The beginning of the end

There are more and more signs of the fact that the IMD bubble eventually is going to burst. Today Regula from the MBA Office took us through the different procedures for exiting Switzerland, canceling insurances and leaving our apartments.
Regula and the rest of the MBA Office are the grease that keeps the MBA machine running. Everyday they fix dozens of small and large practical problems. They handle everything from a grumpy landlord to an unclear phone bill with a smile. They made sure that everything went well when we entered Switzerland and IMD and they are now helping us through the door in the other end.

Today was the day for the monthly partner lunch and the partners also joined the 'Exit IMD' session with Regula. Here Henry's wife Kelly [Singapore] is here learning how to do an apartment exit the Swiss way.

Rasmus [Norway] has all year been collecting quotes for the yearbook. Today he became yearbook material himself when expressing his concern about the excessive cleanliness of the apartments that is required upon departure: 'If there is one thing I have learned about Switzerland, then it is that it is all about......spots!'. Who can argue with that? :-)

The graduation party committee has started their work and Joost, Karim and Wouter presented the initial work. Judging from the hats it can only be a blast! :-)

Time to catch up

I have just come back from Genova. As a customer with Trenitalia today, I was very positively surprised. Instead of being stuffed into one of the usual 30-old year noisy cars, they deployed a brand new, silent train with seats and entertainment systems that looked like they were stolen from an airplane. Nice! I spend the time to catch up with almost three weeks of unanswered emails. Needless to say that I only got half way through it.

It was great to spend two days with my girlfriend and my parents. We took it easy and did not anything at all. I really enjoyed it and hated having to leave again. I am so tired of constantly being on the move, never to sleep in the same bed for more than a couple of days at the time. While I know I will miss IMD when I am no longer here, then I also look forward to getting back to a somewhat normal life, a life where they days have some kind of rhythm and routine. Not too much, of course, but enough to feel that you actually have a home.

The first signs of things coming to an end are becoming obvious too obvious to be ignored. This weekend I moved my motorbike to Genova with the intention of not bringing it back, committees for the yearbook and graduation have been established and on Tuesday we have a 'move-out' session with the MBA Office on how we exit the country again. Exit?!? How can that be? We have barely started yet!

For the next day and half we will be back in class again for the first time since the building blocks ended. I really look forward to that, it is like the family coming together again, even if it is just for a little while. There are too many people that I haven't seen for the past two months!

Tour de Southern Europe

It is 23.00 here in Genoa, but I feel like it is much later.... or earlier in the morning. Perhaps I still have a bit of Singapore time left in me. Out there it is 5.00AM now.

Yesterday morning my parents picked me up in Frankfurt airport. They left Denmark on Monday and had via Bremen taken the trip through part of the Rhine valley. From Frankfurt we drove west towards Strassbourg, where we caught the so-called Alsace Whine Route. The route goes through 170km of vineyards at the foot of the Vosgian mountains, small picturesque villages with colorful houses and flowers everywhere. It looks like it is straight out of a fairytale. We had apparently hit the peak of the harvesting season, so everywhere we met these tall funny looking grape-picking-machines and tractors with trailers full of grapes. We went into a small place to buy some wine, but they were so busy harvesting that they barely had time to serve us. We got our wine, though, and we also found small places where we could get bread, cheese and sausage, so finally dinner was secured. French dinner that is. Awesome!

Alsace has throughout history been thrown back and forth between Germany and France, but since 1919 it has been in French hands. The German influence is still significant and everywhere you see names that are a mix of German and French. Just take the small town of Dambach La Ville as an example, or Haut-Koeningensburg – and old castle on mountaintop where we stopped by. In the late afternoon we found the highway back to Lausanne, had our awesome French purchases for dinner and went straight to bed.

This morning I had the pleasure to show my parents around the school. They saw the dungeons, the powernap room, the auditorium, the canteen and all the other places that have been the center of our lives for the past nine months. Most of all they met the people I have been working so closely with. I have been gone for three weeks, which is an eternity at IMD. Trying to catch up with everyone on what had happened during those three weeks proved impossible. I will have to spend all of next week doing that.

