Kenya calling

It has been a couple of long days as we have been preparing the end-of-phase-2-presentation and planned the work for Phase 3. Luckily, doing these two things is very much one-and-the-same process. Quite a heavy process, though. It entails the usual iterative discussions, post-it notes and drawing upon drawing on the white boards. Over and over again, a process that is so tiring when you are in the middle of it but which is the only way to bring the real problems to the surface and consensus to the group. It is always very nerving, because you constantly are up against a hard dead line. Afterward follows the relief from the pressure and the tiredness of having been going flat out for a period. It is all covered by a feeling of either joy or frustration depending on how it went. Today it went well, the clients (which is last year's MBA class) expressed their appreciation and we feel on the right track as we move on to the next phase.

Next phase is again called Kenya, starts Monday morning in Geneva airport and lasts for twelve days. We have planned the next rounds of workshops there. The focus is this time much less on digging up information and much more on finding solutions together with the people in the organization. It is three weeks since we left Nairobi and in that time Koinonia (the organisation we work with) has been working with the frameworks we gave them. We look forward to learning what they got out of those exercises.

We chose to order the abundance of information that we had obtained during our first Kenya voyage by first writing the information on post-it notes.....

....then ordering it in complete silence....

....until we arrived at a few overall groups.

Finally, we drew up how the different groups are interrelated and we had a good picture of how to approach the issues.

Jellybrain and a jolly-good ride

'Jellybrain' one of my classmates just wrote in his Facebook status field. I know exactly what he means. A six and a half hour Finance Exam marathon just gets the best of you. Particularly when you already have done twelve hours of exams in the preceding two days plus whatever studying you could fit in. Just to add insult to injury there was 50 pages of pre-reading for tomorrows Strategy exam waiting in our mail boxes. At least it will be the last one.

Already yesterday I had had it with exams, so I decided - against all logic - to take my motorbike out for spin. It had been more than a month and half since I last took it out, so I was surprised when it started. Inspired by Kelley's Diary entry on Monday I went out East along the lake, past the Lavaux vineyards, through Vevey and Montreux before stopping for an Ice Cream in Villeneuve.

While eating my ice cream I decided to head up into the nearest mountain, which happened to be this one. There is nothing better than motorbiking in the mountains. You just feel that you are flying up the small winding roads. Before long I caught myself humming the song 'Country road, take me home, to the place...'. I think you know which one I talking about. It is an old classic that both John Denver and Olivia Newton-John have had success with.


As I went up the road became smaller and steeper and the temperature quickly dropped. I did not expect to meet anyone up there, but to my surprise there was a typical small Swiss Inn at the top. This is the view from their terrasse. I am definitely going there again, even if only for an ice cream! The picture is taken with my phone so it does not do the view justice, but you can sense the curvature of the lake. Lausanne is in the right-hand side of the picture although you cannot see it.


Coming from little 'flat' Danmark I cannot help being amazed how people like the Swiss adjust to living in such a vertical world where everything is either up or down. I passed this little mountain railway station next to a tunnel through a cliff under a house! All of it of course at a significant incline!

It was a great and really reenergizing ride albeit it only lasted a few hours. I have promised myself to do it again soon. Then again, that is what I have been doing for the past three months......


Thorsten


Hanging out on the lawn during yesterdays lunch break between the Marketing and Global Political Economy exams.

Henry Low [Singapore] and Rasmus Figenschou [Norway] talking while Lisa Bridgett is watching from the back.

Exam preparation!
Fadi Sbaiti [Lebanon/US], Wouter Naessens [Belgium] and Jodie Roussel [US].

Brad Moldin [US] and Oliver Freiland [Germany] enjoying a cup of coffee before diving into the Finance exam.

The Finance exam was a killer. Here we are around four hours into it.



The reward was a cheeseburger at the harbour front.
On the left: Olivia Assereto [Italy], Marco Simons [The Netherlands] and Carsten Bremer [Germany].
On the right: Ope Adejoro [Nigeria], Yury Vasilkov [Russia], Valeria Pavlyukovskaya [Russia] and Thorsten Boeck [Denmark].

thorstenboeck.dk!

