Seeing CERN

Yesterday we had the opportunity to visit one of the places that I really have wanted to see eversince we arrived to this part of Switzerland a year ago. We went to the European Center for Nuclear Research or CERN as it normally is called. A 27km circular particle accelerator 100m under the ground in the south western tip of Switzerland and eastern France. In the accelerator - also called the Large Hydron Collidor or LHC - two beams of protons are accelerated to speeds close to the speed of light in opposite directions and are then brought to collisions. The aim is to recreate the conditions that existed when the universe was created with the big bang billions of years ago. Nothing less. The aim is to understand what matter (and anti-matter) is made of. More specifically they are looking for the Higgs boson, which the Standard Model claims exist, but which has never been observed.

Enormous amounts of information is created at the collision, more than it is physically possible to store. CERN is therefore always at the forefront at information technology. That also goes for sharing of the information that is created. Due to the nature of the organization, that consists of thousands of scientists in universities all over the planet it was necessary to create an efficient way of distributing the information efficiently. CERN therefore became the birthplace of the worldwide web.

The visit was arranged by Professor Donald Marchand who has been studying the collaborative decision processes in CERN the last two years and by our own classmate Paolo Guglielmini [Italy], who worked in CERN before joining IMD. It was fascinating to hear both their perspectives!

CERN gathers the best brains from around the world and has several Nobel price winners in its history books. You can clearly feel how passionate the people are at being at the frontier of what mankind knows. They are out there where the building blocks of life, parallel universes and unknown dimensions are part of the everyday discussion.

As Donald said at one point: "These people are every day at the edge of what humans cans understand". One of my good classmates added "and he is not even talking about group dynamics" (referring to our leadership sessions with Professor Jack Wood).

A Spanish scientist explained how a typical experiment typically runs over 10 hours in what to us seemed like a pretty tedious and boring process, but when Fadi Sbaiti asked him: 'So where is the excitement?' he answered with a big smile 'What do you mean?'. How could we not be excited about this? We later learned that they actually had set a new world record that day!

The state-of-the-art control room of ATLAS, the newest of the four detectors along the LHC. ATLAS detects the particles that are created at the collisions of the protons.

Ready for a 3D movie!

Part of the LHC control room.

Paolo Guglielmini telling about how fascinating it was to work at CERN.

A quick jump back to IMD. I have been waiting anxiously for months to take this picture. Juan Benitez (far left) is out of a family with a very special set of names. Juan's full name is Juan Manuel Benitez. Juan's father (far right) is also Juan Manuel Benitez. Juan's brother (nr. 2 from the left) is Juan Nicolas Benitez and there is yet another brother (not here) named Juan Camilo Benitez, so all in all, a family with four Juan Benitez. Amazing, isn't it?
Lately, yet another brother has sneaked into the family. Our classmate Gerrit from Germany (nr. 2 from the right) visited Juan's family last week in Colombia (see below picture) and immediately felt at home. We therefore now call him Juan Gerrit Benitez! :-)

Gerrit with the rest of the Benitez family in Colombia last week.

Thorsten

Football finale

I had a Friday that was quite unusual. I got up at 3.30 in the morning to get on a 4.20 train to Geneva in order to reach the 6.30 EasyJet flight to Brussels. As I was sitting there waiting at the gate, feeling sorry for myself for being awake as such inhuman hours Fill Niu [China] from the class walked in. He had been up at the same time, been on the same train and was going on the same flight. He looked as fresh as he always does, so there went my excuse for pitying myself.

We slept all the way to Brussels and a little before 8, the time we normally walk into the classroom, we were walking out of Brussels Airport. Fill was picked up by the company he was visiting and I took the train to Antwerp, where I had two meetings. Mid afternoon, I got on the train to Rotterdam for another meeting in a café right next to the Rotterdam train station. Two hours later I was back in the train, now heading towards Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. Everything was going according to whatever little plans I had made......until a passenger on the train got sick and had to be picked up by an ambulance. That took 30 minutes and now time suddenly was in short supply! I ran through the airport and made it to the gate just as they started to board. Back to Geneva, on the train back to Lausanne and at 00.30 I was finally home again. A nice 21 hour work day, good meetings and I avoided staying overnight. It is great to have these high-pace high-energy days from time to time..... as long as you get your rest in between.