In the afternoon I got on my motorbike and headed off towards Genoa with my parents in the car behind me. My girlfriend now lives in Genoa in Northern Italy and I will be moving here when done in Lausanne in December. This was a good time to bring the motorbike here for good. I am out for a big part of October and if we get into November it gets too cold and too risky to move it. The six hour drive was quite an experience. Particularly the winding road on the way up to the St Bernard mountain pass reminded me of the motorbike trip in France only a month ago. We started with sun and 22C in Lausanne, were hit by 12C and rain on the Italian side of the St Bernard tunnel and ended up with 26C upon arrival here in Genoa.

Now I have a day and a half to catch up on things with my girlfriend, my parents, my email, my homework for next week and all the other things I have neglected for the past three weeks. There is no such thing as a full-off weekend just yet.

Q & A

I am sitting at the Starbucks in the new giant ION shopping centre on the fancy Orchard Road in Singapore. The whole ground floor is packing with brand new stores with Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Armani, Patek Philippe and the likes. From the ground floor the mall goes four stories DOWN, not up. In the basement there is the typical Asian food court. I got myself a ‘Nasi kuning ayam merah’ which is Indonesian and/or Malay for ‘Yellow rice with red chicken’. Another reminder of the good ol’ times in Indonesia.

Yesterday I treated myself to a trip to the movies. I used to do it regularly, but it is almost a year ago I went last time. I saw Tarantino’s latest creation ‘Inglorius basterds’ about an American Jewish hit squad working under cover in Nazi occupied France. As usual with Tarantino you leave the cinema with a funny feeling. It leaves you thinking, but you don’t really know about what, because the movie did not teach you anything. Nevertheless, I enjoyed my first evening off in weeks and the first movie theatre trip in a year. And I did not even fall asleep!

My trip here in Asia is coming to an end. I have a meeting tomorrow for lunch and tomorrow evening I head back to Europe. The trip has been an intense learning experience, as intense as a week of building blocks at IMD. Hong Kong overwhelmed me with a lot of new questions and things to consider while Singapore answered a lot of these questions. The reason being that in Hong Kong I mostly met customers, who listed an endless amount of requirements I would have to fulfil if they were to buy my product. In Singapore I mostly met suppliers who offered solutions that I did know existed and I met seasoned industry experts who could give me the high level perspective on the forces in the industry.

My parents are right now working their way down from Denmark to Lausanne by car. We agreed that they should pick me up on the way in whatever airport whereto I could get a convenient (=cheap) flight. That ended up being Frankfurt, so they will pick me up there Thursday morning and we will drive to Lausanne together. I look forward to seeing them again. I actually even look forward to driving with them to Lausanne. It reminds me of the trips in Germany we used to do as a family when I was a kid.

In half an hour I will meet an old colleague at Harris’ on Robertson Walk. Almost exactly one year ago this was where I met my coming classmates Henry Low (Singapore) and Sylvain Cabalery (France) for the first time. It seems like it was only yesterday we were sitting there at the high tables outside the bar enjoying a cold beer. On the other hand, if I look at how much has happened since, how much I have learned and how differently I think, it seems like it must be ages ago. Who did this to me? :-)

Business with style and a smile

It has been another change of scenery. Not as drastic as the one from Nairobi to Hong Kong, but still I cannot help noticing the differences. I am now in Singapore, sitting with a glass of red wine in my friend Nicolaj's apartment overlooking Robertson Quay from the 13th floor. We are still within the old English empire so the electrical plugs are still the sames as in Kenya and Hong Kong and they also drive in the wrong (left) side of the road.

Both Hong Kong and Singapore are to Asia what Switzerland is to Europe. They make a big part of their living functioning as a regional hubs and tax refuges for the big international corporations. All three of them administrate an amazing amount of wealth despite the fact that they produce few or no physical goods. But they do i very differently and I particularly like the way the Singaporeans do it. Just like in Hong Kong and Switzerland everything is very well organized. Public transportation (for some reason always used as a measure for public administration of countries) works like clockwork and you are very safe whereever you go. There is more space in Singapore, so the city is not as build up and congested as Hong Kong, but on the other hand it does not having the enormous natural beauty of Switzerland.

What I like about the Singaporeans is that they do it with style and with a smile. They take their time to enjoy what they do. It is not a matter of just delivering a service in the most effective what, but it is also about how you do it. Take the taxi drivers for example. In Hong Kong they will take you from A to B in the fastest, shortest and most effective way without cheating you. You will be thrown around on the backseat as they take the turn in order to reach this goal.