WWW.THORSTENBOECK.DK

Yes, I now have my own website! Inspired my sister Helene I bought thorstenboeck.dk. Had I known it would be this easy I would have done it a long time ago. You just go to one.com or a similar site and buy your domain for USD 15. Then you connect it to the blog which is still hosted at blogger.com. That's it! No html code or anything!

The same .COM site was also available, but although it was tempting (and cheaper) to go with that one I decided to stay loyal to my Danish heritage and go with the .DK site.

NOTIFICATION BY EMAIL

It does seem that the blogger software allows readers to sign up to get an email whenever there is news. You can sign up for an RSS feed, but I think that is overkill for most of the potential readers. To overcome this I will send out a short email notification manually. If you want to get on the mailing list then send me a mail on thorsten@boeck.dk.

THE FIRST MONTH OF THE NEW LIFE

Today it is exactly one month since I packed my things at work and went into the (voluntary) unemployed life. And what a month it has been! Just as busy as before, but with different things!  I have to be honest, though, and say that I haven't been very efficient or disciplined by my normal standards. I haven't gotten started on the stack of books we got from the school or on applying for scholarships. Instead I have gotten tons of other (less serious) things done that I have wanted to do for months or years: I have learned how to blog, I've gotten a website, gotten my dad an iPhone, started cooking a bit again, changed bank, rented my apartment out, started running a bit again and most of all I have seen a lot more friends and family than the last year. Next project is to learn how to get my thousands of photos organized and uploaded to the web, so they actually bring some value.

I have also worked quite a bit on the practical aspects of moving to Switzerland: Getting flight tickets, insurance, phone, internet, moving, etc set up. Considering how much time it has taken me - moving alone within the same time zone to an already furnished apartment - I can only admire those of my future fellow students that move their entire families from the other side of the planet. How do they do it?

CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR

Susana and I will be celebrating Christmas with my family in Denmark on the 24th. The next morning at 6.00 we will fly to Madrid to take part in the Spanish christmas celebrations. The 29th I will go to Lausanne to meet up with my Indonesian friends Adi, Binky and Anya who will be visiting me over the New Year. We will all four be attending New Year party in Lausanne together with 50 other IMD student and partners. Susana will come to Lausanne on the 1st or 2nd of January, just in time to join the pre-school skiing trip on the 3rd and 4th. On the 5th and 6th we must attend information sessions on campus and on the 7th at 10:30 the school year officially kicks off! It will be an intense couple of weeks. But probably nothing compared to the year that follows!

You have been blogged!!

Hi Folks, Friends and Family!

I now have a blog! How about that?

WHY A BLOG?
So what happened? Did he grow soft in his old days? The answer to that is probably 'Yes'.
When I went to Indonesia back in 2003 I pretty much disappeared from the face of the planet from one day to the other and I resurfaced again two years later just as abruptly. I have been spending the last few months thinking about how I ensure that doesn't happen again when I move to Switzerland in a couple of months. I have in the past enjoyed following the life of friends overseas by reading mass mails and seeing the pictures they post. Once they returned home it felt like I had been there all the time, so we could just continue where we left off without having to catch up on a lot things first. By doing it in a blog the readers have the added benefit of deciding themselves whether they want to receive the news or not.

WHY IN ENGLISH?
Well, over time I have made friends with people from corners of the world where the Danish language is hard to distinguish from the gurgling of a sore throat. It is my hope that some of these friends also are interested in reading along. And as everybody speaks English, English it is!

HOW OFTEN?
That depends on two factors:
- Whether there is anything to write about?
- Whether there is time to write it?
In the next couple of months the former will likely be the restricting factor, but once in Lausanne the latter will without a doubt be setting the pace. Nevertheless, a commitment is required and I will therefore set the target at 1-2 relatively short entries per week.

SO WHAT IS IT THAT IS HAPPENING NEXT YEAR?
I am moving to Lausanne in Switzerland for a year to attend a 1-year MBA program at IMD. The program starts in January, ends in December and has a 3-week summer break in July. I will come back to the details of the program in a later entry.

WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW?
In short I stopped working two weeks ago and am now preparing for the year ahead. Much more about that later. I expect to move to Lausanne between Christmas and New Year.