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].