The taxi drivers in Singapore will also go the shortest way without ever cheating you (sometimes it is even hard to get them to accept the tip), but they will do it with a big smile, cracking jokes and telling you about the things they think you should see in their beloved city. They are always in a good mood and if everything else fails you can always talk Premier League football with them. One of them even showed me his ManU tattoo on his shoulder one time. The taxi drivers are a good representation of business in Singapore. It is all about business, don't get that wrong, but it is the way it is done that I find appealing. Much more than in Hong Kong and Switzerland.

Dennis, another old friend of mine, is also here, so the talk goes on the old days and what has happened since we met last. I was out here for the Formula 1 last year, the first F1 for both me and Singapore. The city is now preparing for its second race which will be held this coming week. Unfortunately I will be gone by then, but at least I had the experience already. Another weird thing about being here is that it feels like I was here yesterday. I can remember everything we did and all the details. I just cannot get it to fit in my brain that it was a year ago. Another one of those scary reminders of how time flies.

We are heading to Boat Quay for Indian food, then to Robertson walk to catch some other friends that are there for tonight's Premier League game.

The World Capital of Business

What a week this has been? I have never had one like it, that is for sure!

It started with the networking meeting Monday and Tuesday on the Kowloon side of the city. Lots and lots of information and input from the more than 50 people (and potential customers) from all over the world. Tuesday evening I moved to a cheaper hotel on Hong Kong Island. A 4-star hotel in central Hong Kong for what equals USD 40 per night. Sometimes you are just lucky!

Since then I have basically just been doing one thing. Meeting people! One after the other, non-stop. Meetings that have been set up through IMD classmates, old colleagues, friends, connections on www.linkedin.com or through people from the network meeting. A good share of the people I have met have been Danes. I guess like most other nationalities we stick together and help each other whenever we can.


When I first got to Hong Kong I felt that everything was so rushed, too much efficiency to really be enjoyable. Somehow this efficiency absorbs you and you become part of it. You are grabbed by the flow and fall into the rhythm of the city. I have never done so many meetings in such a short period of time as here. Everything is so close, you never spend more than 15 minutes going anywhere, very often it is just around the corner. At the same time everything is so focused on business that you can set up a meeting in a matter of hours. I have met people here who makes their living out of ‘just’ knowing and connecting people. Like Nokia! One meeting constantly leads to the next, “I have this guy you need to meet” people say all the time. It is like you find a little piece of rope in the sand, but as you start pulling it becomes longer and longer and eventually turns into a net. As you try to reel it in it just gets bigger and bigger. I have discovered an amazing amount of things the last week – a whole new world, actually - and still I suspect that I have only seen a fraction.

Today I took the one-hour train ride to the Chinese border, got a visa and then ventured into Shenzhen, a city that in 20 years has transformed itself from a sleepy fishing village to a fifteen million people production facility! I had set up two meetings in Shenzhen, one with a local company and one with an multinational company with an office there. Of course I wanted to get the information from the people that I met, but most of all I wanted to get a feel for China. I have heard so much about this place the past ten years, but I had never been there. There is only one way of experiencing these things and that is by going to see for yourself. As a foreigner in China you are a completely blind and deaf. You cannot understanding anything people say and you cannot read the sings. Neither can they understand you. You just hand over a note or a business card to the taxi driver with the address written in Chinese and then hope that he takes you to the right place. Today he did.

Tonight we went for a few drinks with an amazing 25th floor view of the Hong Kong skyline. It beats Manhattan by miles. It is just such much wider, bigger, more colourful and spectacular.

The hotel is fully booked tomorrow, so in a few hours I need to pack my things again and go to my friend Morten’s place, where I will spend the last night. We are heading out on an all-day boat trip tomorrow arranged by the Swedish community here. The smart thing would be to stay back, sleep and get some work done, but I don’t want to miss this chance. Tomorrow night there are new parties waiting and Sunday morning I head off to Singapore. I might actually have another very early morning meeting on the way to the airport, so is the Hong Kong way! And in Singapore there is another 5 meetings lined up so far with more on the way.

I guess I have said before. The second half of the year is no less intense than the first, it is just much more fun because you are doing it to yourself. It is still only a few hours of sleep per night, but it is OK because you are in charge yourself. It is happening because you cannot stop chasing opportunities. It is driven by excitement, not by force or fear! I love it!


LIVING IN LAYERS

You are not in doubt that Hong Kong always has been in lack of space. Everything is in layers. The places where people live...

