Jellybrain and a jolly-good ride

'Jellybrain' one of my classmates just wrote in his Facebook status field. I know exactly what he means. A six and a half hour Finance Exam marathon just gets the best of you. Particularly when you already have done twelve hours of exams in the preceding two days plus whatever studying you could fit in. Just to add insult to injury there was 50 pages of pre-reading for tomorrows Strategy exam waiting in our mail boxes. At least it will be the last one.

Already yesterday I had had it with exams, so I decided - against all logic - to take my motorbike out for spin. It had been more than a month and half since I last took it out, so I was surprised when it started. Inspired by Kelley's Diary entry on Monday I went out East along the lake, past the Lavaux vineyards, through Vevey and Montreux before stopping for an Ice Cream in Villeneuve.

While eating my ice cream I decided to head up into the nearest mountain, which happened to be this one. There is nothing better than motorbiking in the mountains. You just feel that you are flying up the small winding roads. Before long I caught myself humming the song 'Country road, take me home, to the place...'. I think you know which one I talking about. It is an old classic that both John Denver and Olivia Newton-John have had success with.


As I went up the road became smaller and steeper and the temperature quickly dropped. I did not expect to meet anyone up there, but to my surprise there was a typical small Swiss Inn at the top. This is the view from their terrasse. I am definitely going there again, even if only for an ice cream! The picture is taken with my phone so it does not do the view justice, but you can sense the curvature of the lake. Lausanne is in the right-hand side of the picture although you cannot see it.


Coming from little 'flat' Danmark I cannot help being amazed how people like the Swiss adjust to living in such a vertical world where everything is either up or down. I passed this little mountain railway station next to a tunnel through a cliff under a house! All of it of course at a significant incline!

It was a great and really reenergizing ride albeit it only lasted a few hours. I have promised myself to do it again soon. Then again, that is what I have been doing for the past three months......


Thorsten


Hanging out on the lawn during yesterdays lunch break between the Marketing and Global Political Economy exams.

Henry Low [Singapore] and Rasmus Figenschou [Norway] talking while Lisa Bridgett is watching from the back.

Exam preparation!
Fadi Sbaiti [Lebanon/US], Wouter Naessens [Belgium] and Jodie Roussel [US].

Brad Moldin [US] and Oliver Freiland [Germany] enjoying a cup of coffee before diving into the Finance exam.

The Finance exam was a killer. Here we are around four hours into it.



The reward was a cheeseburger at the harbour front.
On the left: Olivia Assereto [Italy], Marco Simons [The Netherlands] and Carsten Bremer [Germany].
On the right: Ope Adejoro [Nigeria], Yury Vasilkov [Russia], Valeria Pavlyukovskaya [Russia] and Thorsten Boeck [Denmark].

Accounting, my old friend

There is nothing like having an old friend over for coffee. Today I am with Accounting, my old acquaintance from Building Block 1. We are discussing the same things that we talked about back in March, cash flow statements, ratio analysis and a little bit of Balance sheets. A few new topics - management accounting and relevant cost - have also sneaked into our conversation.

Yes, the exams are here. Five of them within the next four days to be exact. We kick off with a double tomorrow, Accounting in the morning and Global Political Economy in the afternoon, four hours of each. Then it is Marketing, Finance and Strategy over the following days. That does not leave time for in-depth preparation of all of them, so it is all about focusing your resources on the things that are right for you!

Finance is the big one for me this time. The biggest chunk is about assessing the financial health and the value of a company. Not really rocket science, but just an awful amount of details to understand and memorize.

I have said it before and I will happily say it gain: The exam period is a piece of cake compared to an ordinary week at IMD. Yes, the pressure is still there and so are the many hours with your head in the books or in your laptop. But you have much more control of your time as you don't have to coordinate your work across three groups and balance a million other things at the same time. I have slept a lot since Friday and I am getting some real quality reading done now that my head is not pounding from lack of sleep.

I have had a couple of other things to take care of as well, though. I have spent part of today finishing the end-of-course innovation paper, which is due tomorrow and I had lunch at the school with the other Scandinavians. We are arranging a mid-summer party on the last day before the class goes on summer vacation in a little more than two weeks. In the Scandinavian countries mid-summer calls for a bonfire. Whether we ever will get that through the Swiss authorities remains to be seen, but we will definitely give it a try!

Thorsten


The campus is so tranquil these days. People are just hanging around during the lunch break enjoying their Mövenpick ice cream or a coffee from the café.


Even the MBA students crawl out of their dark dungeons during lunch time to enjoy a few energizing rays of sunlight. From left it is: Stefano Cazzulani [Italy], Oliver Freiland [Germany], Seif Shieshakly [Saudi Arabia / Germany], Sebastien Guery [France], Wouter Naessens [Belgium] and Johan Jansen-Storback [Sweden/Finland].

Friday in Pictures

The day started with Innovation professor David Robertson demonstrating a technique for idea generation. Here he is 'Decomposing the problem' as it is called; the problem being a vegetable/fruit peeler.


The problem was decomposed into 'Apply pressure', 'Remove peel' and 'Manipulate/rotate fruit' and the class was asked to create solutions for each part.


Engineers on home turf! Paolo Guglielmini [Italy] (in front) and Karim El-Koury [Austria] creating solutions for how to 'Apply pressure'.

David demonstrating a machine (lower right) that peels, slices and cuts out the core of an apple in one go. He got it on eBay.


A cup of coffee in the IMD café after lunch has become a daily ritual for many of us. Here it is Eva Hubsman [Israel], Kornelius Thimm [Germany], Johan Jansén-Storbacka [Sweden/Finland], Stefano Cazzulani [Italy] and Sebastian Guery [France]. The latter three surprised me by speaking Italian to each other despite only one of them being Italian.

Modern mom keeping in touch with her off-spring. Lisa Bridgett skyping with her two boys Julian (4 years old) and Aurelien (9 months). I am so impressed by Lisa and the other MBA parents. On top of all the work the rest of us are struggling with they manage to find time for their families.

We had Finance Professor Jim Ellert most of the day on the subject of 'Capital Structure and Dividend Policy Guidelines'. It is known stuff for the bankers and accountants in class, but most of it is a new world for me.

Looking sharp!! The period of company presentations has started. A number of companies will come and present themselves and answer questions from the MBAs. The companies will likely be the ones coming back to hire MBAs in September. Here it is (left-to-right) Cedric Jusseaume [France], Shibu James [Indian], Oren Yehudai [Israel] and Suchir Swarup [Canada/India] dressing up for their potential future employers.

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