Back to work!

I just got back to Lausanne a couple of hours ago. My suitcase was packed with liver pate and marinated herring, the good ol' traditional Danish dishes that any good Dane craves for when abroad. In Denmark we prefer to eat these delicaies with dark ryebread for lunch. The only places I have found the ryebread outside of Denmark is in Germany and - to my great surprise - here in Switzerland. I then only need to get the aforementioned toppings from home, which my girlfriend sofar has supplied on her frequent visits. So with the IMD restaurant for lunch and my native food for dinner it is understandably a serious challenge to keep the extra unwanted kilos away.

I feel better than I have done for three months. I need to say that while I can. Tomorrow we dive in again and soon we will have forgotten how strong and confident we feel when we are completely rested. I have slept a lot over the past four days, but it feels like we have been off for much longer than that. Most of all because the week of exams is much less stressfull than the normal IMD schedule. Nevertheless, I managed no less than three naps on Thursday: I slept half the flight to Copenhagen, took a nap in the afternoon and another one after dinner. Still I had no problem at sleeping from 11pm to 9am. I think I had some catching up to do.

Tomorrow marks the beginning of Building Block II. That means a goodbye to Operations with Professor Nikos Tsikriktsis and a half goodbye to Economics and Professor Ralf Boscheck who dominated Building Block I, but who only will be back for a few 'guest appearances' in the next Building Block.

The new Building Block also means new study groups. The new groups will effectively start on Wednesday, but we should already be informed about the new groups tomorrow. I believe it is fair to say that everybody is excited to learn about their new groups as they will be the center for many hours of work on assignments, projects and integrative exercises until the summer break.

Thorsten



This is what an MBA exam look like in 2009. Here it is Finance.



Same exam, different angle.

Back in Copenhagen

I am back in Copenhagen again. Looking out the window at the usual unstable Danish march weather. 10 minutes ago the rain was pounding on the windows. Now the sky is almost clear. The spring has not arrived here to the same degree that it has in Lausanne, but it is on the way.

I was supposed to meet some of my friends in a bar in a couple of hours, but I have had to ask them to come here instead. The reason being that I have some issues with my back that have immobilized me somewhat. Nothing big, it happens every 2-3 years, lasts a couple of days and then I am fine again. However, I cannot help asking: Why now? Why should it start acting up now that the pressure finally is off? But then again, how often don't you hear about people who get sick during the weekends or on their vacations after a stressful period. It is like the body says: 'Now I have the opportunity to be sick, so I will take it!'. I wonder whether there is a psychosomatic theory on this. Anyway, coincidence or not, it is better that it happens now than when the heat is on.

My girlfriend left early this morning to go to work, so I have had most of the day to myself. This is the first time I really have had proper time to think back at what it was that hit me the past three months. The first thing that strikes me is: Has it been three months already? If it keeps going at this pace then I will be out of here before I feel I have properly arrived!

The second thing that you are reminded of are the intense days, weeks and months. The worst thing about the pressure is actually its consistency. It is not like you can just work hard for a while and the relax at other times. You will need to develop new ways of optimizing your resources to the extent that you eventually catch yourself calculating the Return on Investment on an extra hour of sleep or an hour of physical exercise.

I have primarily been doing Operations during my professional career and there is no doubt that the many hours in class discussing Entrpreneurship, Marketing, Economics, Finance and Accounting have given me a new and much broader view of business in general. If I have to pick my biggest piece of learning, though, it comes from the study room. The model, which you probably have heard described several times, is fairly simple: You take 8 people and tell them that they are a group. You then teach them the basics of human behavior and group dynamics. Last, you lock them up in a small room, turn on the heat and let nature take care of the rest. As simple as the model may be, the learnings are equally complex. Complex to an extent, that you often only are left with a FEELING of what the right or wrong answer is, but the difference is that now you DO have the answer.

The 'cruising' season has started!

WACC, ROIC, RONA, ROOA, EVA, COD and EBIT. If Accounting was a world of rules, then Finance is a world of abbreviations. Add 'Amortization of Goodwill' and 'Net Working Capital' and we have the same challenge as in Accounting: Figuring out what it all means. It is actually not that hard to understand the principles behind it. The math as such is very simple. It is more a matter of getting the terminology right and building vocabulary. More often than not, there is more than one term for the very same thing. And to complicate things a bit more, some of the terms have different meanings depending on whether you are in the world of accounting or the world of finance. If you were in doubt: The Finance exam starts tomorrow at 8.00!

Just like Kristin and probably many others I took yesterday afternoon off. I have had my motorbike standing in the basement since I arrived in Lausanne, but had decided that the completion of the accounting exam should be celebrated with kicking off the 2009 motorbike season. I had charged the battery one last time overnight and mounted it for the first time this year. You are always a bit excited the first time you start in the spring. You never know whether the bike will start after several months in the garage. You can then add that my bike is an old 'slow-rider'. A distinguished lady with a personality. Some would even call it an attitude. Sometimes it just decides not start at all for no real reason. Just because it feels like it.