… and where they work.

Even the trams….

the busses….


and the boats are in layers!

Business, business, business!!



Sunset over Hong Kong Island seen from the Kowloon side…


and a part of the Hong Kong skyline just as the lights start to come on.

At the Bruce Lee platter on the ‘Walks of fame’.

In Shenzhen. Five years ago this area was a swamp!

From Cool Kenya to Hot Hong Kong

Wow, what a change of scenery it has been.

- From dry and cool (22C) Kenya to hot and very humid Hong Kong.
- From the dusty roads of the Nairobi to the busy waters between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island.
- From the bunk beds on Ngong road to the 8th floor on Harbour Plaza hotel.
- From the desperate poverty of the Kibera slum to the Ferraris and high rise office buildings.
- From the wide and bright laughs of the Kenyan’s to the complete absence of even just a little smile from the people of Hong Kong.

It is amazing that you can travel between two such extreme contrasts in less than a day. Kenya was a first for me and so is Hong Kong, so I have the privilege of exploring them both with eyes that have not yet been coloured by experience and opinion. The only things I can see that they have in common are that they were British colonies and that they therefore drive in the wrong (left) side of the road and use the same electrical plugs.

In Friday’s diary entry I asked why Kenya is so underdeveloped, when there are so many smart and hard working people in the country. A number of different Kenyan’s (from old colleagues to the taxi driver that took me to the airport) have replied to that questions and they all say the same:

What Kenya is lacking is leadership!

What they mean by that is that the Kenyan government is too busy lining their own pockets to help their country develop. There is no doubt in my mind that if Kenya had a Nelson Mandela they would leap out of poverty as quickly as South Africa is doing it. They already have everything else that it takes.

The next two weeks there are no classes and no project. The time is reserved for job hunt and on-campus-recruiting (known as OCR) where a large number of companies will come on campus to conduct interviews. I will be spending those days in a somewhat different way, though.

I have chosen to start my own company upon graduation and am therefore working on a business plan that I aim to have ready in November. I have conducted most of the operational analysis, but now I need to know whether the customers will want to buy such a product at all. That is why I am in Hong Kong!

An old friend of mine (a Belgian that I met in Indonesia, who now lives in Hong Kong. Long story, I know) is hosting a networking meeting for 50 people from 28 countries that all are potential future customers of mine. They are here to get to know each other and I am here to get to know them. The networking meeting will run over the next two days. Tomorrow they will do a lot of short 5-10 minutes presentations and Tuesday morning I have been given a 15-minute slot to present my idea. It is obviously a truly unique opportunity to be able to pitch your idea for fifty customer representing most of the world. I am not doing a sales pitch, though, but am purely here to get an idea of what it is I need to deliver for them to buy my product. To truly understand your customer, as they say.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I have set up a number of other meetings with potential customers and a supplier in Hong Kong and Shenzen. Over the weekend I will move to Singapore, where I have set up a number of similar meetings. Sounds expensive, but with the exception of these first three days (where I need to stay at the hotel for the networking meeting) I will be staying with old friends, so it is actually not that bad.

All day today I have been working on my presentation for Tuesday and the questionnaire for the subsequent interviews, so I have not seen anything of Hong Kong yet. I hope I can find some time on Saturday to do that.

Now I better call my girlfriend and go to bed. The jetlag has hit me harder this time than it usually does.

Thorsten

Welcome to the worlds second largest container port!

This is the view from my hotel. Notice the constant fog. It is very, very humid here.

Exactly the same skyline, just taken at night. Hong Kong is one big island of colourful light!

Next time, Nairobi!

I am lying here on my bunk bed at Shalom House after four very intense days here in Nairobi. I am trying to make up my mind about what I think of what I have seen. So far, I don’t really know to be honest. There is a lot to digest.
I guess what you automatically do when you see things that you cannot relate to is to anyway compare it to what you know. Comparing it to Europe does not make any sense. Comparing it to South Africa where we were only a few months ago or to Indonesia, where I used to live, comes closer, but still does not really hit the mark. Both of these countries are more advanced than Kenya.


The main questions that keep popping up in my mind is: Why? Why is this country burdened with such heavy poverty and so great social problems? I have met so many smart and capable young people the last few days, so many souls hungry to learn and to improve. So why isn’t it happening?


