Friday freedom

What do you do when you have stared yourself blind on your business plan and no longer can come up with useful answers? You call some of your classmates with experience in the field into a meeting, you explain the problem and a couple of hours later you are on your way again with your head full of new input and - most of all - a new solution to your problem. That was what I did today and it worked wonders! Thanks guys!

We have this and the coming two Fridays off. I was not in Lausanne during the 'On-campus recruiting' weeks, so this is the first week day where I have not had class or group work since I arrived in Lausanne. What a wonderful feeling of freedom to walk around in town and feel the fresh pre-winter air in your lungs as you walk up the steep pedestrian street. I spent the afternoon running some errands. Amongst other things I went up to get my official 'Departure Certificate', which basically is a letter stating that Switzerland acknowledges that I am leaving the country. As I walked up there I discovered several new places; stores, nice restaurants and a big movie theater. Places that I had no clue existed and that I definitely would like to frequent. It is somewhat ironic, though, that I only see them on the way to pick up my departure documents.

My girlfriend arrived early in the evening and we went out for Chinese with a bunch of people from the class. When we arrived at the place there were two other tables with IMD students already there. A popular place, indeed! And their dumplings were fantastic! The feeling of the fact that this year is about to end has started to settle and we have realized that if we are to go and have all the coffees, beers, dinners and other get-togethers that we talked about the whole year, then we need to do it NOW!

Eugene Cha [Korea], Juan Benitez [Colombia] and Tony Jamous [France/Lebanon] enjoying some of the good Chinese food.

Nicolas Denef [Belgium] and Suchir Swarup [Canada/India].

Mind your map

I have been putting a lot of hours in my business plan over the last couple of days. I collected a lot of the information for it in Hong Kong and Singapore back in September, but then came a month of ICP with travel and intensive days in the dungeons, so I never had time to write it down. It would have been better if I had written it down earlier, though. You loose a lot of details when you have things in your head for too long, but at least I remember all the general principles.

I guess I am also starting to panic a little bit. The end of the year is drawing near. Just like everybody else is on the hunt for a job, then I need to create this job for myself. It is not really that different. I promised myself and a potential investor that I would have my business plan ready by mid November. I am glad that I made this commitment; it keeps me on my toes. I guess I also panic, because as I write, I realize what a monstrous task I have in front of me. There is such an endless amount of things to consider, when you want to start on your own: Where do you register the company, where do you find investors, who do you hire to help you, where do you find them, what are the risks, how do you mitigate them, etc, etc. I try to stick to the big picture, but it is not easy and I still get lost in the detail too often.

Luckily Johan Jansén-Storbacka (Sweden/Finland) showed me some mind-mapping techniques and tools the other day. That has been a huge help in getting the whole thing organized. Thanks, Johan! The perhaps greatest benefit of all is to get all this stuff out of your head and down on paper. That is the benefit of the writing process.

Well, I better get back to work!

Ciao!

Thorsten

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!

Sawubona!

Two days ago I sat on my balcony in Lausanne. What a change of scenery there has been since then!

Sunday evening we met in Lausanne and via Geneva and Zurich we made it to Johannesburg by Monday morning. I asked for a seat by the emergency exit on the plane and was the lucky to get it! That is major deal breaker for me. It is the difference between sleep and no sleep. With enough space to stretch my legs I slept 7 of the 10 hours from Zurich to Johannesburg. I couldn’t have had a better start.

There was a lot of catching up to do on the way. The class has been spread around the world in the past three weeks. Combined we must have visited at least 50 countries. Around 25 people had gone to South Africa early, some individually and others in a trip organized by our native South African, Lisa Bridgett. Stories about cage diving with 4-meter sharks outside Cape Town were already spreading!


Chuks and Andres waiting to pass security in Zürich. Chuks had just become a dad less than 24 hours before the picture is taken!


Arrival in Johannesburg! Some more rested than others.


Our welcoming team. As the width of these two gentlemen indicates they are here for more than just driving us around. They are employed by a security company that takes care of all our transportation and security. All of them have a past in the army or the police.


Yesterday afternoon we met the companies that we will be working with. Here is the rest of my team Stone, Shibu and Eric with Peter [left] from Profast Hydraulics, the company we will be working with. Peter is a true entrepreneur and selfmade man who over the last 15 years has worked his company up from being just himself to employing 15 people and a number of advanced CNC machines. The company produces hydraulic fittings (primarily for the South African mining industry) and components for the construction industry.

