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