IMD Times

Last weekend was very much centered around IMD. It began when two awesome classmates rolled into town--one from the Netherlands, the other from Zurich--with their partners. We had dinner at Le Pinnochio, an IMD standard, and then spent the night just talking and catching up back at our place, where both couples were staying with us. For one of my classmates, it was his first time back in Lausanne since graduation!

Saturday was a glorious weather day--typical for Lausanne in the summer. While most of the household had a lazy morning, one of my classmates and I got up early and headed into IMD. Saturday was Mock Interview Day, during which alumni return to campus to give the current MBA students experience interviewing with real hiring managers. It is also a great chance for us to get to know some of the students, reconnect with the school, and partake in the famous IMD lunch!

In addition to the mock interviews, I gave a presentation to the class on using social media for their own professional branding. We live in an ever more connected digital world and your online presence can either help or hurt your career--but you have the power to control which! The presentation went very well and I have posted the slides on SlideShare. Take a look and I welcome any feedback!

Saturday night we had some of my IMD classmates over to the house for a pool party. Hmm, summer, pool, good friends . . . sounds like the perfect recipe for . . . SANGRIA! We made up a big batch of French-Swiss sangria (using French wine instead of Spanish, and using Kirsch instead of Triple Sec - and all local, organic fruit, of course!) and served it along with mojitos, bellinis, beer, and wine all night. It turns out that Katie and the rest of the gang weren't idle while we were at IMD all day. By the time the party started they had whipped up tables and tables of delicious, healthy, and mostly vegetarian food.

The party was a lot of fun! We had about 30 people over the course of the night and we didn't turn out the lights until about 3 AM. Several little groups formed and people just kept switching between them, talking, and catching up. Another IMD couple stayed with us Saturday night as well, so Sunday morning we had a four-couple breakfast reunion.

It would appear too that my sangria hasn't lost its touch: as one of my classmates came down the stairs Sunday morning, another one said to him, "Oh wow, you look how I feel." Mission accomplished!

Monday Katie and I trained into Zurich, where I had lunch with the sponsor of my IMD ICP. Here again it was great to catch up with someone from the IMD world. It was excellent chatting with him and he still contends that our supply chain strategy project helped them through the difficult financial times of the last two years.

It has been a great, IMD-filled four days. This is why I came back for the summer! (OK, also for the perfect weather and gorgeous lake/mountain views!)

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.

Final ICP Presentation

Today we woke up early, hopped on a train to Zurich, and delivered our final presentation to our ICP client. Despite having only one week to prepare (due to scheduling constraints), the presentation went well and the client seemed exceedingly pleased. They took us out for a nice, long lunch on a hilltop overlooking Zurich and the atmosphere was very pleasant. One of our client stakeholders is a member of their Board of Directors and may invite us to make the presentation to their entire Board in December.

This project was, for lack of an eloquent descriptor, awesome. Four students from four different continents helped a global chemical manufacturer optimize its supply chain. Despite none of us having chemical industry experience or supply chain experience, we were able to identify and help realize over CHF 200m of value.

The best part of the project was that it soon became evident that the client's challenges weren't specific to supply chain; their real problem was change management. Our "solutions," helping them implement corporate initiatives in a globally decentralized organization with greater success, aren't particular to supply chain or the chemical manufacturing industry. The learning we took from this project can be applied across industries and functions and I'm sure it will be very valuable throughout each of our careers. Real world, real learning.

Similarly, I appreciated the opportunity to work with a small, very diverse group for an extended, multi-phase project with several deliverables. It was critically important to use each person's skillset in the most appropriate way, manage different individual priorities, and address both intra- and inter-group dynamics. I won't claim that we did everything perfectly but I do believe that we learned a great deal and improved a lot throughout the project. Again: real world, real learning.

Now, with the ICP behind me (sort of--there are still several wrap-up to-do items), I'm flying to Washington DC tomorrow for a final interview with Positive Energy. I'm excited to arrive just about the time that presidential election returns start rolling in. Go Obama, go Skelly, and no on Prop 8!

Halloween

Happy Halloween (a little belated) to all! As many of you know, Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. I love putting a lot of effort into an inventive costume and having fun with others who have done the same.

This year my costume creativity was limited a little by lack of time (Our final ICP presentation is tomorrow!) and costume resources. In Houston I knew all the party supply and costume shops I could visit for specific costume elements. In Lausanne, though, I just haven't familiarized myself that well with the costume supply infrastructure yet.

