Fresh thoughts from MBA Faculty and Invited Guests in the last week.
“BS can kill you …” - Communications Class
“A manager gets the employees he deserves …” - Leading People Class
“Silent Disagreement is the worse enemy in a team …” - Leading People Class
“For a start-up dilution is nominal, running out of business is terminal …” - Entrepreneurship Class
and the best one so far …
“Managers are lazy by definition … ” - Economics Class
Quote of the day: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with a team”.
Camera On. Action. A japanese football club owner, a german engineer, a french finance controller, a greek high school principal, a norwegian finance lead, a canadian operations manager and a nigerian transaction manager are in a room with a survival exercise to complete in a short amount of time … after 1h of discussion they have only managed to complete 20% of the task … we need to decide on the 15 most useful tools to survive in the Arctic
10minutes left to the deadline ….”We need to take the maple syrup!” - “We need to take the matches!” - “Please stop interrupting me everytime!” - “Get to the point” … the tension is running high and we still don’t have the solution. Soon the time is up, the survival exercise is over and we have not completed it in time. We all wonder if it wouldnt have been easier to do this exercise on our own, instead of taking all this time to do it with a team …
In real life, we would all be dead frozen in the Arctic … thank God this is just the 1st simulation of the year. After a bit of calculations we discover that the average of the score of the team after the exercise was better than the average of the individual scores before. This means we made smarter decisions about survival in the Arctic when working in a team… even if none of us was an expert on this topic.
… all this talk of Maple syrup made us hungry, time for Pizza!
Today we did a review of 4000 years of political economy in 4 hours … I was curious to see how Economy and Finance will be taught in MBA programs this year … as it seems that the theories of the day have proven insufficient to avert the current economic crisis. But we stopped at 1900 … looking forward to hear part 2 tomorrow morning … yes, you got it right …. we also have class on Saturdays 
Here a picture to follow-up the story on “People of the Corridor”
For all of you MAC fans … I was told last year there was just more than 10% of MAC users among the students , but this year its almost 30% of the incoming MBA class coming with a computer decorated with the illumined apple …
Vahid & Joe ... another ex-colleague from Shell ! Class is busy setting up the laptops and email accounts.
More interestingly - it was our first encounter with the other participants, their wives and kids who were all invited for lunch. There are people from all around the world - and a full contingent for the BRIC Countries (Brasil, Russia, India and China!) - but not more than 5 participants from any given country …so its an incredibly diverse group.
I found myself explaining several times that I am Swiss citizen, but from Iranian background, living until now in London, but working in Malaysia, and married to a German, who was actually born in Afghanistan. I really tried to make it as simple as possible but it was just confusing people even more … then I realised that there were many others that had such stories around me. … It reminded me of an analogy. If you see the world as a large house, and each country is a room, there are people in each of the rooms and occasionally they travel to the other rooms, but then go back to their own room. But I feel I dont belong to one room only, I am one of the people of the corridor …
PS: No progress with the readings …
2009 will really start on Wednesday 7th January at 10am for me and 89 other classmates at IMD for the first days of our MBA. Still 3 days to go and I cant wait for it!
Just came back from an inspiring week at Changing Times - according to David Henderson its the future Davos of young leaders - was great hanging out with old friends and also helping out with the transition of the organising team. Very refreshing week before start of business school. As usual i added lots of to-dos to my evergrowing wish/action list.
The first to-do … start blog/twitter … all credits to David H. for giving me the final push to start in the blog world. It really only took my 5 minutes to setup my blog on Wordpress .. but then another hour was spent fine-tuning and adding all the cool plugins … Dont really know where this blog will go - so please help me out.
Other to-dos from Changing Times Conference:
IMD MBA Students favorite companions in December ...
I should actually be finishing my readings instead of blogging … still need to read 100 pages of the “World is Flat”, 170 pages of “Bound Together”, 4 chapters of “Financial Analysis” and complete 5 career preparation exercises - all that before Wednesday 10AM …
