Electives

This weekend I finished reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, my favorite (so far) of the movies. It was a great read and I'm really enjoying the extra depth that the books provide--both of the plot and of the character development. Although it may sound blasphemous, I find that there are some scenes the movies actually portray "better" than the books, especially in Prisoner of Azkaban. Director Alfonso Cuarón really elaborated cinematographically on some of the J.K. Rowling's ideas to good effect.

One element that I enjoyed about Prisoner of Azkaban is that it is the first year that the students choose electives. They no longer all take the same courses and can now specialize in the subjects that interest them. In less than two weeks we will begin electives here at IMD as well. Only instead of "Divination" and "Care of Magical Creatures" our options are more like "Advanced Group Dynamics" and "Managing Change." They aren't quite as exotic sounding, but I'm still looking forward to them.

Following is a list of our available electives. The ones I will be taking are in bold:

Course 1:

Introduction to Advanced Group Dynamics - Jack Wood (our Leadership professor)

Economic Dilemma - Economic Opportunities - Ralf Boschek (our Industry/Company Analysis & Economics professor)

Course 2:

Entrepreneurship - A Longer View - Joachim Schwass

Business History - Lessons from the Past - Stewart Hamilton (our Accounting professor)

Global Corporate Strategy - James Henderson (our Strategy professor), Cyril Bouquet

Course 3:

Managing Change - Maury Peiperl (our Leading People in Organizations professor), Anand Narasimhan

Special Topics in Private Equity and Venture Capital - Benoit Leleux (our Entrepreneurship professor)

Turnarounds: Tools for Recovering Corporate Wealth - Jean-Frederic Mognetti

Course 4:

Advanced Supply Chain - Corey Billington (our Production and Operations Management professor)

Advanced Finance - Didier Cossin

Managing Information, People, and IT Capabilities for Business Value - Don Marchand

For most of the course blocks I was torn between two or more courses. Like Hermione Granger in Prisoner of Azkaban, I really wanted a way to take all of them. However, lacking a time turner, I've had to resort to more mundane methods to bone up on each subject. For example, in Course 4, I've been able to learn a great deal of the Advanced Supply Chain content during the ICP because Corey is our faculty advisor. For the other courses I may just procure the required readings and get to them when I can.

Regardless, there is still an ICP to finish before I can start really thinking about electives.

Entrepreneurship

Most of my posts so far have been about extracurricular life. Perhaps this is because I spend so much of my time thinking about school so it is tempting to write about other subjects during my free time. This post, however, is devoted to one of our courses: entrepreneurship.

Our professor is Benoît Leleux, a high-energy Belgian who is also the Director of our MBA program. He came up through the US entrepreneurial scene of the 90s so has more than a few stories to tell.

Our first class with him (the first day of classes) centered on a business case about Boblbee, a startup (at the time of the case) manufacturer of an innovative, sporty, ergonomic, high-tech backpack. We had all been up until the wee hours of the morning (See my post: And so it begins) reviewing/analyzing the case, so we had great discussion in class with many different points of view. It was amazing to me not only how many students saw certain aspects of the case differently than I did, but also how many students identified issues that hadn't even occurred to me. While the realization that apparently I don't know everything is hard to swallow, it does validate my decision to come here!

Often after a business case discussion a professor will present "what really happened." Did the company see the situation as we saw it? Did it pursue a course of action in line with our recommendations? How successful was it? For this case, Benoît took it to the next level by inviting the CEO of Boblbee to fly halfway around the world to debrief us himself. This was great as he spoke not just about business decisions but also about the psychological impact of the entire entrepreneurial roller coaster.

At the end of the session, he joined us for lunch and gave the entire class IMD-logo'ed Boblbee backpacks. As mentioned in a previous post, our class claps all the time, but the applause for this CEO was much louder than on any previous occasion.

We have had a few more Entrepreneurship classes since then and each has been very interesting. Benoît has done a great job keeping it lively and interesting--he even mentioned Predator once, which I know will make some readers of this blog very happy (AH!).

Following is a list of some interesting take-aways from this course so far. Some of them may seem pretty obvious but exploring them in depth was beneficial all the same:

• Entrepreneurs have no common differentiators from the rest of the population; there is no entrepreneurial "profile."
• If anything, entrepreneurs are slightly more risk averse than the rest of the population.
• Entrepreneurship is all about people. From VCs to clients to teammates, people drive the direction of a company or idea.
• "Drive" pushes an entrepreneur along; "passion" pulls him toward a goal. Passionate entrepreneurs tend to be the most successful.
• Companies require dramatically different leadership at different stages.
• 60-70% of variables that control a startup's destiny are uncontrollable; no matter how brilliant you are or how hard you work, you won't be able to control those factors.
• When you're the darling of the VCs and everybody wants a piece of you, milk it; tomorrow you may be yesterday's news.
• Never refuse your own employees' money. If they want to invest, it will align their goals with yours.
• If data are available and readily show potential in a market, then competitors will enter that market, thus reducing your opportunity. An essential skill for entrepreneurs is the ability to gather information, see possibilities, and make linkages where others see only chaos.

Most of our discussion so far has focused on VC-based, high burn rate companies. As my entrepreneural background is with low-funded, organic growth companies, I hope to add value to class discussions with this different perspective.

We haven't had too much non-case reading for this course (as compared to some of the others). Of what we have read, I would recommend The Monk and the Riddle by Randy Komisar. He is a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where noted Rice alum John Doerr is senior partner.