Wrapping up February

At 5.30pm, I stood up from my seat and picked up my name plate. Tomorrow the class changes seating plan, as it does at the start of every month.

To close off the month, this afternoon we had two talks from distinguished businessmen, 'executives-in-residence'. One of them is the former CEO of Tetra Pak, Nic Shreiber. He was an IMD MBA about 30 years ago and a former partner of McKinsey. A very unpresupposing man, he earned the class's genuine respect, not just that of a captain of industry.

I took 3 lessons from his talk. First, harmony in your career. It's ok to work flat out 24/7, so long as you understand that 24/7 doesn't leave a lot of hours for anything else. If you want to have a family or any personal pursuits, bear that in mind.

The second lesson for me, was that power is increased inversely to its use. Or, if you like, using power diminishes it. The CEO of a $10bn company should rely on more subtle leadership - and we've spent a lot of time learning about that subject over the past 8 weeks.

Finally, in paradoxes lie opportunities. For example - and this is not one he gave - how can you save energy and increase the temperature of your home? Easy, insulation. Ok, now apply it to everything else in life. The paradox, not the insulation.

February made the course increasingly 'real'. Already we've had a number of graded projects and papers. The first was the Leadership paper, exploring the dynamics of the study groups we've been working in. Next, the Industry and Competition Analysis project. Finally, an individual paper on predicting, explaining and influencing the behaviour of individuals within organisations. With tight deadlines, it's hard to concentrate on devoting a lot of energy to our start-up projects - real companies in need of business brains.

Amongst all this, there's been a tiny bit of skiing and walking in the mountains. The first of a series of Sunday night films - Blood Diamond - screened in the auditorium. The broad theme running through them all is Africa in advance of the Discovery Expedition in June to South Africa. This coming Sunday we'll be seeing My name is Tsotsi.

Then there's the MBA Olympics. Well, the event, held at HEC in Paris, is not until May but I agreed to join the organising committee headed up by Ole (Danish), along with Tom (German) and Paul (Canadian). I'm responsible for sports. In other words, of the 90 people in class, plus however many spouses, I need to pull together teams for all the various sports. Sounds easy. You haven't seen my spreadsheet. But I'm grateful for the effort of the team captains.

What else?

Well, it's been a year since I left my job in Maidenhead. I'm still not regretting it. We had a session on power naps and other ways of sustaining your personal performance. I was picked out of the hat, along with four others - Henry from China, Fumi from Japan, Greg from Australia and Stéphane from Canada - to go to INSEAD in April for 3 days to compete in the European Business School Case Challenge. Careers planning is underway with draft number 783 due in soon; plus I had an online chat with a potential employer at the MBA Online Career Forum: he happened also to be an IMD MBA, from 1994. And... Perrine and I are still together.

Tomorrow is the start of the 48-hour graded integrative exercise, pulling together everything we've learned so far. Next week we have projects to hand in for Marketing and Economics. The week after we have a day-long Finance exercise. A few days later, the final version of our Leadership papers are due. There's also an Operations project; and an Economics 'quiz'. Then revision and exams. No doubt some surprises along the way, too.

Getting a career off the ground... or a business

It’s only the second day of February, 10 months from graduation day, but at 8am Careers Services have us in the auditorium for a 4-hour session to think about getting a job. The intention is to start working out what skills and experiences we have to offer and what our ideal jobs are.

If we contemplate what we really want to be doing, it’s often a far cry from we’ve been doing. For example, I’ve been doing marketing in the financial services industry in the UK. What I’d like to do - possibly - is to set up a business serving the tourism industry in Argentina. What’s the link?

Well, it’s a bit like the theory of six degrees of separation between you and anyone else in the world. Except in this case, it’s only 3 steps. Maximum. So, one option is to do the whole stretch in one leap. It’s more advisable, however, to get at least one common area, be it sector, role or region.

This afternoon, we have a class on entrepreneurship where we investigate the case of a MBA candidate (from another school), who presented his business plan for his entrepreneurship elective, thinking of commercialising the idea in an industry he had at best little knowledge of. He was torn to shreds by the panel. The point is, that Venture Capitalists are more interested in the team than the idea. Clearly, the opportunity must be fairly attractive but the VCs will not buy into the best money-making concept in the world if the wrong person is doing it.

So our MBA went off to get experience at a big name software company, learning everything he needed, while thoroughly re-writing his business plan. This time he attracted the funding he needed and got the company off the ground.

Well, it would have got off the ground if it hadn’t been for a French postal service strike lasting 2.5 months, in which 80% of his catalogues were forever lost. Unable to deal with the backlog, the postal service simply burned all commercial post stuck in the system! The business was all but dead. The money spent. No customers.

But the first 10% of catalogues had got through and produced great results. So he managed to get the same investors to plough another few million to relaunch. The long and the short of it is that there were other critical moments in the history of the company but that today it is listed on the NASDAQ and it’s worth several billion dollars. Our professor of entrepreneurship was one of the original investors. Well, it took 12 years to get a return but it was a huge gain.

Winter hits IMD

In a quick break from this morning’s class on ‘leading people in organisations’, where I’ve discovered that my main motivation is ‘Power’, followed closely by ‘Autonomy and Growth’, I’m taking the opportunity for a quick update...

The storm that struck northern Europe a few days ago has finally reached Switzerland. At last, the snow is coming down. My car this morning had about 10cm of snow on it. It’s really winter now and the temperature is dropping. Fast. Minimum forecast temperature in Geneva for Friday is -21C! About -10C during the day.

This is great news for the many ski resorts in the area. It’s clear that the Christmas holiday season was bad for all the businesses whose livelihoods depend on 4 or 5 months from December to April. With little snow on the slopes, many people chose to cancel their trips to the mountains. Many of the pistes have been brown for much of the last month. For day trips, it’s fine. We’ve been up to Verbier a couple of times over night and found enough decent snow to have a good time.

Tonight I’m meeting the start-up company that I’ll be helping over the next 5 months . I’m not sure what they do - other than that it’s a hi-tech company looking for US$5m - are what they want from our little group. However, they are going to get some 500 hours of help from 5 IMD MBAs. For free. We have about 35 years’ experience between us across a number of industries and disciplines.

The start-up project, just one of the assignments keeping us in the ‘Dungeon’ every night till midnight (or so), was one of the main reasons why I chose to come to IMD rather than take up one of the other offers I received. The school’s strapline is Real World. Real Learning. It’s cheesy but true and a clear differentiator.