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.

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!

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.

Economics Ironman

We kicked the day off with Accounting and continued with Operations with Professor Nikos Tsikriktsis. Todays subject was on Process analysis and took us around the concepts of Cycle Times, Throughput times and bottlenecks. 'You are not engineers', Nikos said, 'but you need to know what questions to ask!'

Today was crunch-time for the ICA projects that we have been working on for the past two weeks. The projects were handed in last night, and today some of the groups were picked to present for the class. We got some very interesting presentations on topics ranging from IT and Oil Explorations to manufacturing of helicopters. Another reminder of the enormous collective experience there is in the class.

We all felt relieved that the project was over and we could get back to all the other stuff we need to do. Economics Professor Ralf Boscheck let the air out of that balloon very quickly though with one sentence: 'And tomorrow we start another project.' Well, at least we felt good for about an hour or so.

Class was over at 19.15 and 15 minutes later some twenty of us found ourselves lined up for another round of fitness with Patricia. No time wasted! Neither is there during Patricia's sessions. The program is designed to take us through both cardiovascular and muscular training as well as some stretching in just one hour. There are no breaks, of course!

If last fridays full day of Economics was a marathon, then the coming days are an Ironman. From now and until saturday at lunch time we are basically only doing Economics. Macro-economics that is, starting tomorrow. Ralf Boscheck only gave us one assignment for tomorrows class: 'Get a good nights sleep!'. That's an order I can commit to!

Goodnight,

Thorsten