Saturday and Sunday have been passing at a much lower pace. More and more signs of the closing of our MBA experience is starting to appear. One of them is the arrival of parents, brothers and sisters that are coming in for the graduation on 8. December.

Today was the last round of football in Parc de Milan. Our Sunday morning football is one of the things that I will miss the most. There were weeks - particularly during the building blocks - where is was the only thing that kept me going, the only short-term reward I had in sight to get through the week.

There was a great show of people today, so we were playing 11-on-11 or something like that. After the game our fearless and tireless football captain of the year, Joost Mackor, had invited us all out for a beer. The Sportsbar was closed, so we ended up at the White Horse, having beers and burgers. The team presented Joost with a picture of the silver-medal-winning MBAT team duly signed by the team members. Both on and off the track Joost has been the driving force behind the team. Thanks Joost, from all of us!!

Thorsten

We had a great game today!


Today's orange team. It is Yury's dad in the back with Yury's daughter.


Sometimes you can shake a camera so much that the picture actually becomes good. I was just about to delete this picture when it occurred to me that it somehow pictures a memory. The blurred but good memory that our Parc-de-Milan days eventually will become.

Of course this diary entry must finish with the team's grand achievement.
The MBAT 2009 Silver medal, Paris 9 May 2009.

Time to catch up

I have just come back from Genova. As a customer with Trenitalia today, I was very positively surprised. Instead of being stuffed into one of the usual 30-old year noisy cars, they deployed a brand new, silent train with seats and entertainment systems that looked like they were stolen from an airplane. Nice! I spend the time to catch up with almost three weeks of unanswered emails. Needless to say that I only got half way through it.

It was great to spend two days with my girlfriend and my parents. We took it easy and did not anything at all. I really enjoyed it and hated having to leave again. I am so tired of constantly being on the move, never to sleep in the same bed for more than a couple of days at the time. While I know I will miss IMD when I am no longer here, then I also look forward to getting back to a somewhat normal life, a life where they days have some kind of rhythm and routine. Not too much, of course, but enough to feel that you actually have a home.

The first signs of things coming to an end are becoming obvious too obvious to be ignored. This weekend I moved my motorbike to Genova with the intention of not bringing it back, committees for the yearbook and graduation have been established and on Tuesday we have a 'move-out' session with the MBA Office on how we exit the country again. Exit?!? How can that be? We have barely started yet!

For the next day and half we will be back in class again for the first time since the building blocks ended. I really look forward to that, it is like the family coming together again, even if it is just for a little while. There are too many people that I haven't seen for the past two months!

Business with style and a smile

It has been another change of scenery. Not as drastic as the one from Nairobi to Hong Kong, but still I cannot help noticing the differences. I am now in Singapore, sitting with a glass of red wine in my friend Nicolaj's apartment overlooking Robertson Quay from the 13th floor. We are still within the old English empire so the electrical plugs are still the sames as in Kenya and Hong Kong and they also drive in the wrong (left) side of the road.

Both Hong Kong and Singapore are to Asia what Switzerland is to Europe. They make a big part of their living functioning as a regional hubs and tax refuges for the big international corporations. All three of them administrate an amazing amount of wealth despite the fact that they produce few or no physical goods. But they do i very differently and I particularly like the way the Singaporeans do it. Just like in Hong Kong and Switzerland everything is very well organized. Public transportation (for some reason always used as a measure for public administration of countries) works like clockwork and you are very safe whereever you go. There is more space in Singapore, so the city is not as build up and congested as Hong Kong, but on the other hand it does not having the enormous natural beauty of Switzerland.

What I like about the Singaporeans is that they do it with style and with a smile. They take their time to enjoy what they do. It is not a matter of just delivering a service in the most effective what, but it is also about how you do it. Take the taxi drivers for example. In Hong Kong they will take you from A to B in the fastest, shortest and most effective way without cheating you. You will be thrown around on the backseat as they take the turn in order to reach this goal.

The taxi drivers in Singapore will also go the shortest way without ever cheating you (sometimes it is even hard to get them to accept the tip), but they will do it with a big smile, cracking jokes and telling you about the things they think you should see in their beloved city. They are always in a good mood and if everything else fails you can always talk Premier League football with them. One of them even showed me his ManU tattoo on his shoulder one time. The taxi drivers are a good representation of business in Singapore. It is all about business, don't get that wrong, but it is the way it is done that I find appealing. Much more than in Hong Kong and Switzerland.

