge. Enjoy!

The Dream Bag - Part 1

The Dream Bag - Part 2

The Dream Bag - Part 3

The innovation challenge

2009-04-29T02:33:00.004+02:00

It is well after midnight and the dungeons are buzzing with activity. The second integrative exercise have been underway since 15.00 this afternoon. The task: Design, build and sell a bag using only Tyvek, Velcro and duct tape. Delivery: Tomorrow morning 9.00 AM.

Each of the 12 study groups must come up with their own design. The buyers will be the 40 people that currently are attending the Program for Executive Development (PED) on the school. They will vote for the bag that they like best. Likewise the PEDs will produce a number of bags of which the MBAs will choose a winner.

It is all part of the Innovation stream taught and headed by Professor David Robertson. We have spent the past couple of weeks investigating customer behavior and needs and have used different idea generation techniques to translate the needs into solutions. You don't really have to be that creative to come up with new ideas as long as you have the right tools and processes in place. At the same time, it is actually good fun.

Most groups have covered the glas in the door to the rooms in an attempt to keep designs and prototypes secret, but industrial espionage has still proven difficult to avoid for some. Like any other product bags do not sell without a proper marketing campaign. The opposite is also true: With the proper campaign anything sells! I assume that is why I see so much creative effort being used on the 6 minute sales pitch that each group has available tomorrow.

Sato Konagai has started the construction of the bag with a roll of Tyvek.
As you can tell it is a quite strong material.

Group 3, also known as 'The Roos' are showing off their 'Roo bag' with a group phoon . From the left it is Adrian Smaranda [Romania], Prashant Biwal [India], Rasmus Figenschou [Norway] (with the Roo bag) , Carsten Bremer [Germany], Andres Akamine [Peru].

Group 5, now known as 'Catch me if you can!'. From left it is Valeria Pavlyukovskaya [Russia], Joe Nai [The Netherlands/Hong Kong], Lisa Bridgett [South Africa/UK], Kornelius Thimm [Germany], Stone Gao [China], Nader Ashoor [Saudi Arabia], Stefano Cazzulani [Italy].

Friday in Pictures

2009-04-25T08:42:00.010+02:00

The day started with Innovation professor David Robertson demonstrating a technique for idea generation. Here he is 'Decomposing the problem' as it is called; the problem being a vegetable/fruit peeler.

The problem was decomposed into 'Apply pressure', 'Remove peel' and 'Manipulate/rotate fruit' and the class was asked to create solutions for each part.

Engineers on home turf! Paolo Guglielmini [Italy] (in front) and Karim El-Koury [Austria] creating solutions for how to 'Apply pressure'.

David demonstrating a machine (lower right) that peels, slices and cuts out the core of an apple in one go. He got it on eBay.

A cup of coffee in the IMD café after lunch has become a daily ritual for many of us. Here it is Eva Hubsman [Israel], Kornelius Thimm [Germany], Johan Jansén-Storbacka [Sweden/Finland], Stefano Cazzulani [Italy] and Sebastian Guery [France]. The latter three surprised me by speaking Italian to each other despite only one of them being Italian.

Modern mom keeping in touch with her off-spring. Lisa Bridgett skyping with her two boys Julian (4 years old) and Aurelien (9 months). I am so impressed by Lisa and the other MBA parents. On top of all the work the rest of us are struggling with they manage to find time for their families.

We had Finance Professor Jim Ellert most of the day on the subject of 'Capital Structure and Dividend Policy Guidelines'. It is known stuff for the bankers and accountants in class, but most of it is a new world for me.

Looking sharp!! The period of company presentations has started. A number of companies will come and present themselves and answer questions from the MBAs. The companies will likely be the ones coming back to hire MBAs in September. Here it is (left-to-right) Cedric Jusseaume [France], Shibu James [Indian], Oren Yehudai [Israel] and Suchir Swarup [Canada/India] dressing up for their potential future employers.

2009 meets 1979

2009-04-22T00:41:00.002+02:00

I was standing outside the auditorium yesterday around lunchtime when I heard someone saying 'Here is an MBA 2009 student'. I turned around and found myself being introduced to a gentlemen some 30 years older than me. He was from the MBA class of 1979. 'So how is life?', he asked. 'Life is good', I replied, my standard answer to that question. I had just come out of the powernap room, so I actually did feel quite OK at that very moment. 'Well, then you are not learning enough', he said. From that I gathered that the workload around here is not something that was invented yesterday. It was here in 1979 as well. 'But the volleyball court is missing', he continued, 'it used to be between the old building and the restaurant.' I afterwards realized that I don't even know which building that is the 'old building'. I assume it must be the building with the reception. If that is the case then the volleyball court must have been where the table tennis is now.

Reflecting on that conversation afterwards painted a picture in my mind of what this place is all about. Although the buildings and the sports we play may change, the fundamentals remain the same: Hard work and good fun.

