Accounting, my old friend

There is nothing like having an old friend over for coffee. Today I am with Accounting, my old acquaintance from Building Block 1. We are discussing the same things that we talked about back in March, cash flow statements, ratio analysis and a little bit of Balance sheets. A few new topics - management accounting and relevant cost - have also sneaked into our conversation.

Yes, the exams are here. Five of them within the next four days to be exact. We kick off with a double tomorrow, Accounting in the morning and Global Political Economy in the afternoon, four hours of each. Then it is Marketing, Finance and Strategy over the following days. That does not leave time for in-depth preparation of all of them, so it is all about focusing your resources on the things that are right for you!

Finance is the big one for me this time. The biggest chunk is about assessing the financial health and the value of a company. Not really rocket science, but just an awful amount of details to understand and memorize.

I have said it before and I will happily say it gain: The exam period is a piece of cake compared to an ordinary week at IMD. Yes, the pressure is still there and so are the many hours with your head in the books or in your laptop. But you have much more control of your time as you don't have to coordinate your work across three groups and balance a million other things at the same time. I have slept a lot since Friday and I am getting some real quality reading done now that my head is not pounding from lack of sleep.

I have had a couple of other things to take care of as well, though. I have spent part of today finishing the end-of-course innovation paper, which is due tomorrow and I had lunch at the school with the other Scandinavians. We are arranging a mid-summer party on the last day before the class goes on summer vacation in a little more than two weeks. In the Scandinavian countries mid-summer calls for a bonfire. Whether we ever will get that through the Swiss authorities remains to be seen, but we will definitely give it a try!

Thorsten


The campus is so tranquil these days. People are just hanging around during the lunch break enjoying their Mövenpick ice cream or a coffee from the café.


Even the MBA students crawl out of their dark dungeons during lunch time to enjoy a few energizing rays of sunlight. From left it is: Stefano Cazzulani [Italy], Oliver Freiland [Germany], Seif Shieshakly [Saudi Arabia / Germany], Sebastien Guery [France], Wouter Naessens [Belgium] and Johan Jansen-Storback [Sweden/Finland].

The Dream Bag Marketing campaign - 3 videos

Here are the three videos we used in our marketing campaign for bag in the innovation challenge. Enjoy!


The Dream Bag - Part 1



The Dream Bag - Part 2


The Dream Bag - Part 3

Staying afloat

I have an old mantra that says that 'stress doesn't come from too much work; it comes from loosing the overview'. That mantra is being severely tested these days. I have spent the entire evening skimming and sorting the seamless stream of emails and papers that we receive on graded assignments, new assignments, upcoming tests, industry presentations, invitations to group work, input on group work from other team members and so forth. The problem is that you spend so much time trying to figure all this out and getting it filed and scheduled that you don't have time to do the actual work. I still believe it is the right approach, so I will stick with it for now, but I might be proven wrong. Over the next 10 days we have five assignments and two tests, so I better get to work and not just sit and plan everything!

Today was one of those days with four different and short classes instead of the usual two. That always means a lot more preparation as the amount of work for each class is independent of the length of the class. We kicked the day off with Martin Koschat and a case study on how companies can use data bases to track customer behavior and thereby approach the customer in the most effective way. There is definitely a lot more going on behind the scenes than you realize as an average customer.

Martha Maznevski followed up on the personality tests we did last week with a session on the importance of matching personality and job and what you can do - or cannot do - when they don't match. The subsequent accounting class with Stewart Hamilton was spent scrutinizing Carlsberg's annual report for 2007. For a non-accounting person like myself it takes quite a bit of energy to get a meaning out of all the different ratios and abbreviations that the accounting world is so full of. Last, but not least, Phil Rosenzweig had the ungrateful task of taking us through the afternoon shift. He did a brave attempt, but by the end of day like this the fatigue has taken control and the energy levels are just close to non-existing.

Busy days

Katty Ooms Suter and the rest of the Career services office kicked off the process of writing our CVs today. The sessions we have had with Career Services over the past couple of weeks have helped us define our individual Interests, Skills, Style, Values as well as the career destination we dream about. Now it is time to compress all of that into the bullets that will get us there. First step is to define our individual 'value proposition'. As simple as it may sound, it is not easy to compress everything about yourself into 3-4 lines. It forces you to really get to the essence of who you are, what you want and who you want to address. I will undoubtedly be writing and rewriting that statement many times over the next weeks. It is great to get started, though. It helps you clear your head.

The marketing cases on Zara, Easy-Jet and Swatch that we have done over the past two weeks have all been relatively simple as the subjects were clear and the companies easy to relate to. Today Marketing Professor Martin Koschat threw a case on Colgate-Palmolive at us and we quickly found ourselves struggling to develop a marketing plan for the global tooth brush market. Not a market we really knew anything about despite we all are consumers in it. I guess there is more to marketing than first anticipated....

I know 90 people in Lausanne that have a very busy weekend ahead of them. Most of the start-up teams are visiting their startup-companies tomorrow. Many students have lined up the first interviews with the therapists that are part of the Personal Development Initiative. I have three interviews lined up saturday afternoon myself. On the basis of these relatively short interviews each of us will choose the one therapist that we will work with for the rest of the year. On Sunday afternoon many of us will attend the Responsible Leadership Seminar that is held on campus. And in between all that we will find time to do the Leadership paper that is due monday morning. That's MBA life!

And now I am off to the train station to pick up my girlfriend. She is visiting for the weekend and I am already late.

Thorsten