A sudden turn

Sunday evening I received the sad news that my grand mother had been hospitalized with a brain hemorrhage. Since noone knew the status or where it was going my parents recommended that I should still go to Kenya as planned the next morning.

Monday morning I met with the team at Lausanne train station and we went together to the airport in Geneva. After having checked in we received news that the situation with my grand mother had worsened, so instead of getting on the plane to Nairobi, I got on one in the opposite direction, back to Denmark.

My Mom and my youngest sister, Helene, were already there when I arrived at the hospital. My other sister Anne arrived later in the evening and today my brother came by train. All of them live in the other end of the country. It has been a couple of tough - but at the same time good - days. Tough, because of the gravity of the situation, but also good as the family very quickly came together. Not that I doubted that it would, it just warmed to see it happen as it always has.

My grand mother appears to have stabilized physically now, but other than that we seem to have lost her. She is no longer able to speak and only in a short glimse from time to time does she seem to recognize us. The old, calm and clever eyes are still there, but they will probably never again tell the stories they used to. My grand mother was born in 1920 and has lived a long life with three children, a 62-year marriage with my grand dad and an incredible amount of friends. It is a tired and happy old woman who says her goodbyes.

The last couple of years she has told us a lot of stories from a time we have never really known: About how it was to be a child in a small provincial town in Denmark in the 1930s and how it was to be a young couple in Copenhagen during World War II, sitting out some of the coldest winters in recent Danish history in an unheated apartment and in a society where everything was in short supply. We loose so much when these people leave us, yet we forget to ask or to listen when we still have them.

I will spare you a long philosofical tailspin on the meaning of life and death, although I have done quite some thinking on the subject the last two days. Let us just remind ourselves that we must live our lives in a way so that when we one day are taking our last breaths, then our loved ones will gather around our bed, sad because we are leaving, but also happy because we got the most out of our life. Do not wait until you loose someone to get an overdose of this realization, but make it a small part of your everyday life.

Thorsten

Decompression and recompression

I feel, it has been a pretty tough week. As tough as an average week in the building blocks. Coming back from abroad and being dumped straight into classes and the ICP project with a Friday deliverable to the clients.

This weekend my girlfriend was here. There is nobody that like her can make me relax and we immediately went into 48 hours of eating, sleeping and day dreaming about the 'normal life' that we soon will be leading again.

Taking it easy for a weekend is a sin in IMD language and always comes back with a vengeance. The last leadership paper is due tomorrow morning at 8.00 and I still have quite a distance to go on it. On top of that I need to get my suitcase packed again; tomorrow morning at 8.42 the train departs from platform 4 to Geneva from where we via Istanbul will find our way back to Ngong Road in Nairobi.

Life is good, but man, why does all the good have to back stacked so close.

This afternoon we went to the Open House at the Trimoto Harley-Davidson dealership in Cortaillod not far from Neuchatel. The trip was arranged by Christian Steiger from IMD, who also arranged the motorbike weekend into the French Alps a month ago. Christian is a passionate Harley maniac with several bikes in his garage.

My own bike is a bit egoist-bike, a bar-hopper if you want. It is a so-called naked bike with no backrest, a minimum of a backseat and as little equipment as the law allows. Not the most comfortable thing to be a passenger on. It is actually not even comfortable for the driver, if you go more than a couple of hours.

My girlfriend and I have therefore been talking about renting a real touring bike for a vacation trip. So when we got the chance to take one of the big Electra Harleys out for out quick spin, we took it. Here Jean-Claude explains all the ins and outs of it.
This bike has more buttons than the keyboard on my computer. Here is radio, CD-player, MP3-player, intercom, cruise-control, heating in the handles and a host of other luxury items. The only button on my own bike is the start-button, so it took me a while to figure this one out.
It is Christian Steiger standing in the back.

And off we go, just for a quick 15 minute trip. We were immediately convinced that this is the way to tour a country. On this kind of bike you sit so comfortably that you just can go on for hours and hours. We agreed that we next spring will explore our new home country Italy on a big comfortable motorbike like this one.

Back again! This bike is so heavy that it helps with an extra hand when you go backwards.

