Handstands and hamburgers

Like Kristin I am also attending the class on India and China this week. The class is taught by Professors Anand Narasimhan and Winter Nie, who are from India and China respectively. Today Professor Nie (pictured above) taught a case about how the relatively small Chinese company Alibaba successfully kicked global giant Ebay out of the Chinese business-to-business e-commerce market in a couple of years.

Alibaba was forced to use new and unproven methods to overcome the massive financial advantage Ebay possessed. One of the things Alibaba did was to teach their employees how to do handstands. The idea was that to get them to see things from a different angle. Chuks Onunkwo is not Chinese, but was happy to show how they do handstands in Nigeria. Eric Vergara [Thailand] (and the rest of the class) is watching.

The beautiful autumn colors and the winter coats have come out, but that cannot keep an MBA class off the ping-pong tables. Here it is Henry Low [Singapore] and Juan Benitez [Colombia] on the left playing Eric Vergare [Thailand] and Ilya Syshchikov [Russia].

Yury Vasilkov [Russia], Carsten Bremer [Germany] and Fill Niu [China] had their birthdays Sunday and Monday. That was celebrated yesterday at the White Horse pub with cold beer and dart games. Since birthday cake does not go very well with beer, Valeria Pavlyukovskaya arranged for birthday hamburgers. Here the three gentlement are joined Chia Chia Lim [Singapore].
Carsten is from the old East Germany and has his birthday on 9 November, the same day as the Berlin wall came down in 1989. That was his 13th birthday. He has both memories and very interesting stories from that time. We tend to forget that these events are not very far away. In fact, they are part of the people that are around us every day.