Any given Sunday

9 hours of sleep at night, football in Parc De Milan at 9am, three rounds of laundry and another two hour nap in the afternoon. Sundays are about recuperation, about repairing the damages of the past week and preparing yourself for those of the coming week. It is not just about your body, but also your apartment, your dirty laundry, your emails and your list of assignments. It is your one chance per week to bring things down from completely chaotic to just overwhelming.

You never get to the bottom of things, but you can get it to a level where you have an overview of what you need to do. That is very good for stress levels in general. This weekend I didn't get quite as far as I wanted, though. Partly because we had a full day of Career Services yesterday and partly becuase of a meeting today with the company from our Startup Project.

The startup project has reached its very final phase. We have delivered several recommendations to our startup company over the past months, which they generally have accepted and implemented. We delivered another two recommendations today that also were very well accepted. We agreed with them that it now is time to stop collecting and analyzing data and start preparing the final handover to them.

We will be delivering our handover to the company on 29 May and we will be doing our final exam presentation on 30 May. The 'jury' in that exam will be a panel of experienced Venture Capitalists that will measure us on how much Real Value we have added to company. The exam will be held in the form of a 15 minute presentation.

15 minutes to present 4 month of work is not a lot, so we better be sharp. Razor sharp! We have tons of information, findings and recommendations. The trick is to destill it into a heavy, but clear, substance that is easily digestible. We have 12 days to do that and to write the 20 page report that goes with it. It has been made very clear that consultancy-like presentations with high-level strategic recommendations will not be accepted. It needs to be down-to-earth, concrete and real value added to the company. Real World, Real Learning!


Daniel Porot held yesterdays Career Services workshop on job hunting. Daniels is a bit of a guru in his field and you clearly felt the many years of experience that were behind his recommendations. I very much liked his fast paced course with a lot very concrete and actionable advice. There were no 'it depends' answers here.
Daniel presented by making drawings on his laptop, which then were projected on the screen. I have never seen this method used before, but it was very effective. He made more than 100 drawings during the 8 hour course. Here you see he his 'Bermuda Triangle of job hunting'.


MBA student at work! I do not have the view of the lake and the Alps that some of my fellow students do, but whenever I can I move out on my balcony. That gives me some fresh air while getting some work done. A good combination. It is warm enough in Lausanne now to sit outdoor all evening and I really enjoy to just sit there and listen to the sound of the rain hitting the trees.

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