So this year I resolved to make a costume given the constraint of using exclusively materials I already owned. This limited me significantly since I really don't have much in the closet I call an apartment. As I perused my wardrobe, however, I was inspired by my cold weather running gear: black and bright blue spandex. Hmm, I could probably do something with that. I ran a Google image search on "black blue spandex" to see which characters might employ similar outfits but I didn't find much. My best option turned out to be Nightwing, the superhero that evolved from Robin, Batman's sidekick.

I had no emotional bond to Nightwing, however, so I wasn't too keen on it. Looking at pictures of him on wikipedia, though, reminded me of another character to whom I did have a strong bond: Subzero of Mortal Kombat fame. Nick and I used to spend hours and hours playing Mortal Kombat on his Sega Genesis. My favorite character from the game was Raiden, but unfortunately my running clothes didn't look at all like his outfit.

So I went as Subzero, covering my face and head such that only my eyes were revealed. The Halloween party itself was pretty tame. The organizers did a great job of converting the IMD "dungeons" (where we spent most of our lives during the first part of the year) into  real dungeons. People got into it and it was fun to guess who was behind the costumes. My face covering forced me to drink through a straw all night, which made taking shots interesting, but I managed.

Still, I turned in by midnight--not exactly my Halloween party experience of yore! It's good that I did, though, as I was able to wake up early today, rehearse my ICP presentation, go for a run, and finish Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which is my favorite of the books so far. Tonight I'll head to bed early again as we have an early train to catch to our client's headquarters in Zurich and I'd like to run through the presentation one more time before we leave.

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.

Phase IV

We have now entered the final phase of our ICP. This is where the rubber really hits the road and we focus on how to implement all of the grandiose recommendations we have made. For scheduling reasons with the client, our final presentation will be this Monday so we really only have half the allocated time to reach all of our goals. No worries, though; I'm sure we'll come through.

On top of this, we're operating a man down as Daniel's son is being born as I write. I hope all goes well with the birth so we'll have something even more important than the completion of the ICP to celebrate next week!

Last night I took a break from ICP, pre-reading for electives, and my career search in order to join 30 of my classmates at a dinner celebrating Randy's birthday. It was a lot of fun just sitting, eating, conversing, joking around, speculating about the future, and sharing good times. I probably haven't done enough of this socializing this year and it felt good to spend time with my friends as opposed to my colleagues.

Solar-powered Clothing

Tuesday marked the end of Phase III of our ICP. The presentation went well and it felt great to move on to our fourth and final phase. Before that begins next week, however, we had the rest of this week off for recruiting activities.

I didn't waste any time and less than one hour after our presentation I was at the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces at EPFL. At the invitation of Carole Grätzel (Rice PhD in Physical Chemistry) and her husband, Michael, I toured the lab and learned all about Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells (DSC).

It is absolutely amazing what they are doing; I watched in awe as they showed elementary school children how to power a fan by shining a lamp onto layers of raspberry puree and pencil shavings. This simple process is at the heart of DSC and its implications are tremendous:

1.It doesn't use silicon so is impervious to price fluctuations and raw material shortages due to the semiconductor industry.

2. The photovoltaic medium is essentially an "ink" that can be "printed" on many different materials. This means that no longer are solar cells relegated to big, ugly, heavy panels. Instead they can be integrated into the windows of your house (transparently), the body of your car, or the fabric of your clothing.

3. The fabrication process is cheap and can leverage the skill/scale of major printers.

4. The cells perform well in diffuse light so you don't need huge arrays in areas with massive illumination; they work in the rest of the world.

Can you imagine the possibilities? Mobile, wireless power wherever you go. Self-powered houses, office buildings, and vehicles. Cars sitting in parking lots all day becoming net energy suppliers. That's all still out there a bit but it's not as far off as you might think. One of the companies that licences the lab's patents is G24 Innovations and they are already proving the concept. Very exciting! This is the type of game-changing technology I want to be part of.

Pictures are in my facebook album.

Deja Vu

Everytime I think I've left IMD's first half in my rearview mirror, it jumps back into my life. It is late at night, I'm here at school with my team, and--just to ensure that I really feel like it's Q1 2008 again--we all just trampled each other to get at sushi left over from an executive program dinner. But I wouldn't have it any other way; these are the memories I will take with me years afterward.

