My Little Pueblo

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!!!

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

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

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

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

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

'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

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

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

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