The dungeons are buzzing these days. Everybody is running flat out trying to coordinate the work across the groups each person is in, getting the piles of cases read and the numerous assignments in on time. Despite the insurmountable workload the class still chooses to prioritizes Accounting with Professor Stewart Hamilton. I have read tomorrow's case on the Mannai Corporation twice and made an effort to answer the questions. I really look forward to an interesting discussion with my classmates whom I know also have been working hard on this.

Table tennis is a favorite pastime during lunch breaks. Apparently volleyball played the same role in 1979.

The MBA 2008 Ultimate Frisbee team is preparing for the MBA tournament that will be held in Paris mid may. Here Cathinka Scheie [Norway] shows the talent of the team. Left-to-right it is Wouter Naessens [Belgium], Chia Chia Lim [Singapore] and Ilya Syshchikov [Russia] watching.

Carsten Bremer [Germany] selling the idea of Micro-finance to Valeria Pavlyukovskaya [Russia] in the IMD café.

Meeting the 2008 MBAs

2009-04-20T01:31:00.004+02:00

Today was the day for the long anticipated match of the generations. The 2009 MBAs versus the class of 2008. The 2008 class had apparently suffered some casualties at the party the night before but was nevertheless strong in numbers and on the field. We had to use almost the entire length of Parc de Milan as we were playing 12 against 12 or something like that. It was a great match played in the spirit of the game.

For me it was particularly interesting to meet last year's diary writer, Mathieu Pointeau, who's shoes Kristin and I are trying to fill this year. It was also interesting to hear to old class' stories about the life both during and after IMD. It was clear that they had experience IMD very differently between themselves. For instance, some of them thought that February was the hardest month to get through, whereas others thought it was May. To me the week we just have been through have been the toughest so far and I sincerely hope that we have peaked now.

It was also interesting to learn that more than a third of last year's class have stayed in Switzerland after graduation and more than half of those are in the Lausanne/Geneva region. You can't really blame them. Life is so convenient and the nature so impressive around here.

We should be seeing much more to them in the coming month. Several of them will come to present the companies that they now work for and many apparently intend to join the IMD networking event on June 6th, where this year's class get the chance to meet all those that now can call themselves IMD Alumni, whether from 2008 or before.

And for the results of today's match, I will just let the numbers speak for themselves: We won 5-0. Thank you, 2008 class, for a great match. We look forward to you coming back for a rematch.

The Latin Express on the move. 09'er Andres Akamine [Peru] in pursuit of 08'er Janislav Marinovic [Chile].

Game over and a 'Great game' handshake

Line-up of the players of today's match. A good mix of the 2008 and 2009 classes.

A night in Bollywood

2009-04-18T01:50:00.002+02:00

Today was one of those days that just disappeared too fast. Class all day and a three hour start-up meeting afterwards. Two things were different, though.

First of all my old friend, Stefan, was visiting from Denmark. Stefan is half Swiss, half Danish and found time to stop by Lausanne while visiting his family close to Zürich. I think he got a good first hand impression of the frantic speed at which things pass by at IMD.

Secondly, tonight was the night of the Bollywood party that our Indian friends have been working on for the past couple of weeks. And what a party it was! There were shows prepared by those who really knows how to dance the Indian way and there was dance tuition by Suchir Swarup for those of us who have absolutely no clue how to do it.

The evening ended on the peak with Kanika Lakhwani showing a video of a somewhat younger version her husband Ajay in a real Indian TV soap opera! All this time we have had a real Bollywood star walking among us without knowing. Ajay is in my startup group. The group will never be the same again now that this fantastic secret has been revealed. It can only make you wonder what other talents or secrets that are kept hidden in the class.

Thanks to all our Indian friends for a fascinating and fun evening!

Left-to-right: Gerrit Sinderman [German], Marco Simons [Dutch] and Ruslana Zbagerska [Ukrainian/Canadian] looking great at the Bollywood party. Not surprisingly Gerrit went on to win the price as the best dressed.

Ajay Lakhwani and his wife Kanika showing how real Indian dancing is done. It was fascinating to watch. Shortly after this picture was taken Kanika revealed Ajay's Bollywood stardom to the class!

Phooning

2009-04-15T03:52:00.003+02:00

Yesterday I was still taking it easy back home in Denmark. Today we are back in the pressure cooker and yesterday is only a faint memory. I barely landed in Lausanne yesterday before I went to work on the pile of emails that I use as my to-do list. It was in the early ours of the morning before I felt that I was just reasonable up to speed and could go to sleep. Today was the usual full speed schedule and the next four days are packed to the brim as well. Assignments, startup projects, carreer coaching, personal development initiative (PDI) and the regular class preparation. You name it and we have got it at the moment.

