Electives and Beethoven

The first week of electives is halfway done and what a ride it has been. We are definitely back in "class" mode: reading cases late into the night, showing up on time to class, and throwing ourselves back into heated discussions. Well, some of us are, at least. Some, on the other hand, are checked out, arriving at class late and unprepared; I feel like only a subset of us have successfully re-engaged.

I try not to be resentful of the "slackers" but it slips out sometimes with snide remarks. Perhaps I'm the stupid one, clinging religiously to school rules and assignments while I neglect my career search. However, my intention in coming to IMD was to learn, not to "get a job." I'll be OK with continuing my career search into 2009 if it means I can focus more on the few weeks of learning opportunities we have left here.

And speaking of which, our classes have been really excellent so far. Global Strategy is taught by IMD newcomer Cyril Bouquet who will later be joined by IMD president John Wells. We have visited some interesting topics so far: how to choose the right internationalization strategy and how to build the best cross-border consensus in international M&A.

Managing Change has also been great. The first half of this course was taught by Anand Narasimhan, who used many movie clips to help illustrate techniques for creating a sense of urgency, building a guiding team, and defining an inspiring vision. Old favorite Maury Peiperl (whom we first met in Leading People in Organizations) is back now to finish up the course and focus on implementation. 

He began today's class, as he did in LPO, with a musical piece that he was able to tie into today's class objectives. I recognized it as I walked in as Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D--such a tour de force and one of my favorite classical musical works of all time.

A performance by Leonidas Kavakos with the Houston Symphony Orchestra first impressed upon me the incredible difference between classical music on CD and in the concert hall. The intensity of the piece was communicated not just by the sound waves coming from the 1692 "Falmouth" Stradivarius he plays, but also his body movements, breathing, and facial expressions. It was amazing.

Perhaps someday we too will be virtuosi of business--I'm working on it!

Two Fifths Down, Three Fifths to Go

Some friends back home make fun of the way I frequently divide things into fifths: probabilities, progress, alcoholic beverages . . . anything. Well today my pro-fifthism is justified as we are 40% done with our Mod I final exams. LPO went well yesterday as we analyzed a very interesting case about leading change in uncertain times. Today Accounting went . . . less well . . . but I was impressed during my studying by how much I had picked up in class. Stewart has managed to teach me a thing or two whether he likes it or not!

To help me tune out all the clackity-clack of laptops and calculators during the exams I have been listening to Mozart on my mp3 player. As Maury, my LPO professor, is a pianist, I listened to piano concerti (especially 21 and 23) and sonatas (especially 11 and 16) during the LPO exam. During Accounting I played operatic overtures. Given how much better I think (hope!) the LPO exam went, I think I'll return to the piano tomorrow.

Tomorrow's exam is Marketing. We have already received the case on which the exam will be based and most study groups are here in the Dungeons working feverishly to dissect it. Then tomorrow we will individually present our analyses and formulate marketing plans. I'm sad that marketing is coming to an end; it was an interesting class about everything from market research to branding to comunication and distribution of products. We learned much more methodical approaches to answering marketing questions (and that most business questions have at least some marketing relevance) than I'm used to in my "put out the fire" and "if the shoe fits, wear it" software startup experience. Indeed, marketing has turned out to be much more than just "tra la la."

What we have learned is just the tip of the marketing iceberg. IMD's objective isn't to train marketers; it's to train general managers to be familiar enough with marketing concepts to manage marketers well. I'm embarrassed and disappointed that my group received a barely passing grade--the lowest grade in the class--on our Marketing Plan, the key group project of the Marketing curriculum. However, I'm not here because I have all the answers; I'm here to learn and a key part of learning is failure. Tomorrow I will deliver a much better marketing plan during our exam because I have learned from the failure of our group project. More than just enhancing my grade, hopefully this will help Martin understand that he has succeeded as a professor as well. We got him a bottle of champagne for the last day of class, but I think he will feel more rewarded by our high performance. I hope so at least, as high performance is what I intend to deliver.

