Just another day in the office.....

Just another day in the office, at least in terms of length and intensity, but as usual a standard day at IMD has some new elements to it. Today that element was the first 'real' meeting in our ICP team. Yes, we have had other meetings already and we have met with the client and with our coach, but this was the first time that it was just the five us 'locked up' in the dungeons with a specific deliverable.

Today's deliverable was a Letter of Agreement outlining and aligning the expectations for the project for both the client and the ICP team. Moreover, we had to come up with a work plan for the first phase of the project. The project is split in four phases, where phase 1 is an industry analysis. But how do you do an industry analysis for an organization who's purpose it is to help the children of the streets of Nairobi? What does the industry produce? Who are the competitors and the customers? And the key success factors? It became obvious that we will need to tweek and turn the framework we have been taught to get useful results, but we are not in doubt that the framework will work. It is just a matter of how we do the tweaking.

My group has spent the last two evenings in the dungeons, where we have been working on the last group assignment for Finance. We are conducting a thorough analysis of the financial health and estimated value of the two food industry giants Danone and Nestlé. The assignment has been heavily driven by our CFO Alex Rubio [Brazil] and by Sato Konagai [Japan], a.k.a. Mr. Framework. The rest of us have been trying to keep up, add value to the best of our ability and learn as much as possible in the process. The assignment proved to be an excellent exam preparation for most of us. Accounting was the heavy exam at the mid-term exams in March. This time it will be Finance I will have to focus on!

The Finance exam was due at midnight and at 23:57 Alex submitted it by email. At 00:01 Finance Professor Jim Ellert replied and thanked us for a just-in-time delivery. No time wasted around here!

Thorsten
















Sato Konagai and Simon Brunner, a.k.a the Dalton brothers. It remains unknown whether this was a pure coincidence or they were trying to send a message! :-)

From Shrek to Cinderella

I just sent in my second leadership paper. 4936 words on the roles that I either take or that I am given in different groups and in different settings. Sounds weird? It did to me as well when we went through the first leadership classes back in January. Transactional analysis, child-parents relationships, group dynamics and power plays. I was skeptical. Were we not over-analyzing things?

Today we use all of this terminology without thinking about it. In describing the roles I have heard about my classmates using such colorful characters as Shrek, Cinderella, Scarlet O'Hara, Curious George and Gandhi. At times it almost becomes philosophical. Just listen to this quote from my paper:

'The tricky thing is that you think that people think in a certain way and therefore you start acting as if they think the way you think they think!'

Did you get that? :-) I hope the person reading my paper does as well.

And now I better get a couple of hours of sleep before we head into the last week of classes before the final exams. I can't believe we are this far already.

'Godnat og sov godt!' as we say in Denmark.

Start-up shut-down

'So you are giving the software away for free and you want to build a business doing that?'. We were somewhat sceptical when we meet the people from Bacula Systems for the first time on 21 January. There we were, six guys from all over the world who had been working with chemicals, automobiles, fashion clothing, banking and shipping. And now we were asked to help a company doing open source backup software build a business! We barely knew what software was about, not to mention open source. Only Gerald Lo [Malaysia] is from the IT industry, so we had to rely heavily on his technical expertise in the beginning.

Today we gave our final presentation to Bacula wrapping up the past four months of work by summarising the findings and recommendations we have made along the way. There were no surprises for them today, as we have been working with them all the way. Bacula was represented by CEO Jack Griffin and by Kern Sibbald, who has programmed the Bacula software. Both gentlemen have a long career in the IT industry. They were very satisfied with the cooperation we have had and said that they will be making signficant changes to their business model and target customers on the basis of our findings. That is the kind of feedback that is great to receive. Then it has all been worth it!

Along the way we have had to learn the basic jargon of the industry and understand a very complex and advanced product well enough to be able to define how it is different from its main competitors. We have learned the basic drivers of the open source community and the dilemmas that a company operating in this sphere faces. We have spoken to potential customers and partners and have analyzed the ins and outs of the competitors. The process has taken us through countless iterations and involved hours and hours of discussions, but eventually we were able to come to an agreement both among ourselves and with Bacula on how the business should move forward.

Tomorrow at 9:50 we start the grand finale. We will be presenting to a panel of Venture Capitalists, who all have seen thousands of business plans and who are renowned for their ability to spot weaknesses a mile away. We have practised the presentation over and over again. I am certain that Ajay and Cedric - who will be presenting - are rehearsing the lines in their sleep right now. Fifteen minutes to explain four months of work is not a lot. We need to be sharp! Really, really sharp!



4 February 2009. Backup for dummies. This is where it all began. Bacula CEO Jack Griffin was very patient and took the time to teach us the basic technicalities.



7 February - Information overload! Trying to make sense of it all. It just seemed insurmountable at the time.



4 March - Bacula boys at work in the Maersk building, where we spent a lot of time together. From left it is Gerald Lo [Malaysia], Ajay Lakhwani [India], Brad Moldin [USA], Slava Raykov [Russia] and Cedric Jusseaume [France].



Mid March - Finally some kind of framework starts taking shape.



Late May - Sharpening the final presentation!

Koinonia

Ups, it is the middle of the night and I just woke up on the couch. I did not intend to take that 3 hour 'nap'. The upside is that I feel more fresh now than when I came home a few hours ago.