Professor James Henderson introduced the International Consulting Projects (ICP) today and asked us to state our preferences for the project. It was a bucket of very varied projects that was presented. Different industries, different tasks and different parts of the world, some very far away and others just around the corner. The ICP is the part of the year that I look most forward to.

The morning started in celebration, though. Rasmus Figenschou from Norway turned 30 on Monday and the class had prepared a special gift for him. Rasmus is a fan of 'phooning'. To phoon means to have your picture taken as you strike a pose like a runner in special places or under a particular set of circumstances. Here Rasmus shows how it should be done.

Rasmus has previously declared that his biggest 'phooning' dream is to have all 90 students phooning on the tables in the auditorium. So last week, while Vahid Khamsi lured Rasmus away, Henry Low [Singaporean] snapped the below picture. You can probably imagine Rasmus' reaction when the picture popped up on the screen in the auditorium today. It was great to kick off this period of heavy workload on a less serious note.

Swiss Fondue, the Danish way!

2009-04-13T00:26:00.003+02:00

I am SO full again. Again I had too much of the Swiss cheese fondue. The only difference is that this time I had it back home at my parents place. It was my Dad's birthday last week and his four kids decided to give him a Swiss fondue set. I brought it home on Friday together with 2kg of good Swiss fondue cheese. I am out of a very cheese loving family, so I am afraid that we have just started a tradition that over time will add many kilos to the combined weight of the family. We don't have any fondue traditions in Denmark, but we have plenty of traditions for good cheese and I am confident we will find great ways of combining the two.

This 4-day break has been very different than the one we had after the exams a couple of weeks ago. First of all, the after-exam break was spent with my girlfriend in Copenhagen, whereas this one has been spent with my girlfriend visiting my family. This largest difference was mental, though. Last time we had just completed the exams and thereby Building Block 1 and we had only a few new assignments. I really felt very relaxed. This time we are in the middle of everything and the assignments are piled up (4 in next week alone), so mentally I have not been able to leave the school like I did last time. I came home with a long list of things that I wanted to get done, but I hardly managed to get anything done. So the usual sense of guilt has been nagging all the time. The only good thing, I guess, is that I have slept a lot, so the batteries are fully charged. This will give me some extra work hours over the coming week.

Tomorrow is the return to reality. My girlfriend and I will take the car back to Copenhagen. We are stopping by an old friend of mine on the way, just to say hi and get a cup of coffee, but otherwise it is straight to the airport and straight back to Lausanne. To be honest, I don't feel very much like it. I could really spent some more time up here. On the other hand there is only two months left of the Building Blocks and with the pace that times passes in Lausanne the summer break will be here before we know it. To me it is not even a matter of making it THROUGH the exams, though, it is just a matter of making it TO the exams. As I have said a couple of times before, the exams are wonderful peaceful times compared to the daily chaos. I may very soon regret saying that, though, because the first thing that awaits us on Tuesday is our exam results!

I took this picture outside the Copenhagen Congress Center, where a giant wind turbine has been raised in the parking lot. We have several times during the Responsible Leadership Summit at IMD and during the Global Political Economy classes discussed the Copenhagen Summit, which will take place in 2009. Business and government leaders from most of the world will meet to discuss climate change and how we proceed beyond the Kyoto targets that will expire in 2012.

The end of Cloud #9

2009-04-08T01:12:00.003+02:00

This morning we were back in the dungeons and back in our old study groups for one last time. The purpose was to give each other feedback on our behavior the past three months. The basis of the discussion was an online survey that asks you to rank both yourself and each individual in your group. The result gives you a picture of how you see yourself compared to how your group sees you. I guess that it is no surprise that we all tend to rank ourselves higher than our peers rank us, but what is really interesting is to learn where the big gaps are, the so called 'blind spots'. This also include unknown strengths, meaning areas where your peers actually thinks higher of you than you do of yourself.

It is amazing to see what a transformation 'The Group formerly known as Cloud #9' has gone through the past three months. I cannot help smiling when I think back at our first group assignment. We were all so intensely trying to convince each other with hard facts and loud arguments. Within minutes the group split into pieces: Two people were heavily debating and writing on one white board, another person was writing on the white board on the other side of the room, one person was eagerly drawing his thoughts on the flip chart, two people were on the laptop looking into the databases and the last two were sitting behind looking somewhat lost. None of this was coordinated and little of it was ever used in the final solution.

Three months later we are sitting around the table again. We take turns at speaking. The tone is direct but respectful. We explore the differences in our most fundamental beliefs but we never judge. I believe we have had some very unique challenges to bridge and I believe we have every reason to be proud of the way we have handled it. Although there has been very intense moments, we have always had the courage to continue the talk. Along the way we have produced excellent results and some that were less excellent. Much have been learned from analyzing these ups and downs.

