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].

From Enron to Biofuels in a day

It is past 2.00 AM and the lights are still on in most of the study rooms. No, it is not another Integrative Exercise although it feels like it. We are working on a presentation for Strategy with Professor James Henderson. The subject is Biofuels and we will presenting to a company in the industry in 6 hours. We are all at point where we mostly are thinking about our beds, but it will be a while before we can realize those thoughts. My group has nevertheless been kind enough to let me spend some time writing this diary entry.

It has been another one of those days. Marketing and Strategy in the morning, Accounting after lunch, a company presentation and then down in the dungeons to work on the Strategy presentation. Today's accounting class was about the fall of Enron back in 2001. Another fascinating story of just how bad things can go, even in big corporations. It is only a couple of weeks ago we learned how a single man in 1995 brought London's oldest bank, Berings Bank, to collapse.

What is on most of our minds now (apart from tomorrow's presentation) is the upcoming MBA Tournament (MBAT) in Paris. The first bus leaves late tomorrow evening and arrives in Paris Thursday morning. We will be a total of 70 students and 17 partners attending. The MBAT is a mini-Olympics between all the major European business schools. We will be competiting in a large number of sports from football and fencing to basketball and babyfoot (miniature football). I have the honor of being Captain of the Tug of War team.



Sylvain's dog, Kizomba [France], helps out with the Strategy presentation. Left it is Ruslana Zbagerska [Canada/Ukraine], right Alex Rubio [Brazil].



With a background in consulting Satoshi-San is amazing at setting up frameworks for our group discussions. Here we are discussing the potential consolidation of the biofuels industry.



Sunday in Parc De Milan. Joost Mackor, Captain of the football team, with the team strategy for the MBAT. We like to keep things simple at IMD!