Delinquent Blogger

I'm sorry to all my readers for taking so long to post an update. The last week has been very hectic for me between finishing school, career search, and preparing for the post-IMD tansition. Let me bring you up to speed in a few areas:

Classes

Last week we finished our second and final week of electives. Global Strategy changed somewhat as we moved to professor (and IMD President) John Wells, who focused on the need for strategic agility for long-term success. IAGD continued to be emotionally draining but we touched on some really significant--if painful--issues in group dynamics. Managing Change was replaced with Managing Information, taught by Don Marchand, who drove home the importance of focusing on people and information, not just on technology.

Electives really brought it all together for me. The classes presented many similar initiatives through different lenses. For example, to remain strategically agile (Global Strategy), it is critical to foster information sharing within your organization. Information sharing is facilitated by incentives and systems (Managing Information). Changing incentives and deploying information systems require major change management (Managing Change) initiatives. For change management initiatives to succeed, it is helpful to know what is really going on within your senior leadership team (IAGD).

Thanksgiving

The electives were excellent and really helped me finish on the right note. Another factor contributing to my happiness was a long, belated Thanksgiving dinner at my professor's house in Lutry. Corey was our faculty sponsor for the ICP and invited the whole team (+ guests) to his house overlooking the lake. He cooked for us, shared wine from his awesome cellar, and facilitated 6+ hours of merrymaking as the sun slowly set over the mountains. Best of all, we also got to play with his 2-year-old dog, who was most excited to to have visitors. She left so much black hai on my clothes that I was reminded of the infinite supply of white hair once provided by Ivan the Terrible, Nick's Samoyed. I will miss Corey and my ICP team a great deal but this was an excellent way to begin the process of saying goodbye.

Pictures are in my facebook album.

Harry Potter

Another reason that dinner at Corey's place was so nice was that I have a strong, positive association with Thanksgiving. I usually spend it with my relatives in Hot Springs, Arkansas, which I really missed this year. It is always wonderful to see them, catch up, and get away from the hustle and bustle of big city life. When I'm in Hot Springs, I'm so relaxed that I actually pull myself away from my computer and go to the movie theater.

In fact, it was in Hot Springs that I first saw Harry Potter and became hooked. Speaking of which, I finished the Half-Blood Prince and I am now making my way through the final book, the Deathly Hallows. IMD and Lausanne will always stand out to me not only as the place where I did my MBA, met life-long friends, etc., but also as the place where I [finally] read all the Harry Potter books.

Career Search

While I still have several opportunities in the pipeline, my only firm offer is with Poken here in Lausanne. It is a great opportunity with a company that has lots of potential. In that it is a start up, there is none of this "take your time, find yourself, and start in March" nonsense; if I accept with them I will start Dec. 8th!!! So, in addition to my other preparations right now, I am also soul searching and advancing my other opportunities to see, by the end of this week, if this is what I really want to do.

Graduation

Graduation is upon us! Our committee has put together a black-tie ball following our ceremony at Beau Rivage Palace, to which I am really looking forward. After that it's goodbye, which obviously encompasses some very mixed emotions: jubilation at finishing, excitement about next steps, and sadness at leaving a great year behind. This was the subject of an entire day of classes yesterday: how to say goodbye and move on in a healthy way. We'll see if I can put into practice tomorrow.

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.

Condom Understanding

Yesterday was the first presentation to our ICP client, the definitive end of Phase I. ICPs usually follow a four phase format:

I: Industry Analysis - understand the client's industry and which factors are key to succeeding in it
II: Company Analysis - benchmark the client against those key success factors, identify gaps, and recommend initiatives to close them
III: Issue Analysis - take one of those initiatives and work it out in great detail to provide very specific recommendations on which actions the company should take
IV: Implementation - provide a plan for and participate in the implementation of change

Our project is a little different, however. The client arrived with a firm idea of which issues they wanted worked. Accordingly we combined the industry and company analyses into Phase I and used it as an objective validation of the specific issues on which the client wanted to focus. Our conclusions were that yes, supply chain mattered to this industry, yes, the client had significant room for improvement and, in fact, if they didn't address their supply chain strategy immediately, they would soon find themselves in a world of hurt.

Three of our client stakeholders--including one board member--came down to IMD. I was honored to be selected by my team to make this first presentation, key to setting the tone for the rest of the project. Our team worked long and hard to produce a quality deliverable and wanted to make sure that the presentation reflected that. Although I had to adapt my usual "jovial" style to the serious, Swiss-German audience, I think it went well. This should largely be credited to the team (including Corey, our faculty advisor), who offered me very helpful feedback during the several dry runs we went through.

There was one snafu, though, and it occurred at the very beginning. I was presenting with the display behind me and one of my teammates' laptops in front of me, controlling the powerpoint presentation. While presenting one of the first slides, a meeting reminder popped up on the laptop, obscuring much of the screen. It wasn't visible on the display behind me, however, so no one else knew about it. As I contemplated whether or not just to continue presenting that way, my mouth was on autopilot. I was supposed to say that our objective for the meeting was to build a "common platform of understanding" from which to launch the rest of the project. However, what came out was a "condom platform of understanding." Oops.

