Just another day in the office.....

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! :-)