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.

Vision to reality

A great guest entry by John Rohan, the dad of one of my good classmates David Rohan. I include it here because I shows how the IMD impact goes far beyond the MBA students.

Recently my wife and I had a very enjoyable lunch at IMD and met Thorsten and in our discussions, I mentioned that I had previously attended two IMD courses for executives. On hearing that Thorsten was looking to start up his own company, I mentioned to him that, after attending my first course at IMD, I made a major change in my career, which most of my friends and family thought was very risky, if not crazy. Thorsten has now asked that I might repeat some of that story for the IMD Diary.

The reason for our visit to Lausanne was to visit our son David and Kate our daughter in law. As many of you would know, David is a 2009 MBA student.

The first IMD course I attended was in the early 90’s and was entitled ‘Vision to Reality’, nearly all the 45 or so attendees were from different countries, very like the composition of the current MBA class. All attendees were at, or about to move to managing director or executive chairman levels. Whilst some of us had MBA degrees others had worked their way up from the ‘coal face’ without any formal qualifications, however all were generally successful business people.

As all IMD participants know, IMD is very different to other business schools. One example which really brought this home to us was a remarkable lecture by an Indian Professor from Harvard on the effects of subliminal advertising on TV, (Incidentally he was not advocating its use). He mentioned at the start of his lecture that during the hour lecture, he would put everybody to sleep during that lecture. As you would expect this group of relatively hard nosed business people thought this was impossible. He gave a very good and interesting lecture to a minority as he succeeded in hypnotizing all but two people to sleep, in the hour and woke them all up at the same time at the end of the hour.

We all learned a lot about ourselves and human behaviour in general and most of us came out of the course believing that up to that stage in our careers we had only tapped a small part of our real potential and we came away with the healthy belief we could achieve anything.

When I came to the Vision to Reality program I had been running companies for about 15 years and had been working my way up the corporate ladder over that time. At this stage of my career, I was running 42 companies in Asia, the Pacific and America, for one of Australia’s blue chip organizations with over 3000 employees and this group of companies had been growing successfully for the previous 3 years.

Shortly after returning from the program I was approached by Vodafone UK to become MD of Vodafone Australia and to build and run a digital mobile network. There was no office, no people, no network, no product etc. I accepted the job and I am sure that my then, recent experience at IMD had much to do with this decision.

Within 6 years the Australian business went from zero to $1Billion turnover and from 1 to 2500 employees. It certainly helped that the digital mobile market in Australia doubled every year for those 6 years and as I said to Thorsten in Lausanne, that business success is also sometimes helped by a little luck and fate.

In these tough economic times I am sure that many of the 2009 IMD MBA graduates will have needed to accept new positions which are probably more risky and not quite in the career direction or in the country that they might have wanted. I hope my positive experience of making what seemed to be a risky career change gives them some confidence for their own success.

I wish all the 2009 MBA participants all the best in their future careers.

John Rohan

Chillin'

It has been a relatively light day, where I got a lot of small practical things done, canceling insurances, delivering stuff for dry cleaning, etc. Nothing really major, but just nice to get going on all the things that have piled up. I went to the school for lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon there.

We went to the Chinese place again for dinner. It was just as packed as last time! It is as if all of Lausanne have discovered this place at the same time. The food - particularly the dumplings - is great and the price absolutely reasonable.

A lot of people are out of town this weekend, some have gone skiing and some are visiting friends around Europe. As you probably can sense from this Diary entry I don't really have much to write about. The reason is that there is actually not much happening. And you know what, for once that is actually very nice!

The bright summer colors are gone, but that does not make the the landscape around Lausanne any less beautiful.

And the sunsets have not lost their colors at all.

Are you liable for your tweets?

Are you liable for your tweets? That is what the headline on cnn.com currently is asking. In the article the paper goes on to ask 'Can the law keep up with technology?' It describes how a number of people have faced law suits because of the statements they have written on their twitter accounts. The article goes on to philosophize that the laws governing free speech online generally are five years behind the technology. The technology needs to develop first before you can design laws to govern it, the argument seems to be. Sounds reasonable to me.

Interesting article, I thought. Even more interesting, I thought, that I actually read it. And took the time to let it sink in. Something have changed. It is not like I haven't gotten my share of news. Particularly after Jean-Pierre Lehmann's class on Global Political Economy I made sure that I subscribed to some RSS feeds on the different part of the world news. A very efficient way of keeping up with the high-level news. I barely made it further than the headlines, though. Until now.

I feel that I am in the process of resurfacing after a very long dive and I am starting to rediscovered things that I used to enjoy. Such as reading the news. Only three weeks ago I discovered that the information center at the school actually keeps the main Danish business newspaper 'Børsen'. There is nothing better than grabbing a cup of coffee and a Bounty chocolate bar and then spend half an hour after class reading the news. Not because I have to, but because I can.

It was mostly Danish news and business news used to read, but the Global Political Economy class (and probably the IMD environment) has changed that. Right now I enjoy following Obama on his trip around Asia and the talks about the upcoming climate summit in Copenhagen. The International Herald Tribune delivers 90 papers to the school every day in attempt to get us to become so accustomed to the paper that we will buy it afterward. I probably will from time to time.

Friday freedom

What do you do when you have stared yourself blind on your business plan and no longer can come up with useful answers? You call some of your classmates with experience in the field into a meeting, you explain the problem and a couple of hours later you are on your way again with your head full of new input and - most of all - a new solution to your problem. That was what I did today and it worked wonders! Thanks guys!

