Friday freedom

What do you do when you have stared yourself blind on your business plan and no longer can come up with useful answers? You call some of your classmates with experience in the field into a meeting, you explain the problem and a couple of hours later you are on your way again with your head full of new input and - most of all - a new solution to your problem. That was what I did today and it worked wonders! Thanks guys!

We have this and the coming two Fridays off. I was not in Lausanne during the 'On-campus recruiting' weeks, so this is the first week day where I have not had class or group work since I arrived in Lausanne. What a wonderful feeling of freedom to walk around in town and feel the fresh pre-winter air in your lungs as you walk up the steep pedestrian street. I spent the afternoon running some errands. Amongst other things I went up to get my official 'Departure Certificate', which basically is a letter stating that Switzerland acknowledges that I am leaving the country. As I walked up there I discovered several new places; stores, nice restaurants and a big movie theater. Places that I had no clue existed and that I definitely would like to frequent. It is somewhat ironic, though, that I only see them on the way to pick up my departure documents.

My girlfriend arrived early in the evening and we went out for Chinese with a bunch of people from the class. When we arrived at the place there were two other tables with IMD students already there. A popular place, indeed! And their dumplings were fantastic! The feeling of the fact that this year is about to end has started to settle and we have realized that if we are to go and have all the coffees, beers, dinners and other get-togethers that we talked about the whole year, then we need to do it NOW!

Eugene Cha [Korea], Juan Benitez [Colombia] and Tony Jamous [France/Lebanon] enjoying some of the good Chinese food.

Nicolas Denef [Belgium] and Suchir Swarup [Canada/India].

Handstands and hamburgers

Like Kristin I am also attending the class on India and China this week. The class is taught by Professors Anand Narasimhan and Winter Nie, who are from India and China respectively. Today Professor Nie (pictured above) taught a case about how the relatively small Chinese company Alibaba successfully kicked global giant Ebay out of the Chinese business-to-business e-commerce market in a couple of years.

Alibaba was forced to use new and unproven methods to overcome the massive financial advantage Ebay possessed. One of the things Alibaba did was to teach their employees how to do handstands. The idea was that to get them to see things from a different angle. Chuks Onunkwo is not Chinese, but was happy to show how they do handstands in Nigeria. Eric Vergara [Thailand] (and the rest of the class) is watching.

The beautiful autumn colors and the winter coats have come out, but that cannot keep an MBA class off the ping-pong tables. Here it is Henry Low [Singapore] and Juan Benitez [Colombia] on the left playing Eric Vergare [Thailand] and Ilya Syshchikov [Russia].

Yury Vasilkov [Russia], Carsten Bremer [Germany] and Fill Niu [China] had their birthdays Sunday and Monday. That was celebrated yesterday at the White Horse pub with cold beer and dart games. Since birthday cake does not go very well with beer, Valeria Pavlyukovskaya arranged for birthday hamburgers. Here the three gentlement are joined Chia Chia Lim [Singapore].
Carsten is from the old East Germany and has his birthday on 9 November, the same day as the Berlin wall came down in 1989. That was his 13th birthday. He has both memories and very interesting stories from that time. We tend to forget that these events are not very far away. In fact, they are part of the people that are around us every day.

Mind your map

I have been putting a lot of hours in my business plan over the last couple of days. I collected a lot of the information for it in Hong Kong and Singapore back in September, but then came a month of ICP with travel and intensive days in the dungeons, so I never had time to write it down. It would have been better if I had written it down earlier, though. You loose a lot of details when you have things in your head for too long, but at least I remember all the general principles.

I guess I am also starting to panic a little bit. The end of the year is drawing near. Just like everybody else is on the hunt for a job, then I need to create this job for myself. It is not really that different. I promised myself and a potential investor that I would have my business plan ready by mid November. I am glad that I made this commitment; it keeps me on my toes. I guess I also panic, because as I write, I realize what a monstrous task I have in front of me. There is such an endless amount of things to consider, when you want to start on your own: Where do you register the company, where do you find investors, who do you hire to help you, where do you find them, what are the risks, how do you mitigate them, etc, etc. I try to stick to the big picture, but it is not easy and I still get lost in the detail too often.

Luckily Johan Jansén-Storbacka (Sweden/Finland) showed me some mind-mapping techniques and tools the other day. That has been a huge help in getting the whole thing organized. Thanks, Johan! The perhaps greatest benefit of all is to get all this stuff out of your head and down on paper. That is the benefit of the writing process.

Well, I better get back to work!

Ciao!

Thorsten

A business tour de force

We are having a business tour de force this week with no less than 18 speakers coming through in five days. Seven of them were there today: Bombardier, Deloitte, IKEA, Dell, Kuehne & Nagel, Boston Consulting Group and PubliGroupe. All of them world class players in each their field. The overall subject is change management in different forms.

All of it is done as live cases, which means that the companies present a business situation or dilemma that they have faced. That could be anything from a spin-off of the company to the roll out of a new global strategy. We ask a few questions and give our shot at a solution. We then hear how the company actually solved the issue and what the result was. Interesting stuff which at the same time gives good insight into a lot of different companies.

