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.

Everything's Bigger in Texas!

Today was a day of mixed emotions. It was our last day of ICA/E and the last day of the month. It's hard to believe that we've come far enough to have completed one of our courses already! That is one of the side effects of such an intense program; just blink and time has flown by. I'm glad to have completed ICA/E but we will all miss Ralf. The entire class pitched in and bought him a parting gift with which he seemed very pleased. Fortunately it's a small campus so we'll still see him around.

The last day of the month means that we all have new seating assignments starting on Monday. During January I was between a German and a Brazilian. During February I was on the end of a row beside Victor, from Peru. He and I had a great time together and I will miss his witty commentary next month. As a show of support for each other we wore similar t-shirts to class today. He wore a red España Toros shirt while I wore a red Houston Texans (Thanks, Stacy!) shirt. Together we were Los Hermanos del Toro Rojo (The Last Unicorn, anyone?); pictures will be posted on FaceBook soon.

During our discussion of sustainability economics, Ralf made the point that Americans were very wasteful. He noted first that someone in the third world will generate, on average, 149 times his bodyweight in waste during the course of his life. A European will generate over 1,000 times his bodyweight. An American, on the other hand, will generate almost 4,000 times his bodyweight. Then he remarked, "And look at Bryan; Americans are getting bigger all the time." Little did he know that no higher compliment could be paid to a member of the UMC--AH!

We finished the day with a Lebanese dinner organized by Zina and Ziad, our two Lebanese classmates. Ziad, a former professional basketball player, has been incredibly gracious in helping me learn more about my Syrian/Lebanese heritage. The dinner was wonderful; everyone was there including students, partners, faculty, and staff. I'm just sad I had to take off so soon!

There is a lot to do this weekend in preparation for classes, career services, and our first hardcore integrated exercise next week. My plan is to start the preparation on a good night's sleep--a rare luxury around here.

Ping Pong

Ping Pong has become a regular part of life here at IMD. After lunch it is a great way to get the blood pumping before afternoon classes. Most of the people who play are a lot better than I am, having played much longer and more consistently. This afternoon, though, I was briefly on fire. I absolutely nailed a forehand with just about everything I had. It felt good. ICA/E with Boschek felt less good. Oh well, I call it a net positive.

WalMart

ICA/E revolved around a WalMart case today. How did it grow to dominate its much larger rivals such as K-Mart? Why and how could it diversify to include Sam's Club? Why and how could it diversify into other countries? At what price to the small, rural town comes WalMart's strategy? The case was set in 1986. I always find these retroactive cases interesting because then we have the opportunity to see how things played out with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.

What really made the discussion personal for me is that Ralf chose Janet as the name of a hypothetical WalMart customer in Arkansas. I have an Aunt Janet who lives in Arkansas and is probably a WalMart customer. Ralf usually chooses Frieda or Greta for hypotheitcal names so good on him for proposing an accurate Arkansan name!

Since much of today's class was devoted to discussion instead of lecture, there weren't too many Ralfisms. As always, though, there were a few:

• Let's bring it on, duuuuuude!
• At this stage in your career it's important that you show leadership . . . and hold hands.
• Coffee breaks are so 70s anyway.
• I'd rather eat myself instead of letting someone else eat me.

The soup du jour today was cauliflower. Off to Finance!

Ralf Boscheck

It's funny that I chose to introduce our Industry and Company Analysis/Economics course in last night's blog because our prof was in fine form during this morning's class.

Some Boscheckisms:

• Why are we going into such detail? BECAUSE IT'S GOOD FOR YOU!
• You're tired? Why? Because you're only sleeping four hours a day? That's just half of what you're supposed to have. There, problem solved.
• At IMD, many professors will call this element "people." In economics we call it what it really is: "labor."
• Cartels rely on facilitating devices, such as long-term contracts or implicit agreements to get around the prisoner's dilemma. It's a lot like marriage, actually.
• Where did this great new technology come from? GERMANY, of course!
• This is not some tra la la like marketing; there is only ONE right answer.
• Why do you need a toilet break? I don't need a toilet break, but that's fine because I'm a hero.

This afternoon's class is Marketing. Tra la la, here we come!

Industry and Company Analysis / Economics

Aside: the soup du jour at IMD's restaurant was French onion today--delicious!

ICA/E is taught by Ralf Boscheck, a crazy (in a good way) German who throws chalk at students who ask inane questions. His first lecture was essentially the complete economic history of the world in four hours--step up to the fire hose and take a drink! He's very, well, German, very focused on economics and not concerned with "tra la la," as he puts it. "Tra la la" translates to "fluff" or "basically every other course being taught." He frequently refers to schools of thought by the business schools that support them. E.g., "The Chicago folks would say that capital is never an entry barrier but if you're at Harvard, you'd better not mention it because you'd be laughed off campus."

Each group is currently working on a detailed industry analysis and company analysis for this class; my group was assigned electricity generation for our industry. Half the group has been burning the midnight oil doing industry research for the past two weeks. I am part of the second half, which will focus on a specific company in a specifc segment of that industry, analyzing its position and making recommendations. Our section gets under way next week.

The major take-aways so far from this course have been:

• Substitutability: how easy it would be to substitute your company's service, suppliers, distributers, customers, etc. affects the attractiveness of any market.
• How to identify and define key success factors for companies in a given market segment
• How to delineate a company's assets, capabilities, and systems to analyze competitive advantage

Although I'm loving IMD's focus on development of soft skills (one of its most significant differentiators from other programs), it is great to be paying attention to classic business hard skills as well. I've really never done this kind of analysis before and IMD provides tremendous support through digital access to millions of articles, books, reports, and other publications. Our Information Center is led by John Evans (Welsh) who, along with running a first class operation, is also an oenophile. Detailed data on the German renewable energry industry is great and all, but tips on places to buy wine around here would be for more valuable!