February at IMD

My Singaporean classmate Henry has created another great movie about the IMD life.

Motor show and movie night

'Accounting' is the word that is on everybody's lips these days. It is the one subject that almost everybody seems to struggle with and the tension is increasing as the Accounting Exam on 21 March comes closer. A group of people, including myself and my girlfriend who was visiting for the weekend, nevertheless took the morning train to the Geneva Motor Show. Since I was a kid I have read hundreds of magazines and newspapers with pictures of the new car models revealed on the big shows in Detroit, Tokyo, Frankfurt and Geneva. Now that I am living right next to one of them, I am for sure not going to miss the opportunity.

The Hummer was there and so was Rolls-Royce, but it was clear that the two main themes on the car makers agenda these days are 'global warming' and 'financial crisis'. Most of the major brands were showing off their latest hybrid and bio-fuel models. It was interesting to note how all these cars were painted white. It is undoubtedly supposed to make them appear 'clean' and 'scientifically advanced'. It was also interesting to note that the old proxy for fuel efficiency 'kilometer per liter' or 'miles per gallon' has disappeared. Now we are talking about 'Grams of CO2 per kilometer'. One cannot help making a connection to the Economics assignment on climate change that we finished just two days ago.

Rasmus Figenschou [Norwegian] has established a movie club that will show a movie each sunday evening in the auditorium. Today was the first show and the movie was '12 Angry Men', an old black-and-white Henry Fonda movie. The movie is also homework for the next 'Leading People for Performance' class and is about a jury of 12 men that must reach a verdict on a homicide case. As the movie starts 11 men find the defendant guilty and one man, Henry Fonda of course, finds him 'not guilty'. It only adds to the tension that they are locked into a room on a warm and humid evening. From there we follow their discussion on how they reach their verdict. A couple of months ago I wouldn't have thought a lot of this movie, but now it is impossible not to analyze and interpret all the things going on between these men, both on the surface and below. I think most of us found ourselves drawing parallels to our study groups.

Cloud #9

From Chexbres - IMD Outdoor exercises

It didn't take long before my new skills came in handy. Already on the first day of the program we were split into studygroups of roughly 8 people. I ended up in group 9, which (from top left) consisted of
Fadi from Lebanon/USA, Kornelius from Germany, Liesbeth from The Netherlands, myself, Juan from Colombia, Eric from Thailand, Misayo from Japan and Eva from Israel

A couple of days later we were given 45 minutes to come up with a name for the group and produce a small video advertisement for the group. We named our group 'Cloud #9'. The 'Cloud' came from the overwhelming impressions that had hit us the first days at IMD that we could not clearly see through. #9 came from the fact that we were group number nine. It took us 35 minutes to agree to that, so we made the movie in 10 minutes.

The MBA Archway

The very first task we were given when the MBA program started on 7 January was to build an archway over the door leading into the auditorium where we have all our classes. We were 90 people and had 90 minutes to do it, so you can imagine how chaotic it all seemed when everybody jumped into action at once. I have to say that I was very impressed with the result. I had never thought it would be possible to be both creative and get everything planned, coordinated and constructed between so many people in so little time. It was amazing to see the archway come together bit by bit. You could almost see it grow.

I was carrying my camera, so I took a lot of pictures and some video clips. I have over the past couple of months worked on getting my photos organized and learning how to share the photos, include them in blogs, make webalbums and so forth. Doing this had made me curious about whether I could make a small movie also. Now that I had both the photos and the video clips from the building of the archway I decided to give it a try. You can see the result below. Not bad for a beginner if you ask me. It is incredibly easy to do this on the iMovie program that comes with a Macintosh computer. The program imports all the photos and videos automatically. You then just cut it the way you want it, drag-and-drop the music and the text into place and you've got yourself a movie.


Tip: Click in the lower right corner of the video if you want to see it in full screen.