Our stay in South Africa has come about as a result of the cooperation between IMD and the Internal Development Corporation (IDC). IDC is a government-owned but self-funded institution that provides financing for entrepreneurs in South Africa. Their aim is to stimulate the growth of the economy and to support the black economic empowerment.


IDC welcomed us with a great dinner with lots of traditional South African music and dance. That got everybody out of their chairs so we could dance along. Great fun!


Wendy Luhabe has been the person bringing IDC and IMD together. She is chairman of IDC and on the IMD board of directors. Here she bids us welcome at the dinner.


On the way out to the Profast factory today we drove by this billboard. Notice Wendu Luhabe on the far left. According to our driver, Sharl, Wendy is a well-known and very public character in South Africa. Please also note Sir Richard Branson (third from the left). Apparently they are having a leadership summit on South African entrepreneurship in Sandton – which is where our hotel is – tomorrow. I guess this just proves the relevance of what we are doing.


We spent all day today with Peter and Sharl. They took us around to the different sites where Profast operates.


We saw the machines and the products and we spent the whole days asking questions in order to understand Peter’s business and the concerns he has. Here it is Hendrik by one of the CNC machines.
We have tried to combine today’s learning with the skills we have amongst the four of us in order to find out where we can do our deep-dive over the next three days. With only a week to complete the whole project we need to take a very pragmatic and realistic approach to where we can add value. It means prioritizing, thinking on our feet and acting quickly. The great thing about this short time frame is that it gives you a bit of a kick. This is not a project that will drag on for months and where you have to collect vast amounts of information. Every hour counts and there is not a moment to waste if you want to do an impact by next Tuesday. Well, the impact may only happen over the coming months, but the frame for it must be set by Tuesday. The keyword is ‘impact’, doing something that really makes a difference. I am very excited and feel we are off to a good start, but there is still 6 days to go – and at the same time ONLY 6 days to go.

Every evening we will be sharing the day’s learning with the class. Judging from today’s session it sounds like everybody are working with companies just as exciting as ours. The companies covers such diverse products as restaurants, construction, pharmaceuticals, diamonds, public toilets in Soweto and a lot more that I haven’t had the chance to hear about yet.


This week have we replaced the White Horse with the bar in our hotel, but it is just as cosy. From left it is Richard Dove [UK], Albert Schultz [Germany], Ope [Nigeria] and Rasmus Figenschou [Norway].

And in case you were wondering: ‘Sawubona’ is the South African version of ‘hello’. Directly translated it means ‘I see you’.

Friday in the spring

The day started with a two-hour Entrepreneurship session with Professor Benoit Leleux. In that period of time we managed to finish the session on valuing entrepreneurial companies AND to debrief an entire book. That is just the pace that things are moving at and you just have to hang on as much as you can.

Accounting has now moved from 'financial accounting', i.e. Profit & Loss, Balance Sheets and Cash Flow Statements, into management accounting, which basically means management reporting. This is, at least to me, much more intuitive and logic, but let's wait and see. We are only a few sessions into it, so it might be too early to say.

In Operations Nikos Tsikriktsis, in his usual turbo-charged style, debriefed yesterdays visit at La Poste and reviewed the material we had been through in order to get us prepared for exam.
Then followed a quick update from Career Services on the status of on-campus recruiting and job fairs.

On wednesday our Startup project group had our so-called 'pitstop'. We met with Pascal Dutheil, an experienced Venture Capitalist, who gave us feedback on the work we had done so far on our Startup projects and some pointers on how to proceed. The meeting was held in a polite atmosphere, but it was easy to sense that Pascal is used to communicate in the no-nonense terms that the Venture Capitalists are known and feared for. Today our group then met with our coach, Professor Stuart Read, to discuss the latest development on the project and to prepare ourselves for a meeting with the startup company tomorrow.


I took this picture from the harbor when we were getting on the bus to go to La Poste yesterday. Coming from a land with no mountains this view is just priceless.


Two Russians at the Swiss Postal service, Yury Vasilkov (left) and Slava Raykov.


The sun is coming out and the temperature is creeping up, so we move the coffee breaks outside whenever we can. Here it is (left-to-right) Bruno Portnoi [Brazilian], Oren Yehudai [Isreli], Satoshi Konagai [Japanese] and Tony Jamous [French/Lebanese].