The Rite of Spring

As I mentioned last weekend, spring is in the air here in Lausanne. Or at least it was. Today, the first full day of spring, is cold and foggy with wet snow and high winds. That's no problem for me, though, as I'm planning to spend most of the day indoors anyway.

We have today and Saturday off from classes so I am working right now on my group's LPO paper on "Authenticity in Leadership." It is very in vogue to talk about authenticity as a given "must have" in Western leadership right now. However, some of my international colleagues have mixed feelings about it. In China, for example, where leaders have a more stoic style, authenticity could be seen as a weakness. This makes for a very interesting topic that we are analyzing from from three different perspectives: research in the popular press, our own LPO coursework, and our multicultural group members' experiences. There may be no hard and fast leadership rules (e.g., "A leader is this." or "A leader does that."), which is exactly why I came to IMD. My leadership experience has been in leading small (< 500 people), mostly homogenous organizations and I want to be aware of what issues are at play in larger, more diverse ones.

Another One Bites the Dust

Not only was it the #65 song of 1981, but Queen's Another One Bites the Dust is appropriate for today as well. No, not because of its driving bass line or its well timed injections of Brian May "Red Special" guitar riffs; rather because today we sadly bade adieu to our Leading People in Organizations course. Technically we still have a group paper to write and a final exam to take, so it isn't "over" per se, but gone are the case studies of extreme management methodologies, engaging lectures, and musical tie-ins to course themes.

When I decided to come to IMD, LPO was essentially what I had in mind, academically speaking. My leadership development prior to 2008 had been exclusively learning by doing, and I certainly learned a lot leading football (American) teams, university organizations, volunteer groups, and software companies. However, I was just doing what seemed to work and who was to say that that was optimal? Could it scale to larger organizations? Could it transfer to other industries? Would it work with multinational teams?

I thought it was probably naive to think that there were universal "best practices" in management but I at least wanted to study what others had done--in a variety of contexts--to augment my arsenal of leadership "tools" for the future. That is exactly what I found in LPO: systematic analysis of people-centric managment challenges in contexts as varied as European orchestras, New York investment banks, and Chinese manufacturers.

Maury, our professor--or perhaps "maestro" is a more appropriate term--brought much more to our lectures than just case studies and discussion leading; he also brought culture and class. This was driven home as he concluded our final session by reading us a poem, The Chambered Nautilus by Oliver Wendell Holmes. This left us in a pensive, reflective mood, which we combatted by surprising him with a gag parting gift: a toy keyboard! Although it is probably useless to him, hopefully he will at least take the meaning that we all thoroughly enjoyed his performance and many of us are hoping for an encore during electives.

Leading People in Organizations

I've made it to 1971 in my American popular music journey. This year marks the first major appearances of Rod Stewart, Carole King, the Bee Gees, Al Green, Bill Withers, solo Beatles artists, and many others. It also marks Tom Jones's surprising (to me), continued popularity.

As I find lyrics distracting, I've been listening to a great deal of classical music while working. It's been mostly Beethoven so far with some other classical-era composers mixed in. It still never ceases to amaze me how Beethoven's music can take me through such a range of human emotion and mood: joy, sorrow, anger, tenderness, triumph, loss, chaos, serenity . . . Who would have thought that notes scribbled on paper by a crotchety, deaf, old German would inspire such feelings in people two hundred years later? Incredible!

Maury Peiperl is a piano buff and opens each of our Leading People in Organizations (LPO) classes with a musical passage that relates in some way to our lecture. I've identified two of the three pieces correctly so far, which isn't bad for someone whose only classical music education has been concert attendance. Credit the special women in my life for being my dates to the Symphony and for introducing me to classical music in the first place.

Whereas our Leadership class focuses on deep personal introspection, LPO is about leading and motivating teams, managing HR issues, and creating situations/environments conducive to peak group performance. Tomorrow is our first LPO session in a while. After our intense week of Industry & Company Analysis/Economics last week, I am eager to return to this softer side of our studies.