We have this and the coming two Fridays off. I was not in Lausanne during the 'On-campus recruiting' weeks, so this is the first week day where I have not had class or group work since I arrived in Lausanne. What a wonderful feeling of freedom to walk around in town and feel the fresh pre-winter air in your lungs as you walk up the steep pedestrian street. I spent the afternoon running some errands. Amongst other things I went up to get my official 'Departure Certificate', which basically is a letter stating that Switzerland acknowledges that I am leaving the country. As I walked up there I discovered several new places; stores, nice restaurants and a big movie theater. Places that I had no clue existed and that I definitely would like to frequent. It is somewhat ironic, though, that I only see them on the way to pick up my departure documents.

My girlfriend arrived early in the evening and we went out for Chinese with a bunch of people from the class. When we arrived at the place there were two other tables with IMD students already there. A popular place, indeed! And their dumplings were fantastic! The feeling of the fact that this year is about to end has started to settle and we have realized that if we are to go and have all the coffees, beers, dinners and other get-togethers that we talked about the whole year, then we need to do it NOW!

Eugene Cha [Korea], Juan Benitez [Colombia] and Tony Jamous [France/Lebanon] enjoying some of the good Chinese food.

Nicolas Denef [Belgium] and Suchir Swarup [Canada/India].

Handstands and hamburgers

Like Kristin I am also attending the class on India and China this week. The class is taught by Professors Anand Narasimhan and Winter Nie, who are from India and China respectively. Today Professor Nie (pictured above) taught a case about how the relatively small Chinese company Alibaba successfully kicked global giant Ebay out of the Chinese business-to-business e-commerce market in a couple of years.

Alibaba was forced to use new and unproven methods to overcome the massive financial advantage Ebay possessed. One of the things Alibaba did was to teach their employees how to do handstands. The idea was that to get them to see things from a different angle. Chuks Onunkwo is not Chinese, but was happy to show how they do handstands in Nigeria. Eric Vergara [Thailand] (and the rest of the class) is watching.

The beautiful autumn colors and the winter coats have come out, but that cannot keep an MBA class off the ping-pong tables. Here it is Henry Low [Singapore] and Juan Benitez [Colombia] on the left playing Eric Vergare [Thailand] and Ilya Syshchikov [Russia].

Yury Vasilkov [Russia], Carsten Bremer [Germany] and Fill Niu [China] had their birthdays Sunday and Monday. That was celebrated yesterday at the White Horse pub with cold beer and dart games. Since birthday cake does not go very well with beer, Valeria Pavlyukovskaya arranged for birthday hamburgers. Here the three gentlement are joined Chia Chia Lim [Singapore].
Carsten is from the old East Germany and has his birthday on 9 November, the same day as the Berlin wall came down in 1989. That was his 13th birthday. He has both memories and very interesting stories from that time. We tend to forget that these events are not very far away. In fact, they are part of the people that are around us every day.

Mind your map

I have been putting a lot of hours in my business plan over the last couple of days. I collected a lot of the information for it in Hong Kong and Singapore back in September, but then came a month of ICP with travel and intensive days in the dungeons, so I never had time to write it down. It would have been better if I had written it down earlier, though. You loose a lot of details when you have things in your head for too long, but at least I remember all the general principles.

I guess I am also starting to panic a little bit. The end of the year is drawing near. Just like everybody else is on the hunt for a job, then I need to create this job for myself. It is not really that different. I promised myself and a potential investor that I would have my business plan ready by mid November. I am glad that I made this commitment; it keeps me on my toes. I guess I also panic, because as I write, I realize what a monstrous task I have in front of me. There is such an endless amount of things to consider, when you want to start on your own: Where do you register the company, where do you find investors, who do you hire to help you, where do you find them, what are the risks, how do you mitigate them, etc, etc. I try to stick to the big picture, but it is not easy and I still get lost in the detail too often.

Luckily Johan Jansén-Storbacka (Sweden/Finland) showed me some mind-mapping techniques and tools the other day. That has been a huge help in getting the whole thing organized. Thanks, Johan! The perhaps greatest benefit of all is to get all this stuff out of your head and down on paper. That is the benefit of the writing process.

Well, I better get back to work!

Ciao!

Thorsten

A business tour de force

We are having a business tour de force this week with no less than 18 speakers coming through in five days. Seven of them were there today: Bombardier, Deloitte, IKEA, Dell, Kuehne & Nagel, Boston Consulting Group and PubliGroupe. All of them world class players in each their field. The overall subject is change management in different forms.

All of it is done as live cases, which means that the companies present a business situation or dilemma that they have faced. That could be anything from a spin-off of the company to the roll out of a new global strategy. We ask a few questions and give our shot at a solution. We then hear how the company actually solved the issue and what the result was. Interesting stuff which at the same time gives good insight into a lot of different companies.

Monday morning we turned in our last leadership paper, which was our last large assignment (as far as I know). Due to the presentation of the live cases we don't have to read cases in advance and there is no more group work either. This means that I have been home at 6pm the last two days, WITH NOTHING TO DO! Weird, very weird. I almost don't know what to do with myself. Can you imagine, today I even read the newspaper!! I mean, the real paper version! The one that you easily can spend an hour reading while you are sipping a cup of coffee! Great feeling, but at the same time I almost feel guilty for not doing anything! Luckily I have the diary today, so the shock is not too great, but what about tomorrow? :-)

Thorsten


Deloitte and IKEA live cases presented by Luis Gallardo and Patrick Lindvall respectively.


Stefan Minder from Kuehne & Nagel presenting how he revamped their sales force. It was great to see someone from my old industry - transportation and logistics - on the podium.