After that, though, it was pretty smooth sailing. We're glad to have Phase I behind us and today will immerse ourselves in Phase II: conceiving an optimization model for warehouse locations and transportation costs within Europe. Our next presentation is in 10 days--bring it on!

International Consulting Project

The results are in! This evening we received our assignments for our International Consulting Projects (ICPs). The ICPs are projects wherein groups of four or five IMD students work on a major strategic project for companies around the world, reporting directly to CEOs or other top management. Each group works closely with an IMD faculty member with relevant expertise.

I was chosen for a supply chain strategy project at a global chemicals/materials company headquartered in Switzerland, near Zurich. My group will be great; there are just four of us, including a German (who is in my current study group), a Zambian, and a Colombian. They are all great guys who are both competent and experienced.

Our faculty member is Corey Billington, our POM professor and a former VP at HP. I'm really excited to work with him as he has a wealth of recent, real-world experience and he really likes to think big. Shall we tackle a project that will make billions of euros of difference to the client's bottom line? BRING IT ON!

Although I was diappointed by the lack of wine-, football-, and space exploration-oriented projects, there were some other pretty cool possibilities, including:

• luxury car market entry in France
• international fundraising strategy for an African non-profit
• product strategy for DuPont in Asia
• market entry for an emissions-free scooter startup in Germany
• growth strategy for a services firm in Quatar
• geographic expansion strategy for Norelco/Nivea in the Netherlands
• european marketing strategy for a UK chocolatier

There was even a project for a Danish company looking to open operations in Arkansas--wooooooooooooooooooo PIG SOOOOOIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

As I find out more about the project I will keep you all updated!

Missed Opportunities

In Friday's POM class, Corey focused on knowledge brokering--how to find solutions to problems instead of solving them. As part of the lecture, he walked us through his own knowledge brokering experience at HP, which led to the invention of several products. One of these products was the HP Universal Notebook Expansion Base, which I happen to have in my apartment and on which I am typing right now. As many of my readers know, I have a very personal attachment to my computer hardware, so you can imagine my excitement when I realized that Corey held the patent to one of my favorite computer accessories. I did not contain my excitement well in class and was made fun of by my American and Danish colleagues for being a brown-noser--but then I suppose I can't really argue with that.

If I am a brown-noser, though, I am not a very good one as I missed a serious opportunity that day. Our morning marketing case was about the International Children's Heart Foundation. Its founder, Dr. Novick, flew all the way in from Memphis, TN to speak with us about his life's work and his difficulties in branding/promoting it. The class responded by providing him with insightful marketing ideas and a check for $1,500. The way the $ is going (On Friday it slipped below the Swiss Franc for the first time!), though, he'd better spend it fast!

Our afternoon POM case was about NASCAR's efforts to cut pit stop times in half by using knowledge brokering. Suggestions made by last year's class are already being employed and this year we came up with several ideas that had not been tried before too. Perhaps IMD should change its MBA slogan from "90 Exceptional People Who Will Shape the Future of Business" to "90 Exceptional People from 44 Countries Who Will Shape the Future of Entertainment for Millions of Americans Who Still Wear Jeans Shorts."

It wasn't until Saturday that I realized what an opportunity I had missed. Our classes were about a doctor from Memphis and a NASCAR pit crew. I have with me here in Lausanne a Red Hot & Blue t-shirt that says "MEMPHIS" on the front and "PIT CREW" on the back. Never again will I have the opportunity to wear that shirt and have it be so incredibly appropriate. I missed my chance. I lose at life.

Oh well, speaking of pit crews, Saturday was Beer Bike at Rice--the first Beer Bike I've missed in a decade! Lovett's theme this year, 300 Proof, would have been particularly fun to celebrate, but I was there in my traditional role of pit crew captain in spirit. EOL RRF!

On an unrelated note, the Class of 2009 began interviewing this week. There was a group on Tuesday and another on Friday. IMD is not like some schools where the hard part is getting in and then it's smooth sailing afterward. However, getting in is so rigorous a process that you at least have an accurate idea of what you'll be getting yourself into if accepted! Good luck to all of you applicants out there and don't hesitate to send me any questions you have about the IMD experience.

Production and Operations Management

American professor Corey Billington teaches our Production and Operations Management class where we never know exactly what we're going to get. Our first few sessions were focused on supply chain optimization but now we have transitioned into driving innovation. Today's case is about one of the world's largest power & gas companies which created an award-winning Corporate Social Responsibility strategy in only one week. Naturally they had some help from IMD.

As a former HP executive, Corey has a great deal of industry experience to share, which he does by providing "management tips" in each of his lectures. I have found these very useful as they're a part of the curriculum that you can't read in any book. His greatest contribution today, though, has been quoting the Major General song from Gilbert & Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance--"with many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse!" It takes me back to 5th Grade, when I was the Pirate King in our class's production. No time to reminisce, though; the coffee break is over so it's back to business!