Economics Ironman

We kicked the day off with Accounting and continued with Operations with Professor Nikos Tsikriktsis. Todays subject was on Process analysis and took us around the concepts of Cycle Times, Throughput times and bottlenecks. 'You are not engineers', Nikos said, 'but you need to know what questions to ask!'

Today was crunch-time for the ICA projects that we have been working on for the past two weeks. The projects were handed in last night, and today some of the groups were picked to present for the class. We got some very interesting presentations on topics ranging from IT and Oil Explorations to manufacturing of helicopters. Another reminder of the enormous collective experience there is in the class.

We all felt relieved that the project was over and we could get back to all the other stuff we need to do. Economics Professor Ralf Boscheck let the air out of that balloon very quickly though with one sentence: 'And tomorrow we start another project.' Well, at least we felt good for about an hour or so.

Class was over at 19.15 and 15 minutes later some twenty of us found ourselves lined up for another round of fitness with Patricia. No time wasted! Neither is there during Patricia's sessions. The program is designed to take us through both cardiovascular and muscular training as well as some stretching in just one hour. There are no breaks, of course!

If last fridays full day of Economics was a marathon, then the coming days are an Ironman. From now and until saturday at lunch time we are basically only doing Economics. Macro-economics that is, starting tomorrow. Ralf Boscheck only gave us one assignment for tomorrows class: 'Get a good nights sleep!'. That's an order I can commit to!

Goodnight,

Thorsten

Sunday in the snow

It had been snowing all night. That is naturally great for skiing, but not quite as fortunate for the five players that showed up for sunday football in Parc de Milan. Although we were skating around like Bambi we played for an hour and had good fun.
Top row, left to right: Peter Grissmayr [German], Your Diary writer, Yury Vasilkov [Russian]
Bottom row, left to right: Andres Akamine [Peruvian] and his son David, Ryo Abe [Japanese].

The 'Transport & Logistics Group' spent almost the entire Sunday in the dungeons working on the ICA project on Container Shipping in South America. Here it is (left to right): Your Diary writer again, José Luiz Mesquita [Brazilian], Myriam Vacher [French] and Simon Sundboell [Danish]. We are wrapping it up as these lines are written.

And now I better get home and start reading the two cases for tomorrow.

Thorsten

An MBA Sunday

I am back in the foyer at the school again. We have just finished a good meeting in my ICA group; ICA meaning 'Industry Competition Analysis'.

I am part of the 'Transports & Logistics' group together with Alexandre Rubio [Brazilian], who has been working for the Brazilian railways, with José Luiz Mesquita [Brazilian], who has been making logistics services in the port of Santos in Brazil, with Myriam Vacher [French], who has been doing distribution and logistics services for the global paper industry and with Simon Sundboell [Danish], who - like myself - is from the container shipping industry. We agreed to scope our ICA project to the Brazilian container shipping market as this will allow us to leverage the knowledge of all five group members to the maximum extent. We also agreed on how we would move forward with the project.

I think most of us still are trying to keep up with all the good advice we got from Jogi Rippel during Wednesdays lecture on how to sustain high performance: Drink a lot of water, exercise, quit the coffee, get some sleep, do powernaps and so forth. Needless to say that this is much harder said than done. I am now on my second cup of coffee since I started writing this entry.

One of the things that Jogi also mentioned was that 'professional athletes get up the same time every day, including saturday and sunday, as the body works best with set routines'. So I set the alarm to buzz at 7.00 this morning. I heard it, turned it off and got up at 10.00 instead. I guess I still need some practise....

This morning was another round of football in Parc Milan. A group of people has gone skiing for the day, so we were only 11 players, but it was still good fun and even greater exercise. I have set myself a goal of exercising twice a week: Football on Sunday and either some running or fitness during the week. Just to keep a minimum level of physical well being. More than that is probably not realistic as things look right now.

Other than that we have the usual pile of assignments and readings to do, so I know where I will spend the rest of the day.

Thorsten