This time there was also the added anxiety of being in a foreign country, where you are not as familiar with the roads, the rules and the customs as you are at home. I was lucky, though. After a few minutes the bike fired and I could leave the dark basement and take off into a bright - but cold - Swiss spring afternoon. With fellow Dane, Simon Sundboell, in the back seat, we took off down the old lake-side road in the direction of Geneva. We had no destination; just cruising up, out and away with the old and flat Jura mountains on the right and the lake and the snow covered pointy alps on the left. A fantastic feeling for two people from a country almost as flat as the Netherlands.

I had forgotten how much I missed cruising on my bike. It is one of the few things that I know I will be doing the rest of my life. The sense of freedom is unmatched by anything else I have done. You just feel how gravity and and the power of the engine pulls you through the curves and you immediately forget all the things that normally fills your head. This year that feeling was probably even stronger because we have been so severely 'locked down' in the vicinity of the school for almost three months.

Thorsten

Debit and Credit

Debit and credit, retained earnings, accruals, provisions and appropriations. I barely knew those words were part of the English language, but after two days of studying accounting I will undoubtedly be dreaming about all that tonight. If it isn't obvious already: Our accounting exam starts tomorrow morning at 8.00. If you need someone to calculate your return on assets or give you a quick overview of your cashflow situation then I know 90 people that I can do it in their sleep.

Although the exams does add some pressure I like the simplicity of 'just' having to do exams. Instead of having to balance a dozen things at the same time you just have to focus on one thing: The next exam. You can manage your own time and take things in the order and speed that suits you best. For me that has meant two nights of proper sleep. It is amazing what it does to your physical and mental health. I would also claim that you learn better, when your brain gets enough time to shut down and process the inputs.

'The MBA Survivial Guide to Accouting' that we have been given became just that: A guide to my survival. Yesterday I started on page 1 and read through the chapters on Balance Sheets, Profit and Loss Statements, Cash Flow Statements and Financial Statement Analysis that we will be tested in. One by one the things we have learned over the past two and a half months started to click into place. A few exercises on the same subjects and I now feel much more confident than I did just two days ago. Anyway, I better not celebrate too early. There is usually lots of 'red herrings' and other 'tricks' in the tests that are meant to throw us off course.


Yet another sunset picture from the beautiful Lausanne harbor. I took this earlier this week, when I was riding my bike along the lake.

Exams approaching

I went for a run along the lake when I came home today. I just had to get some fresh air to the brain after another intense day. On the way out I met my classmate Marco Simons [Dutch] who came running in the opposite direction. I was apparently not the only one in need of fresh air.

The sun sets around 7 in Lausanne these days and the view is just spectacular when you at that hour run on the small path between the lake and the huge villas with their boats and high fences. No doubt that this is an area with a lot of money. You can't help thinking that all this must belong to all the big bankers and insurance companies that have made this country so wealthy.

Everybody's minds are on the exams these days. Tomorrow is the last day of tuition before the exams. We get Thursday and Friday off to study. Accounting is the first thing that hits us. That is Saturday. Monday is Finance, Tuesday is 'Leading People for Performance' and Wednesday is Operations. And then we are off for an extended weekend! For the first time since we got here! That is the light at the end of the tunnel that keeps us going at the moment.

The accounting exam is my biggest concern. I actually thought that I had a good grasp of the general accounting principles, but another few layers of complexity have been added that has thrown me off a bit. A big part of it is about understanding the 'language' of accounting, which at times can seem like it has been encrypted. A number of us are very grateful to our classmate Eva Hubsman [Israeli] who has been using her lunch breaks the past days to teach us (again) about the wonders of T-accounts and the meaning of 'capitalizing a financial lease'. Moreover, she has set up one-on-one sessions with a dozen of us over the next couple of days. Thanks, Eva!

Thorsten


Fadi Sbaiti [Lebanese/American] and Simon Sundboell [Danish] enjoying a moment in the sun.


Chuks and Arturas in the auditorium.

February at IMD

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

Friday in the spring

The day started with a two-hour Entrepreneurship session with Professor Benoit Leleux. In that period of time we managed to finish the session on valuing entrepreneurial companies AND to debrief an entire book. That is just the pace that things are moving at and you just have to hang on as much as you can.

Accounting has now moved from 'financial accounting', i.e. Profit & Loss, Balance Sheets and Cash Flow Statements, into management accounting, which basically means management reporting. This is, at least to me, much more intuitive and logic, but let's wait and see. We are only a few sessions into it, so it might be too early to say.

In Operations Nikos Tsikriktsis, in his usual turbo-charged style, debriefed yesterdays visit at La Poste and reviewed the material we had been through in order to get us prepared for exam.
Then followed a quick update from Career Services on the status of on-campus recruiting and job fairs.