Dennis, another old friend of mine, is also here, so the talk goes on the old days and what has happened since we met last. I was out here for the Formula 1 last year, the first F1 for both me and Singapore. The city is now preparing for its second race which will be held this coming week. Unfortunately I will be gone by then, but at least I had the experience already. Another weird thing about being here is that it feels like I was here yesterday. I can remember everything we did and all the details. I just cannot get it to fit in my brain that it was a year ago. Another one of those scary reminders of how time flies.

We are heading to Boat Quay for Indian food, then to Robertson walk to catch some other friends that are there for tonight's Premier League game.

The World Capital of Business

What a week this has been? I have never had one like it, that is for sure!

It started with the networking meeting Monday and Tuesday on the Kowloon side of the city. Lots and lots of information and input from the more than 50 people (and potential customers) from all over the world. Tuesday evening I moved to a cheaper hotel on Hong Kong Island. A 4-star hotel in central Hong Kong for what equals USD 40 per night. Sometimes you are just lucky!

Since then I have basically just been doing one thing. Meeting people! One after the other, non-stop. Meetings that have been set up through IMD classmates, old colleagues, friends, connections on www.linkedin.com or through people from the network meeting. A good share of the people I have met have been Danes. I guess like most other nationalities we stick together and help each other whenever we can.


When I first got to Hong Kong I felt that everything was so rushed, too much efficiency to really be enjoyable. Somehow this efficiency absorbs you and you become part of it. You are grabbed by the flow and fall into the rhythm of the city. I have never done so many meetings in such a short period of time as here. Everything is so close, you never spend more than 15 minutes going anywhere, very often it is just around the corner. At the same time everything is so focused on business that you can set up a meeting in a matter of hours. I have met people here who makes their living out of ‘just’ knowing and connecting people. Like Nokia! One meeting constantly leads to the next, “I have this guy you need to meet” people say all the time. It is like you find a little piece of rope in the sand, but as you start pulling it becomes longer and longer and eventually turns into a net. As you try to reel it in it just gets bigger and bigger. I have discovered an amazing amount of things the last week – a whole new world, actually - and still I suspect that I have only seen a fraction.

Today I took the one-hour train ride to the Chinese border, got a visa and then ventured into Shenzhen, a city that in 20 years has transformed itself from a sleepy fishing village to a fifteen million people production facility! I had set up two meetings in Shenzhen, one with a local company and one with an multinational company with an office there. Of course I wanted to get the information from the people that I met, but most of all I wanted to get a feel for China. I have heard so much about this place the past ten years, but I had never been there. There is only one way of experiencing these things and that is by going to see for yourself. As a foreigner in China you are a completely blind and deaf. You cannot understanding anything people say and you cannot read the sings. Neither can they understand you. You just hand over a note or a business card to the taxi driver with the address written in Chinese and then hope that he takes you to the right place. Today he did.

Tonight we went for a few drinks with an amazing 25th floor view of the Hong Kong skyline. It beats Manhattan by miles. It is just such much wider, bigger, more colourful and spectacular.

The hotel is fully booked tomorrow, so in a few hours I need to pack my things again and go to my friend Morten’s place, where I will spend the last night. We are heading out on an all-day boat trip tomorrow arranged by the Swedish community here. The smart thing would be to stay back, sleep and get some work done, but I don’t want to miss this chance. Tomorrow night there are new parties waiting and Sunday morning I head off to Singapore. I might actually have another very early morning meeting on the way to the airport, so is the Hong Kong way! And in Singapore there is another 5 meetings lined up so far with more on the way.

I guess I have said before. The second half of the year is no less intense than the first, it is just much more fun because you are doing it to yourself. It is still only a few hours of sleep per night, but it is OK because you are in charge yourself. It is happening because you cannot stop chasing opportunities. It is driven by excitement, not by force or fear! I love it!


LIVING IN LAYERS

You are not in doubt that Hong Kong always has been in lack of space. Everything is in layers. The places where people live...

… and where they work.

Even the trams….

the busses….


and the boats are in layers!

Business, business, business!!



Sunset over Hong Kong Island seen from the Kowloon side…


and a part of the Hong Kong skyline just as the lights start to come on.

At the Bruce Lee platter on the ‘Walks of fame’.

In Shenzhen. Five years ago this area was a swamp!