Any dream will do!

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!

'....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

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

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

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'

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?

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.