On wednesday our Startup project group had our so-called 'pitstop'. We met with Pascal Dutheil, an experienced Venture Capitalist, who gave us feedback on the work we had done so far on our Startup projects and some pointers on how to proceed. The meeting was held in a polite atmosphere, but it was easy to sense that Pascal is used to communicate in the no-nonense terms that the Venture Capitalists are known and feared for. Today our group then met with our coach, Professor Stuart Read, to discuss the latest development on the project and to prepare ourselves for a meeting with the startup company tomorrow.


I took this picture from the harbor when we were getting on the bus to go to La Poste yesterday. Coming from a land with no mountains this view is just priceless.


Two Russians at the Swiss Postal service, Yury Vasilkov (left) and Slava Raykov.


The sun is coming out and the temperature is creeping up, so we move the coffee breaks outside whenever we can. Here it is (left-to-right) Bruno Portnoi [Brazilian], Oren Yehudai [Isreli], Satoshi Konagai [Japanese] and Tony Jamous [French/Lebanese].

LeShop

The highlight of today was the visit of Christian Wanner, co-founder and CEO of LeShop.ch.
Christian visited our Operations class where we had been preparing and discussing a case on Ocado and Tesco, the two largest online food retailers in UK market. As the UK market by far is the most developed market for online food retailers, this also make the two competitors the largest in the world. It is the classic fight between the new entrant, Ocado, and the big established player. Tesco leverages it large existing network of stores to enter the online market while Ocado goes for delivery-only. Both models has its operational advantages and drawbacks. LeShop is the Swiss equivalent of Ocado, but in the absence of a Swiss equivalent of Tesco LeShop has taken the lead in Switzerland. LeShop was started in 1999, but as Christian said 'he had to walk five years in the desert' before it took off, but then it also took off big time.

As we started pushing Christian for more 'juice details' he told a fascinating story about how LeShop back in 2002 literally had been hours away from closing down. It was saved by the bell because of the commitment of its management and employees. As Christian pointed out: 'Sometimes the gap between failure and success is extremely narrow.' It felt more like we were in an Entrepreneurship class than in Operations, but who cares, this was real life and there it all comes together anyway!

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.

Change the chip

While the snow was falling heavily this morning outside the auditorium we were presenting our Economics projects inside. Six of them in total, which means that we were nothing less than 15 in each group. The challenge with such a large group is to keep it running effectively and to get a coherent result. It requires a large amount of coordination to get it right, but all six groups pulled it off and gave very interesting presentations. It was big audacious subjects that were on the agenda: Environment, Poverty, Climate change, Intellectual Property and Food Supply. All of them presented in an Economic perspective and all of them with great complexities and dilemmas built in. As he has done many times the past two months Economics Professor Ralf Boscheck reminded us that it is time to 'Change the chip'. This is Ralf's code for saying that it is time for a change of mindset, time to realize that the one-eyed capitalist's relentless pursuit of 'growth, growth, growth' will not give us the world we dream about. Today, he added that if we cannot change the chip, then we can at least 'add a new one to balance the old one'. It is interesting to learn Economics from someone who studied Philosophy before studying Economics.

The 'Intellectual Property' group used the Music industry to demonstrate the importance of intellectual property rights and showed this video on the future of the internet, which I found very interesting.



The theme of 'Critical thinking' spans across all classes. We have had 'Critical thinking' in very broad terms with Phil Rosenzweig , in Marketing with Martin Koschat and in Operations with Nikos Tsikriktsis. Today Arturo Bris, whom we met for the first time, took us through the overarching philosophy and psychology of Finance. No easy task to complete in an hour and a half in a class where sleep deprivation is taking its toll. This has without a doubt been the toughest week so far and the number of red eyes in the class room are growing. And there is absolutely no signs of the pressure easing any time soon.

Thorsten

Focus!

'Focus' seemed to be the keyword of today although I am not sure that was the intention. Entrepreneurship professor Benoit Leleux kicked off the day with session on 'Opportunity Overload' in start-up companies. The case was about a company who had developed a natural alternative to the chemical compounds used for water treatment. It could just as well have been any one of the companies that we are working with on our start-up projects. My start-up group is no different. We are working with a software company that is facing an abundance of possibilities, but little clarity on the direction. 'Focus, focus, focus', as Benoit said in his usual direct style, 'if you try to do everything then you are dead for sure'.

Whether intended or not, Operations Professor Nikos Tsikriktsis had the same message. Focus helps improve the quality and efficiency of the operational processes within the company. The case was on Canadian Shouldice Hospital that for decades had specialized in surgery of hernias. The case may be an example of the extreme, but the point was clear: The fact that they had had such a narrow focus for so many years had allowed them to optimize their internal processes to the benefit of patients, employees and the hospital itself.

In between these two classes Accounting professor Stewart Hamilton swiftly took us on a journey through the complexities of international accounting standards and why it is so difficult to reach agreement on these. There was also just enough time to run through an example of how multinational companies must deal with taxes across national borders and across different business units.


Naoto Tsushima [Japanese] and Vahid Khamsi [Swiss/Iranian] getting some work done in the foyer.


David Rohan [Australian] and Valeria Pavlyukovskaya [Russian] in the dungeons organizing the piles of paper that we are plowing through every day.