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

Baking buns

I arrived in Kenya late Sunday night just in time for me to start the new week together with the team. They had done a fantastic job last week. Most of all they had brought together the Executive Council of the organization and with them defined the high level issues and the 'operational' vision and mission statements for the organization. A grand achievement that will provide a lot of clarity and guidance to the organization in the future and to the rest of our work here. It is important to note the word 'operational', meaning that it is separate from the 'spiritual' vision that Koinonia has a Christian community. One of the most interesting things about this project has been the question on how to bridge this gap between spirituality and day-to-day work. They don't teach you that at school!

Having established the overall objectives for the organization we prepared a workshop that should align the many initiatives with the overall vision. We made some adjustments to the framework that we had used during our first visit here......

...and asked the managers of the individual units to fill it in again. This time the objectives came from the overall organization, not from the units themselves.

A couple of them shared their filled-in framework. It became much clearer how both Social Initiatives and Income Generating Activities can pull in the same direction in support of the overall Koinonia vision.

Last night we met MBA2008 Jesper Hornberg and his friend Petter, who are in Kenya on a project of their own.

Early morning at Baraza Café where we have our breakfast every morning. Baraza is one of the Income Generating Activities under the Koinonia umbrella that serves the purpose of generating income for the social initiatives such as the children's homes.

Today Wednesday we took the next step in bringing the overall vision down to the level of the daily work. We did that by conducting a workshop on process mapping. The objective of the workshop was two-fold: To teach process mapping as a tool and to help Koinonia understand some of their own key processes better.
We needed a simple and recognizable process as an example to teach the very basics of process mapping. Inspired by my dad, who frequently surprises his family with freshly baked buns, we used the process of 'baking buns' as example. That proved excellent to get the points across.

We then split the Koinonia people in smaller teams and asked them to do a process map of a restaurant visit. Each of them were given roles such as host, waiter, cook and manager in order to spice up the discussion. The objective was to teach how to do an integrated flow chart for a process that involves multiple parties.

Next step was then to map Koinonia's own processes. Here Eva and Evelyn are working with the managers on the HR process 'Hiring-to-retiring'.

Helen from the Kivuli Centre - one of the children's homes - took the lead on mapping perhaps the most core of all processes in Koinonia, the reason for their existence, how to 'Integrate a child'.

The 'Integrate a child' process became center of an intense debate, which immediately pin-pointed some of the key issues that the organization is facing with its integration process. This is where the real power of processing mapping lies: Bring people from different parts of a process together and ask them to map their own work and you will be amazed about the understanding it creates. The issues with the process will unavoidable show up.

We were (again) amazed about the passion with which the Koinonia people speak of helping the children in Nairobi. This is much, much more than just a job for them. This is what they live for!

Monday evening I received the sad news that my grandma passed away. In the middle of these sad circumstances, I am so relieved that I made it home last week and managed to see her alive for the last time. When we left her on Saturday I said 'See you later, grandma'. I could not make myself say 'Goodbye', neither did I believe it was the last time. The funeral will be on Saturday, so when the rest of the team goes to Lausanne on Friday I will be heading back home to Denmark.

Thorsten