Kenya calling

It has been a couple of long days as we have been preparing the end-of-phase-2-presentation and planned the work for Phase 3. Luckily, doing these two things is very much one-and-the-same process. Quite a heavy process, though. It entails the usual iterative discussions, post-it notes and drawing upon drawing on the white boards. Over and over again, a process that is so tiring when you are in the middle of it but which is the only way to bring the real problems to the surface and consensus to the group. It is always very nerving, because you constantly are up against a hard dead line. Afterward follows the relief from the pressure and the tiredness of having been going flat out for a period. It is all covered by a feeling of either joy or frustration depending on how it went. Today it went well, the clients (which is last year's MBA class) expressed their appreciation and we feel on the right track as we move on to the next phase.

Next phase is again called Kenya, starts Monday morning in Geneva airport and lasts for twelve days. We have planned the next rounds of workshops there. The focus is this time much less on digging up information and much more on finding solutions together with the people in the organization. It is three weeks since we left Nairobi and in that time Koinonia (the organisation we work with) has been working with the frameworks we gave them. We look forward to learning what they got out of those exercises.

We chose to order the abundance of information that we had obtained during our first Kenya voyage by first writing the information on post-it notes.....

....then ordering it in complete silence....

....until we arrived at a few overall groups.

Finally, we drew up how the different groups are interrelated and we had a good picture of how to approach the issues.

The beginning of the end

There are more and more signs of the fact that the IMD bubble eventually is going to burst. Today Regula from the MBA Office took us through the different procedures for exiting Switzerland, canceling insurances and leaving our apartments.
Regula and the rest of the MBA Office are the grease that keeps the MBA machine running. Everyday they fix dozens of small and large practical problems. They handle everything from a grumpy landlord to an unclear phone bill with a smile. They made sure that everything went well when we entered Switzerland and IMD and they are now helping us through the door in the other end.

Today was the day for the monthly partner lunch and the partners also joined the 'Exit IMD' session with Regula. Here Henry's wife Kelly [Singapore] is here learning how to do an apartment exit the Swiss way.

Rasmus [Norway] has all year been collecting quotes for the yearbook. Today he became yearbook material himself when expressing his concern about the excessive cleanliness of the apartments that is required upon departure: 'If there is one thing I have learned about Switzerland, then it is that it is all about......spots!'. Who can argue with that? :-)

The graduation party committee has started their work and Joost, Karim and Wouter presented the initial work. Judging from the hats it can only be a blast! :-)

Time to catch up

I have just come back from Genova. As a customer with Trenitalia today, I was very positively surprised. Instead of being stuffed into one of the usual 30-old year noisy cars, they deployed a brand new, silent train with seats and entertainment systems that looked like they were stolen from an airplane. Nice! I spend the time to catch up with almost three weeks of unanswered emails. Needless to say that I only got half way through it.

It was great to spend two days with my girlfriend and my parents. We took it easy and did not anything at all. I really enjoyed it and hated having to leave again. I am so tired of constantly being on the move, never to sleep in the same bed for more than a couple of days at the time. While I know I will miss IMD when I am no longer here, then I also look forward to getting back to a somewhat normal life, a life where they days have some kind of rhythm and routine. Not too much, of course, but enough to feel that you actually have a home.

The first signs of things coming to an end are becoming obvious too obvious to be ignored. This weekend I moved my motorbike to Genova with the intention of not bringing it back, committees for the yearbook and graduation have been established and on Tuesday we have a 'move-out' session with the MBA Office on how we exit the country again. Exit?!? How can that be? We have barely started yet!

For the next day and half we will be back in class again for the first time since the building blocks ended. I really look forward to that, it is like the family coming together again, even if it is just for a little while. There are too many people that I haven't seen for the past two months!

Tour de Southern Europe

It is 23.00 here in Genoa, but I feel like it is much later.... or earlier in the morning. Perhaps I still have a bit of Singapore time left in me. Out there it is 5.00AM now.

Yesterday morning my parents picked me up in Frankfurt airport. They left Denmark on Monday and had via Bremen taken the trip through part of the Rhine valley. From Frankfurt we drove west towards Strassbourg, where we caught the so-called Alsace Whine Route. The route goes through 170km of vineyards at the foot of the Vosgian mountains, small picturesque villages with colorful houses and flowers everywhere. It looks like it is straight out of a fairytale. We had apparently hit the peak of the harvesting season, so everywhere we met these tall funny looking grape-picking-machines and tractors with trailers full of grapes. We went into a small place to buy some wine, but they were so busy harvesting that they barely had time to serve us. We got our wine, though, and we also found small places where we could get bread, cheese and sausage, so finally dinner was secured. French dinner that is. Awesome!