LeShop

The highlight of today was the visit of Christian Wanner, co-founder and CEO of LeShop.ch.
Christian visited our Operations class where we had been preparing and discussing a case on Ocado and Tesco, the two largest online food retailers in UK market. As the UK market by far is the most developed market for online food retailers, this also make the two competitors the largest in the world. It is the classic fight between the new entrant, Ocado, and the big established player. Tesco leverages it large existing network of stores to enter the online market while Ocado goes for delivery-only. Both models has its operational advantages and drawbacks. LeShop is the Swiss equivalent of Ocado, but in the absence of a Swiss equivalent of Tesco LeShop has taken the lead in Switzerland. LeShop was started in 1999, but as Christian said 'he had to walk five years in the desert' before it took off, but then it also took off big time.

As we started pushing Christian for more 'juice details' he told a fascinating story about how LeShop back in 2002 literally had been hours away from closing down. It was saved by the bell because of the commitment of its management and employees. As Christian pointed out: 'Sometimes the gap between failure and success is extremely narrow.' It felt more like we were in an Entrepreneurship class than in Operations, but who cares, this was real life and there it all comes together anyway!

Focus!

'Focus' seemed to be the keyword of today although I am not sure that was the intention. Entrepreneurship professor Benoit Leleux kicked off the day with session on 'Opportunity Overload' in start-up companies. The case was about a company who had developed a natural alternative to the chemical compounds used for water treatment. It could just as well have been any one of the companies that we are working with on our start-up projects. My start-up group is no different. We are working with a software company that is facing an abundance of possibilities, but little clarity on the direction. 'Focus, focus, focus', as Benoit said in his usual direct style, 'if you try to do everything then you are dead for sure'.

Whether intended or not, Operations Professor Nikos Tsikriktsis had the same message. Focus helps improve the quality and efficiency of the operational processes within the company. The case was on Canadian Shouldice Hospital that for decades had specialized in surgery of hernias. The case may be an example of the extreme, but the point was clear: The fact that they had had such a narrow focus for so many years had allowed them to optimize their internal processes to the benefit of patients, employees and the hospital itself.

In between these two classes Accounting professor Stewart Hamilton swiftly took us on a journey through the complexities of international accounting standards and why it is so difficult to reach agreement on these. There was also just enough time to run through an example of how multinational companies must deal with taxes across national borders and across different business units.


Naoto Tsushima [Japanese] and Vahid Khamsi [Swiss/Iranian] getting some work done in the foyer.


David Rohan [Australian] and Valeria Pavlyukovskaya [Russian] in the dungeons organizing the piles of paper that we are plowing through every day.

Meeting the start-ups

It has been an intense day. We all came dressed up in business attire today as we were to meet the entrepreneurs that we will be working with on the start-up projects for the next four months. It was fun to see the whole classed dressed up like that. It reminded me in a different way of where we are: In business school!

Economicst professor Ralf Boscheck entertained us all morning with an interesting case on the US retail market in general and Walmart in particular. I had lunch together with the rest of the start-up team and Professor Stuart Read, who will be our coach through the start-up project. We just wanted to get aligned before meeting the entrepreneurs in the afternoon.

After lunch Leadership Professor Jack Wood gave a relatively brief introduction to Transactional Analysis, which is a theory of personality and a systematic psychotherapy for personal growth. It was developed by Eric Berne in the 1960's and is probably best known for its parent-adult-child ego-state model, which basically says that a person at any point in time is in a behavioral state of either a Parent, an Adult or a child. It is my feeling that many of us in our normal day-to-day business environment would discard such theories as 'too soft' or 'too far out', but because we are where we are and because it is delivered the way it is, it all makes sense.

After a short break Entrepreneurship Professor Benoit Leleux gave presented what was expected of the start-up projects and what had been delivered in the past. The people that have been holding our seats in the past have definitely made some remarkable projects, so the bar is set very high. The tension rose in the class as the time approached 17.30 where we would be sent into the dungeons where the 15 entrepreneur teams waited for us. I think we were a bit nervous.

I will together with Brad Moldin [American], Slava Raykov [Russian], Gerald Lo [Malaysian/Chinese] and Ajay Lakhwani [Indian] be working with a software company on building their business model. We discussed with them for three hours straight and could easily have continued. Although we initially had some difficulty understanding what they actually wanted to sell we left quite excited about the project. There is still a lot we need to learn about it as the software industry is new to all of us except Gerald, but we will visit them on Saturday which will be an excellent opportunity to get another load of questions answered.