Monday morning we turned in our last leadership paper, which was our last large assignment (as far as I know). Due to the presentation of the live cases we don't have to read cases in advance and there is no more group work either. This means that I have been home at 6pm the last two days, WITH NOTHING TO DO! Weird, very weird. I almost don't know what to do with myself. Can you imagine, today I even read the newspaper!! I mean, the real paper version! The one that you easily can spend an hour reading while you are sipping a cup of coffee! Great feeling, but at the same time I almost feel guilty for not doing anything! Luckily I have the diary today, so the shock is not too great, but what about tomorrow? :-)

Thorsten


Deloitte and IKEA live cases presented by Luis Gallardo and Patrick Lindvall respectively.


Stefan Minder from Kuehne & Nagel presenting how he revamped their sales force. It was great to see someone from my old industry - transportation and logistics - on the podium.

Movie Night

We had movie night tonight. Although it was very cosy with popcorn, coke and beer there was also an intellectual element to it. After the last two days teachings on 'Ethics and Social Responsiblity' Professor Michael Yaziji showed Al Gores well known movie 'An inconvenient truth' and Marc Achbar's 'The Corporation'. The former tells the story of the biggest challenge of our time, Global warming, while the second is about how corporate greed and lack of ethics and moral can leads to exploitation and human misery. The latter is a very anti-business movie, but it is nevertheless very relevant, particularly in a business school.

What I liked about both movies is that they don't end as doomsday wisdom. Al Gore's movie ends up concluding that we already have the necessary technology to turn the corner and bring our CO2 emissions back 1970 levels. All that is required is mix personal and political will, not more technology.

The yearbook committee is working serious overtime these days. They have collected more than 15,000 pictures and hundreds of pages of data from participants and partners, which they now are compiling into a book that we all will keep as a memory for many years to come. The hard workers are Adrian Smaranda (nearest), Rasmus Figenschou, Sylvain Cabalery, Manisha Mediratta and David Rohan (behind the screen). They get moral support from MBA2009 dog-of-the-year Kizomba. Thank you guys for the amazing work. We know how many hours you are putting in it and we all appreciate it!!

Thorsten

Crisis management

It was Monday morning in the study rooms. The external professor was running late (or so we thought) so we were just sitting in the study rooms doing a few emails, a cup of coffee in the hand, no rush. Then the phone rang! Weird, the phones in the study rooms normally never rings. They are used to call out. It was a journalist from BBC! And he wanted to know what we were going to do about the toxic material we had leaked into the river?!?! Huh, say again! What river? What material?

Then the other phone ring. We looked at each other very confused. It was a teacher from the local high school, who wanted to know whether they could still visit the plant despite the accident we had. School? Plant? Accident? You've definitely got the wrong guy, I am just having my morning coffee while waiting for the class to start. Leave me alone.

The phone rang again. Silence, confusion, more silence. Johan slowly picked up the phone, not knowing what to expect. It was the farmer from up the river who wanted to know whether it still was safe for his cows to drink from the river? Huh??? OK, this was not fun anymore. What was going on? Perhaps we should read the papers that had been left on the table in the room. 'You are the management team of Company XYZ..... accident...... possible leakage......'. We looked at each other in horror. For a couple of seconds the room went dead silent. Then we all jumped to our feet at once, two people went to the white board and started scribbling down the information we had, others started working on press releases and emails to the media, the employees, the customers, etc. Johan was immediately appointed spokesperson, a role we didn't envy him as he time and time again was fed to the hungry beasts (journalists) outside the door.

From there on it was just four hours of fire fighting. We were bombarded with phone calls, emails, sms'es from our boss and DVDs with news coverage from the local media. Protesters were hammering on our door and journalists were barging in at no warning. What a mess! What a Chaos! All extremely well orchestrated by crisis management expert Tom Curtin and his team of very, very real BBC journalists.

In the afternoon we saw the videos that had been made during the hectic morning, so we could hear what we really said. Ouch! We would have been slaughtered by the public if it had been the real thing. It was particularly fascinating to hear from the BBC journalists themselves, what they actually are looking for when they interview. In the afternoon it was wrapped up with a session on 'Brent Spar', very much an example of how not to do it.

Thorsten

There was real Swiss cheese fondue for lunch today....

...which was a big hit, as you can see.

Execution and Change

This week we have been back in the class room again for the first time in what feels like an eternity. It took some adjusting to move from the small ICP teams, where you decide everything yourself and back to the class room with pre-readings and discussions in the auditorium all day. Nevertheless, there was something comforting in being back, like meeting up with old friends for the first time in a long time. So much catching up to do! The fact that the we are back, but relieved from the excruciating pressure of the building blocks, makes both the classes and the days in general very enjoyable.

The subject was 'Execution and Change' and was directed by Professor Maury Pieperl. The class had many parallels to Leadership and Leading People classes, but focused specifically on leadership in periods of great change. A very interesting subject which (as the picture indicates) really got the class going.


Baby lineup of some of the MBA children that are in Lausanne with their Moms and Dads.

Two of the latest proud fathers with their daughters Bruna and Kavya.

From left to right the proud parents Isabella and Corinne with their daughter Camille followed by Swati and Prashant with their daughter Kavya.