Our Phase II ICP presentation is 36 hours away and there is still a great deal of work to do. However, it is interesting work so staring at it all day everyday is not onerous. Time constraints bring the challenge of finding the right balance between sophisticated analysis and quality communication of results. Growing anxiety over careers adds another dimension as teammates (myself included!) are pulled in other directions. This isn't unexpected, though, and I'm sure we can address it--after all, we will face similar challenges in the "real " world.

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!

ICP Client Visit in Zurich

Following is an IMD MBA Diary entry cowritten by my ICP teammate, Daniel, and me. This is Daniel's second time working with me (We were also in the same Mod II study group.) and he hasn't strangled me yet. Pictures of this trip are in my facebook album.

You know that something has changed when you take a train during a weekday. We have become so used to being stuck in Ouchy that it felt almost awkward not to sit in a classroom all day. There was a sense of adventure and excitement in the air when we (Bryan Hassin [USA], Mupwaya Mutakwa [Zambia], Felipe Restrepo [Colombia], Daniel Thull [Germany] and our professor Corey Billington [USA]) left Lausanne for the first work-meeting with our ICP client.

The expectations for our meeting were high. Over the last months there had been some communication glitches between our client, a global Chemical company code-named Pandora, and us and we were eager to get the project back on track. We used the two hour ride to Zurich in a very “swissy” train car to consult with Corey and come up with a project plan that will bring us closer to the “big win”. Had someone told us a year ago that we would be travelling first class to Zurich, talking about physical supply chain optimization and the tax-effect of principal structures, we probably would have told him to go see a doctor...

Avid diary readers might recall that we have recently seen the movie “An inconvenient Truth” by Al Gore. Although our project team had not discussed the issue openly, we did all our travel on public transportation and thus maybe helped to offset some of the carbon footprint of our colleagues who travel around the world.

The meeting with Pandora went very well. Although one of our stakeholders was out with a migraine (maybe that was due to the long list of information we were requesting from him) we were able to extract lots of useful information from them. Not least did we learn that emulsion polymers are colloidal dispersions of polymers in an aqueous medium. We expect that tidbit to be of critical importance in our future careers.

The Pandora buildings left quite an impression. Bland from the outside, they were sharp and very modern inside. Maybe a little TOO modern—the green bathroom was a bit much! Speaking of green, though, all of their buildings had green roofs. We thought this sustainability touch, coupled with the absence of a single environmental incident over their 100+-year corporate history, was surprising—and welcome—coming from a chemical manufacturer.

Lunch was a refreshing break as we spent an hour chatting up our client. The special of the day was “Fleischkäs”, which ostensibly means “meatloaf.” However, this was like no meatloaf we had ever seen. It was basically a huge hot dog, sliced into crosswise sections and served with gravy. It couldn’t compete with IMD’s lunches, but what do you expect in the cafeteria of the local water works?! Unfortunately Corey had a long conference call and couldn’t join us for lunch. He had to settle for a cheese sandwich plus a Twix – welcome to the consulting world!

Before hopping on the train to head back to Lausanne, our group relaxed by the river for about 45 minutes. We found a nice little café with outdoor seating and ordered a round of beer—except for B ryan. When told that they didn’t have any dark beer, he ordered Scotch whiskey instead. The “bourbon” on the menu came from Tennessee so he didn’t trust it—Americans! Despite the fact that he claimed to have had Macallan 12-year many times before, this was the first time that it was served A. in a champagne flute and B. accompanied by dark Lindt chocolate—a pairing that went quite well!

On the train ride home we abandoned project discussion to talk about careers. Corey was helpful in providing some of his wisdom accumulated throughout his years at IBM, HP, and Silicon Valley start-ups. His #1 piece of advice to us sounded obvious but he assured us that each year he saw students not follow it: avoid toxic companies/work environments. Avoid them like the plague. If you love what you do and are in a nurturing environment, there is no limit to what you can accomplish. You should feel your energy going up every day. If, however, you are in an exploitative, unethical, abusive, or otherwise “evil” company, your energy will go down and life will . . . suck.

This project falls into the former category. We are set to deliver millions of euros of value to our client, we have tremendous faculty support from Corey, and we are very positive as a team. Despite the fact that the solution to our client’s problem is non-obvious, our energy level for addressing it is increasing and we know that we will succeed. Now, in the meantime, we all need to work on finding similar environments for life after IMD!

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!