Alsace has throughout history been thrown back and forth between Germany and France, but since 1919 it has been in French hands. The German influence is still significant and everywhere you see names that are a mix of German and French. Just take the small town of Dambach La Ville as an example, or Haut-Koeningensburg – and old castle on mountaintop where we stopped by. In the late afternoon we found the highway back to Lausanne, had our awesome French purchases for dinner and went straight to bed.

This morning I had the pleasure to show my parents around the school. They saw the dungeons, the powernap room, the auditorium, the canteen and all the other places that have been the center of our lives for the past nine months. Most of all they met the people I have been working so closely with. I have been gone for three weeks, which is an eternity at IMD. Trying to catch up with everyone on what had happened during those three weeks proved impossible. I will have to spend all of next week doing that.

In the afternoon I got on my motorbike and headed off towards Genoa with my parents in the car behind me. My girlfriend now lives in Genoa in Northern Italy and I will be moving here when done in Lausanne in December. This was a good time to bring the motorbike here for good. I am out for a big part of October and if we get into November it gets too cold and too risky to move it. The six hour drive was quite an experience. Particularly the winding road on the way up to the St Bernard mountain pass reminded me of the motorbike trip in France only a month ago. We started with sun and 22C in Lausanne, were hit by 12C and rain on the Italian side of the St Bernard tunnel and ended up with 26C upon arrival here in Genoa.

Now I have a day and a half to catch up on things with my girlfriend, my parents, my email, my homework for next week and all the other things I have neglected for the past three weeks. There is no such thing as a full-off weekend just yet.

Q & A

I am sitting at the Starbucks in the new giant ION shopping centre on the fancy Orchard Road in Singapore. The whole ground floor is packing with brand new stores with Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Armani, Patek Philippe and the likes. From the ground floor the mall goes four stories DOWN, not up. In the basement there is the typical Asian food court. I got myself a ‘Nasi kuning ayam merah’ which is Indonesian and/or Malay for ‘Yellow rice with red chicken’. Another reminder of the good ol’ times in Indonesia.

Yesterday I treated myself to a trip to the movies. I used to do it regularly, but it is almost a year ago I went last time. I saw Tarantino’s latest creation ‘Inglorius basterds’ about an American Jewish hit squad working under cover in Nazi occupied France. As usual with Tarantino you leave the cinema with a funny feeling. It leaves you thinking, but you don’t really know about what, because the movie did not teach you anything. Nevertheless, I enjoyed my first evening off in weeks and the first movie theatre trip in a year. And I did not even fall asleep!

My trip here in Asia is coming to an end. I have a meeting tomorrow for lunch and tomorrow evening I head back to Europe. The trip has been an intense learning experience, as intense as a week of building blocks at IMD. Hong Kong overwhelmed me with a lot of new questions and things to consider while Singapore answered a lot of these questions. The reason being that in Hong Kong I mostly met customers, who listed an endless amount of requirements I would have to fulfil if they were to buy my product. In Singapore I mostly met suppliers who offered solutions that I did know existed and I met seasoned industry experts who could give me the high level perspective on the forces in the industry.

My parents are right now working their way down from Denmark to Lausanne by car. We agreed that they should pick me up on the way in whatever airport whereto I could get a convenient (=cheap) flight. That ended up being Frankfurt, so they will pick me up there Thursday morning and we will drive to Lausanne together. I look forward to seeing them again. I actually even look forward to driving with them to Lausanne. It reminds me of the trips in Germany we used to do as a family when I was a kid.

In half an hour I will meet an old colleague at Harris’ on Robertson Walk. Almost exactly one year ago this was where I met my coming classmates Henry Low (Singapore) and Sylvain Cabalery (France) for the first time. It seems like it was only yesterday we were sitting there at the high tables outside the bar enjoying a cold beer. On the other hand, if I look at how much has happened since, how much I have learned and how differently I think, it seems like it must be ages ago. Who did this to me? :-)