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.

Swiss Fondue, the Danish way!

I am SO full again. Again I had too much of the Swiss cheese fondue. The only difference is that this time I had it back home at my parents place. It was my Dad's birthday last week and his four kids decided to give him a Swiss fondue set. I brought it home on Friday together with 2kg of good Swiss fondue cheese. I am out of a very cheese loving family, so I am afraid that we have just started a tradition that over time will add many kilos to the combined weight of the family. We don't have any fondue traditions in Denmark, but we have plenty of traditions for good cheese and I am confident we will find great ways of combining the two.

This 4-day break has been very different than the one we had after the exams a couple of weeks ago. First of all, the after-exam break was spent with my girlfriend in Copenhagen, whereas this one has been spent with my girlfriend visiting my family. This largest difference was mental, though. Last time we had just completed the exams and thereby Building Block 1 and we had only a few new assignments. I really felt very relaxed. This time we are in the middle of everything and the assignments are piled up (4 in next week alone), so mentally I have not been able to leave the school like I did last time. I came home with a long list of things that I wanted to get done, but I hardly managed to get anything done. So the usual sense of guilt has been nagging all the time. The only good thing, I guess, is that I have slept a lot, so the batteries are fully charged. This will give me some extra work hours over the coming week.

Tomorrow is the return to reality. My girlfriend and I will take the car back to Copenhagen. We are stopping by an old friend of mine on the way, just to say hi and get a cup of coffee, but otherwise it is straight to the airport and straight back to Lausanne. To be honest, I don't feel very much like it. I could really spent some more time up here. On the other hand there is only two months left of the Building Blocks and with the pace that times passes in Lausanne the summer break will be here before we know it. To me it is not even a matter of making it THROUGH the exams, though, it is just a matter of making it TO the exams. As I have said a couple of times before, the exams are wonderful peaceful times compared to the daily chaos. I may very soon regret saying that, though, because the first thing that awaits us on Tuesday is our exam results!



I took this picture outside the Copenhagen Congress Center, where a giant wind turbine has been raised in the parking lot. We have several times during the Responsible Leadership Summit at IMD and during the Global Political Economy classes discussed the Copenhagen Summit, which will take place in 2009. Business and government leaders from most of the world will meet to discuss climate change and how we proceed beyond the Kyoto targets that will expire in 2012.

Staying afloat

I have an old mantra that says that 'stress doesn't come from too much work; it comes from loosing the overview'. That mantra is being severely tested these days. I have spent the entire evening skimming and sorting the seamless stream of emails and papers that we receive on graded assignments, new assignments, upcoming tests, industry presentations, invitations to group work, input on group work from other team members and so forth. The problem is that you spend so much time trying to figure all this out and getting it filed and scheduled that you don't have time to do the actual work. I still believe it is the right approach, so I will stick with it for now, but I might be proven wrong. Over the next 10 days we have five assignments and two tests, so I better get to work and not just sit and plan everything!

Today was one of those days with four different and short classes instead of the usual two. That always means a lot more preparation as the amount of work for each class is independent of the length of the class. We kicked the day off with Martin Koschat and a case study on how companies can use data bases to track customer behavior and thereby approach the customer in the most effective way. There is definitely a lot more going on behind the scenes than you realize as an average customer.

Martha Maznevski followed up on the personality tests we did last week with a session on the importance of matching personality and job and what you can do - or cannot do - when they don't match. The subsequent accounting class with Stewart Hamilton was spent scrutinizing Carlsberg's annual report for 2007. For a non-accounting person like myself it takes quite a bit of energy to get a meaning out of all the different ratios and abbreviations that the accounting world is so full of. Last, but not least, Phil Rosenzweig had the ungrateful task of taking us through the afternoon shift. He did a brave attempt, but by the end of day like this the fatigue has taken control and the energy levels are just close to non-existing.

Lunch with Stuart

The career services team let us out early, so I am enjoying the view of the lake from the MBA foyer just before the sun sets. Although the only visible movement are the cars passing by it reminds me that there actually is a world outside.

I spent most of the night pulling Economics professor Ralf Boscheck's model for 'Industry & Competition Analysis' (ICA) down over the container shipping industry. I am not sure that I really got it, but at least we will get some feedback so we can start covering the gaps. It is my impression that most of the class had spent the evening and a good part of the night doing the very same thing.

With only a few hours of sleep I was not feeling too fresh this morning. At lunch I managed to get 45 minutes of sleep in the dungeons. What a difference that made! I was completely reenergized. I guess there is something about that old saying that one hour of sleep during the day equals three hours of sleep at night. I have never seen the scientific evidence of that, but I don't really need to. It definitely feels as if it is true.

13 of the students in the class had lunch with Professor Stuart Read today. The 13 of us had that in common that Stuart was facilitating the case discussion on the day we interviewed on campus. For my part that was back in May. There was no particular agenda for the lunch, just a chit-chat on how we had liked the start of the program and living in Lausanne. As we parted Stuart told us that his door and email always was open if we ever needed help or good advise. That has been the general attitude for all faculty members I have met so far. I know Stuart has done several start-ups in Silicon Valley, which I find fascinating, so I might go and poke him a bit more on that one day.

Thorsten