We are only one week into the new study groups, but it has already given us a lot of perspective on the old group. I don't think anyone ever forgets their first IMD study group. I for sure will not.

Today's Career Service workshop on writing motivating letters was partly held outside. Here it is (left-to-right) Andres Akamine [Peruvian], Jodie Roussell [American], Chuks Onunkwo [Nigerian] and Slava Raykov [Russian] giving each other feedback on their work.

My own workgroup for the afternoon consisted of Johan Jansén-Storbacka [Swedish/Finnish], Cathinka Scheie [Norwegian], Fadi Sbaiti [Lebanon/USA], Ilya Syshchikov [Russian].

Back: Stefano Giussani [Italian], Stelious Vytogiannis [Greek]
Front: Seif Sieshakly [Saudi Arabian/German], Misayo Matsumoto [Japan], Kornelius Thimm [Germany]

Spring, Sake and Fondue

2009-04-06T02:43:00.004+02:00

The spring had chosen to come to Switzerland today with temperatures around 17C. Last time I wrote that the spring was coming it snowed three times the following week, but this time I really believe it is here. The doors and windows in my apartment have been open all day and the fresh outside air has replaced the air that has been trapped inside for too long. It is such a relief to be able to do that after a long winter where everything has been locked up.

My new group just left after we spent a great evening with Swiss fondue, Japanese Sake, a bottle of French red wine and stories from all over the world. It has struck me how different it is entering into this second study group compared to the first one. I cannot help thinking about how much of this difference that is due to the personalities in the group, how much that is due to the fact that we already know each other and how much that is due to what we have been through already. There is no doubt that we are much more cautious and aware this time. First time most of us just plunged in head first without thinking of much else than the task we had been given. That gave rise to many long discussions and - let's be honest - conflicts, that had to be solved. This time we are slowly feeling our way into it one small step at the time. That definitely has its advantages in terms of comfort, but if we are not careful we loose the positive energy of a 'constructive conflict'.

We set out to find a name for our new group. We came up with a large number of different suggestions ranging from 'The Zen Team' to 'Kizomba'. The latter is both the name of Sylvain's dog and the name of a type of Angolan music. We never did decide on a name, though. Perhaps we are still being 'too' nice. Nevertheless, I look very much forward to working with Group 10 over the next three months.

Group 10 around the dinner table. Notice the green bottle of Japanese sake. It is excellent with a Swiss fondue.
Left-to-right: Satoshi Konagai [Japanese], Sylvain Cabalery [French], Fabiana [in front, Brazilian and married to Alex], Olivia Assereto [Italian], Thorsten Boeck [Danish], Simon Brunner [Swiss], Ruslana Zbagerska [Canadian/Ukrainian], Alex Rubio [Brazilian].

The same group of people in their working environment.

Another Lake Geneva sunset picture. This time taken through the window in our study room.

Indonesia

2009-04-04T03:33:00.003+02:00

Professor Jean-Pierre Lehmann's classes in Global Political Economy (GPE) has taken us on quite a bit of a world tour. We were around US, China, India, Russia, Africa and the Arab Region before the exams. Yesterday we 'went' to South America with presentations about president Lula in Brazil and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and a second presentation on the drug trade in the continent. This was spiced up with a presentation of Colombia by our two Colombians, Yadira Sierra and Juan Benitez. It was fascinating to hear the story of a country that to a large degree has freed itself from the hands of kidnapping and corruption and who still is in the process of freeing itself from the drug trade.

Today's GPE 'trip' went to South America in general and to Thailand and Indonesia in particular. I had been looking forward to this as I spent two years Indonesia. The best two years of my life. Indonesia and its people will always have a special meaning to me. I am proud to say that I still have many friends out there that I still stay in touch with. I went back to Indonesia in October last year for the first time since I left four years ago. It was like coming home, home to all the smiles, volcanoes and rice fields.

Today's discussion on Indonesia was centered around the country's transition from dictatorship to democracy. I was in Indonesia during the last elections, so I found it particularly interesting to get the view of the 'outside world' on a situation that I only had experienced first hand.

As you may already have noticed I very quickly get excited, happy and a bit sentimental, when the discussion touches upon Indonesia. I therefore also had to pace myself a bit in the class today. Make sure you have the entire evening available if you ever get me warmed up on the subject. Particularly, if you get me started showing pictures. I couldn't help including a few appetizers below.

My colleagues and friends in the office in Semarang, Indonesia in 2004.

Have you ever seen a new day begin from the top of a volcano? You climb the volcano during the night and then you just sit and wait for the dawn to come. It is a breathtaking experience.
Mount Muria, Central Java, September 2004

The Dutch brought the railroad to Indonesia. In Ambarawa, Central Java, there is still a fully operational steam engine.
November 2004

On a roadtrip with friends. I am the tall one :-)
Bandung, Western Java, February 2005