HIV and AIDS is perhaps part of the answer because of the way it rips families and communities apart. Kenya has the same problems with crime, corruption and climate change (there is a severe drought at the moment) that many other developing countries face. But it still does not add up. There is something missing in the equation. This country should be doing better than it is! Why isn’t it?


Tomorrow we are leaving Nairobi again, but only for a while. We will be back in three weeks to continue our work. Hopefully the impressions will have had time to settle by then.

Thorsten


Monday: Stefano explains some of the things we have learned over the past few weeks to the Koinonia management team. Afterward Ruslana went on to explain the framework that we are working with.


We split the Koinonia managers in smaller groups and asked them to fill in the framework for their own social projects or business units. They took to the task with great enthusiasm and quickly learned the concepts. Here Eva is overseeing one of the groups.

Esther, Ann and Helen working on their frameworks. The Kenyan women seem to be very strong and with important roles in both Koinonia and in the Kenyan society in general. Esther is the day-to-day manager of Koinonia. Ann and Helen each run one of the children homes.

Tuesday we went around to visit the social initiatives in Koinonia. Ruslana and Gerald are here getting a tour of the dispensary.

Wednesday we went around to all the so-called IGA’s (Income Generating Activities), which is NGO terminology for ‘business unit’. Here Stefano and Ruslana are learning how Harrison runs the computer school Shalom IT.

Today Thursday we then visited four other organisations to learn how they do the same things that Koinonia does. This gave us a lot of very useful input. Here we are talking to Father Sebastian – an Indian Catholic priest – who has been working in Africa for 20 years and now runs the Bosco Boys home in Nairobi. The place is both a home and a school for 300 boys, who all have been saved from a life on the streets of Nairobi.

Let’s not forget why we are here. This is two of the girls at ‘Shelter Children Rescue Center’, which we also visited today.

And here are a couple of the boys at ‘St. Paul’s Children Home’. The new Karate Kid has been found.

Eva is making new friends in the process.


Lea Toto as part of the Nyumbani program delivers health services such as medication, nutrition and counselling to HIV patients. They have an impressive 5000 patients enrolled in their programs now.

Kenyan’s are not without humour. ‘CAUTION – Driving School - Driver under instruction – In god we trust…….’


Stefano and Gerald battling with the mosquito net. Quite an entertaining event!

Exhaustion and Excitement

I am back in the train to Milano. As we pass the border to Italy the steward in the train always comes around with the cart with food and drinks. I bought a cup of coffee and a sandwich and found it a bit amusing that alone the process of paying for it was done in three of the four official Swiss languages: German, French and Italian:


Steward: Das is zehn frank sechzig, bitte.
Thorsten (handing over the money): Bitte sehr
Steward: Merci
Thorsten: Merci
Steward (with a smile): Ciao
Thorsten: Ciao

I don’t speak Italian nor French, but as you can see you get far with ‘Merci’ and ‘Ciao’, particularly in a cosmopolitan community like the Swiss.

I will be spending the night in a hotel in Milano with my girlfriend who is coming up from Genoa. Tomorrow morning early we get on the plane to Amsterdam and then on another one to Bremen. Here we take a rented car to southern Denmark to attend the wedding of a friend of mine. After the wedding we drive back south across the German border to a hotel in Flensburg. After a few hours of sleep we drive to Hamburg, where my girlfriend takes a flight to Barcelona and I get on a flight to Istanbul. My girlfriend and I have come to the point now, where we are just happy whenever we can get a few hours together in an airplane or in a car. Sleeping together is complete luxury even if it only is for a few hours at the time.

In Istanbul Airport I meet the rest of my ICP team, who has flown in from Geneva, and we fly to Nairobi to start the work with the Koinonia organisation there. After Nairobi I go straight to Hong Kong and later Singapore on my own to talk with some people there. So all in all this is the start of a three-week journey, a journey that I somehow feel will mark the opening of a new chapter in my life.

As you can probably sense, this IMD life is constantly throwing me back and forth between feelings of exhaustion and excitement. There are times (usually when I haven’t had a full night’s sleep for weeks) where I just dream about a normal life, sleeping in on Saturday morning, making a REAL breakfast and a good cup of coffee, taking time to read the newspaper or perhaps go for a run or a game of football. Like normal people do, you know. At the same time I don’t want this constant stream of new input, impressions and learning to end. It is like a drug that makes me high and makes it easier to work through the nights.

I already know now that I will miss it when it is gone!