An inspiring day

Jogi Rippel from Tignum, the man who taught us the fine art of powernapping was back today. Back with his message on how to maintain a 'Sustainable high performance'. The keywords were still Movement, Nutrition, Recovery, Energy levels, hydration, etc, but this time with less focus on the individual and much higher emphasis on how to work with these things in a team or an organization. We were amongst others given the task to build a model that could calculate the ROI (Return on Investment) on initiatives that create 'Sustainable high performance'. The accounting definition was pretty straight forward as the accounting exam still is fresh in our memories, but defining the value of such subjective items as 'Improved innovation' and 'Better working enviroment' was no easy task.

We had lunch together with some of the participants from the school's Program for Executive Development (PED). This was arranged by our 'new' Innovation professor David Robertson and the aim was both for us to get to know some of the other participants at the school and for us to probe the customers of our 'Innovation Challenge'. The Innovation Challenge will run in late April and is about designing a bag. Each MBA team will design a bag and the PED participants will choose the winner. Similarly, the PED teams will design a bag for the MBA class who will decide on a winner. Sounds like a lot of fun!

Most of the afternoon was spent in the company of the Career Services team. Katty Ooms-Suter gave an update on the current job market. It is tough times 'out there', but there are still plenty of companies signing up for on-campus recruiting, so we should be in fairly good shape as a whole. Céline Beaurain-Casemi followed up with instructions on how to write a good cover letter when applying for jobs and asked us to have the first draft ready next week.

Then followed a quick meeting in my 'old' study group. As we enter into the month of April the group officially ceases to exist. As its very last assignment the group is preparing a presentation that compares and contrasts Brazilian president Lula and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. This is for Thursdays class on Global Political Economy with Professor Jean-Pierre Lehman.

After that classmates Alejandro Salcedo [Mexican] and Gerrit Sinderman [German] held an interesting presentation on 'Search Funds' for the self-established Entrepreneurship Club. This was followed up by a live video conference with Alejandro's cousin Gustavo Fernandez and his partner Eduardo Clave. They are MBA students at Harvard Business School and are currently setting up a Search Fund together. A Search Fund is basically a fund that is set up to give an entrepreneur time and money to search for a company to acquire. You will normally get two years to find the company plus a bit of money to keep you going while searching. Once you have found the company to acquire the investor then submits the bulk of the committed capital. The concept, which was completely new to all of us, is relatively unknown in the US and is non-existing in Europe. It was nevertheless a thought provoking presentation.

Thorsten

Releasing tension by massaging yourself with something as simple as a tennis ball. Part of today's session on 'Sustaining high performance', which also included breathing techniques.

Video conference on 'Search Funds' directly from Harvard Business School.
Cool technology by the way. It was a first for me.

Study group no 9, better known as 'Cloud #9', as it looked in 2009 on Building Block 1.
Left-to-right: Kornelius Thimm (standing) [German], Thorsten Boeck [Danish], Misayo Matsumoto [Japanese], Fadi Sbaiti [Lebanese/American], Eva Hubsman [Israeli], Juan Benitez [Colombian], Liesbeth Bakker [Dutch] and Eric Vergara [Thai].