No two days are the same at IMD, but today was more different than most! Like many other teams we met we the client for our International Consulting Project (ICP). Whereas the majority of the 18 ICP clients are large corporations our team will be working with Koinonia, a relatively small NGO that amongst others runs a number of homes for street children in Nairobi, Kenya.

In the MBA Diary on 21 November 2008 Asier Sinde [Basque] from last year's class was quoted for saying:
"Our visit to Kenya was an eye opening experience that has had a strong impact not only on our year at IMD but also on our individual lives. As a result, we have recently started an initiative to create a fund that will aim at rehabilitating deprived and abused children from the streets and sponsoring them into high school and college in Kenya. This initiative will be implemented through Koinonia, a local NGO which some of us met in Kenya and that is already operating in Nairobi."

The 2008 class decided to help Koinonia by funding a 2009 ICP project for them and today they took another step in fulfilling this promise as they came to hand over the torch to the 2009 class. We are both humbled and honored to be given this task and opportunity and we look forward to getting started. It will be our largest opportunity to date to make a difference in a lot of people's lives.

The 2008's were represented by Daniel Brosseau, Max Sorokin and Svetlana Korshunova. It was obvious from the stories they told that last year's discovery trip to Kenya had made a huge impression on the class collectively. Daniel has just returned from a six week trip to Kenya, where he has been working withKoinonia on preparing our ICP project. He has obviously collected A LOT of information where there was little information to get. This will undoubtedly prove invaluable to get us off to a running start.

The afternoon was a huge information download from Daniel, Max and Svetlana. I think this was what wore me out so badly. The last week have been full of thoughts about our final startup presentations and classes on Financial Derivatives, so it is quite a switch to suddenly start thinking about improving life in the slums of East Africa.

The birds have started singing outside. I think they are telling me to go to bed!



Hand-over from the 2008 class to the 2009 class!
From left: Stefano Giussani [Italian], Max Sorokin [Russian - 2008 class], Daniel Brosseau [Canada - 2008 class], Svetlana Korshunova [Russia - 2008 class], Thorsten Boeck [Denmark], Gerald Lo [Malaysia], Ruslana Zbagerska [Canada/Ukraine], Eva Hubsman [Israel/Romania].

Was it just a simulation?

The integrative exercise continued today. Third and last day. As Kristin mentioned yesterday we are competing in a virtual universe, where each group represents a company that is competing in the same market. Each company must set and execute a strategy for their product. This means deciding how to position the product in terms of price, quality, advertising and distribution? We need to plan the production, establish new production lines, invest in new technology as well as pay interest, taxes and dividends. All of it is managed on a piece of software that simulates consumer behavior and calculates your profit and loss statement, your balance sheets and not least your CASH! Although the different groups went very different ways in the market we all experienced the lack of cash in the early rounds. In the words of Accounting Professor Stewart Hamilton 'Profit is an opinion, cash is an opinion!'.

The game was very realistic and we had plenty of discussion on the many, many trade-offs that a company faces. In the words of Alex Rubio [Brazil]: 'I used to do this and this is exactly what it is like. The CFO is fighting to keep the company liquid while the marketing manager insists on investing in the brand'. Alex used to be a CFO and he quickly took on the same role in the group, constantly reminding us of our cash restrictions when we wanted to invest in advertising, production, innovation and so forth. A great and intense learning experience!

I am one of seven people hosting a party tonight to celebrate the May birthdays in the class. The party is coordinated by Ruslana Zbagerska [Canada/Ukrain] and will be held a Jodie Roussel's [American] apartment as she has a balcony big enough for all of us. The weather is perfect so I am sure we will have a great night. I have two friends from Denmark visiting at the moment and Jodie's sister is staying with her. The three of them have 'volunteered' to go shopping for us and to prepare for the party in general. So let this be a warning for you if you plan to visit an MBA student in the near future: Expect to be put to work!



It is midnight last night and group 10 is discussing the last details of the industry analysis that were presented this morning.



The case for Wednesday's marketing class was about the Japanese beer industry. The case was an example of how a so-called mature industry suddrenly can start changing dramatically. The class was the last marketing class and after the class Marketing Professor Dominique Turpin had arranged for refreshments, which of course was ........ Japanese beer!

Early birds

I feel more tired today than I normally do at this hour and I just remembered why. This morning I actually managed to get up an hour earlier than normal in order to get some reading done. I was so tired last night at midnight that it did not make sense to work anymore, so I took the chance and went to bed with the aim of getting up early. That is indeed a chance when you are me because it almost always backfires, meaning that I do not manage to get up earlier after all. I am one of those kind of people that needs the threat of being late for something in order to get out of bed, but then it also works quite well!

The only bad thing about getting up earlier is that you do not gain any time as such. You just get tired an hour earlier than usual. And once it starts it bites its own tale, so I am probably better off going to bed now and getting up even earlier tomorrow.

Thorsten



After class today we met in our startup team to start preparing the presentation for the exam on 30 May. Here it is Cedric Jusseaume [France] (writing) and Gerald Lo [Malaysia] adjusting some of the slides. We have lots and lots of information. The trick is to get it all into 7-8 slides that can be communicated clearly in 15 minutes.



We played a friendly football match tonight against a company in the area. Not because we really have time, but because we took the time. Parc de Milan is an oasis in the middle of the city. I can't wait to be able to enjoy it properly on a day where I have time to spare.

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.