Thank goodness for the 80s!

The mid-’70s were a low point for American popular music. This period marked the exit of folk and rock and roll while disco and harder rock had yet to hit their respective strides. In the vacuum between there was . . . a bunch of generic-sounding R&B and soft rock, bleh. Seriously, if I hear any more Barry Manilow I may strangle someone. And Paul McCartney, your knighthood should be stripped for besmirching your reputation as you did with Wings. The Eagles, anyone who has seen The Big Lebowski knows how I feel about them.

Don’t get me wrong; there was definitely some great music being made; it just wasn’t all that popular–according to Billboard, at least. This is perplexing because it’s not as if America’s taste took a sabbatical. Look at the Academy Award’s for Best Picture during that period: The Godfather, The Sting, The Godfather II, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Rocky, Annie Hall (should have been Star Wars, of course, but Annie Hall was still a great choice) . . . not exactly a shabby line-up. Oh well, at least this period saw the rise of Queen.

Around 1978 things started picking back up. Disco really found itself and began churning out the iconic songs we still associate with it today. New rock bands began popping out of the woodwork. And hey, Grease; you can’t beat that. 1979 continued the momentum and the stage was set for the fabulous music of the ’80s. What could explain this resurgence of musical quality? Let’s see, was there anything important that happened around this timeframe? Hmm. Oh, hey, that’s right, I was born! I’m not drawing any conclusions–just throwing it out there . . .

Hassin 2 – Virus 0

For the second time this year I felt the beginning of a cold coming on. Unfortunately this time it was on Tuesday, just before our Integrated Exercise was to begin on Thursday. Given that the coming days would be intense and sleepless, I knew I needed to beat this thing or the IE would go badly for me and my group. Tuesday and Wednesday nights I made sure to sleep at least seven hours. I also drank plenty of fluids and stocked up on immunosupportive foods. As it did earlier this year, my immune system came through. Although I did become a little stuffy one day, I didn’t experience any major symptoms and my performance was never impaired. Strong like bull!

The IE was something. So as not to spoil any of the surprises for next year’s class I won’t go into much detail but the basic premise was that on Thursday each group was given a challenging business problem to solve in 48 hours. We had to address accounting, finance, marketing, operations, and other areas in our solutions. Each group presented its solution on Saturday to a random pair of critical faculty members.

It was intense. Channeling seven exhausted people from different countries and with different professional backgrounds to solve such a broad problem in such a short amount of time was a real challenge. Tensions were high in our group but I was pleased with the quality of our deliverable. The faculty found several holes in our ideas (I would have been disappointed if they hadn’t!) which will help drive our approach to solving such problems in the future.

After presenting and defending our plan, I surprised our group with a bottle of champagne I had squirreled away for this express purpose. We popped it open (Who says 10 AM is too early for champagne??) and spent several hours debriefing our performance, process, and group dynamics. The discussion was heated at times but I think we all learned from it. These learnings can’t be captured in a textbook and are one of the key reasons I came to IMD, where such discussions are not only encouraged but required in many cases.

Saturday night I went out for dinner and drinks with my fellow students and we did an admirable job of keeping school discussion off the table. It was nice just to kick back and connect with each other on a personal level. The drinks didn’t hurt either.

Now it’s time to do some real work: my taxes!

It’s Snowing!!!!

As it has been so sunny and warm the past few weeks, you can imagine my surprise when I woke up this morning to . . . SNOW! As is my usual routine, I opened my curtains to see how the mountains looked as the sun began peeking up over the horizon. However, there was no sun and there were no mountains. Instead there was limited visibility and a lot of white stuff flying around. Having lived in Houston for the past 10 years, I had almost forgotten what it looked like, but there was no mistaking it; it was snowing.

Although the sun eventually made a foreceful appearance, preventing any snow from really sticking, the flurries were beautiful and lasted well into the afternoon. While I would have preferred to take the opportunity to practice eXtreme Ping Pong, IMD’s class schedule had plenty to offer as well. Last week’s end of Industry and Company Analysis / Economics gave way to a new class, which started today: Innovation and Product Design. Taught by American professor David Robertson, this course is all about innovation at every level of an organization: product, process, business model, etc. Its goals are two-fold: 1. to teach us how to innovate ourselves, and 2. to teach us how to manage innovation and create a corporate culture that fosters creativity. Our first class was very interesting and focused on individual class members’ experiences in innovation/design. We won’t meet again for a while but come April we will begin competing in a school-wide innovation competition–fun!

This afternoon featured an interesting Finance class. Instead of sitting in the amphitheater trying to absorb formula after formula, we took part in a team-based exercise. Half of our study groups were companies seeking debt financing while the other half were banks looking to lend. Each bank was set up with a company and was given a time limit to reach a deal that worked well for both parties. If no such deal was reached, companies could go to the market and see if other banks would offer them more favorable terms.

My group (bbb7) was paired with our nextdoor neighbors (Magic 8), who were prepared, reasonable, and committed to finding a mutually agreeable deal. Although our ultimate loan package was a little unorthodox, both parties were happy with the terms by the end of the day. We celebrated together with shots of Slovakian liqueur and headed home to rest up before tomorrow’s Integrative Exercise.

I Am a Tug of Warrior!

As predicted, the mighty Rice Owls have retaken the national #4 ranking on their path to an inevitable #1 seed and College World Series championship. In honor of this ascent, I hereby devote my second consecutive post to sports. This time, instead of focusing on NCAA sports, I am focusing on the annual MBA Tournament, a multi-sport competition between European MBA schools. As we are the the smallest program by far, IMD is to the MBAT as Rice is to the NCAA. Hence, I expect no less from IMD than total victory.

I will be coaching the three volleyball events (indoor 6s, beach 2s, and beach 4s) and the tug of war. Recruiting for volleyball was no problem but the tug of war required some extra effort. Following is an excerpt from the email I sent to our class:

“In the interest of full disclosure, you should know that this won’t be a cake walk recreational event. Other teams with larger student pools from which to choose will likely be bigger and stronger than our team. But I’ve never lost in Tug of War and I don’t intend to start this May.

We will tug smarter, not harder, than our opposition. We will destroy them through use of the IMD secret double palm rope technique. We will fortify ourselves every day with bananas, apples, and glorious, glorious desserts. Well, weekdays at least. We will fortify ourselves with [fighting] spirits as well. We will unleash a furious rope tuggery the likes of which the MBAT has never seen and will never see again. We will rain down victory after victory upon our opponents until they beg for our sweet, terrible mercy. The futility of their struggle will sustain us as the fly sustains the spider.

This is not for the faint of heart, but join me and together we will attain the highest glory in the history of the universe . . . MBAT Tug of War Champions.”

It had the desired effect. We now have more than enough for a team. Some select responses:

From Bevan, New Zealander:

“My Lord and Master.
I will tug with the fury of a thousand sheep.
With feet rooted like the mighty Kauri tree.
With hair flowing in the vigorous breeze like a B-movie actor.
Oh, I will tug like my very Economics grade depends on it.”

From Memed, Turk:

“Convinced! I’m in, sign me up!
Ask the French why they have a saying in French “Fort comme un Turc”
I’m ready to unleash some Ottoman explosive fury that Euros seem to have forgotten a bit too quick.
Anybody got some face paint? ”

This sounds like too much fun. Now if only we didn’t have all this work to distract us from training!

Rice Baseball Rules!

After dropping two to nationally ranked, perennial powerhouse Long Beach State, Rice baseball has won five in a row and is back on track. While I am always excited for Rice to make a trip to the College World Series (six times in the last nine years) those who know me are aware that I hold our team accountable to a slightly different metric of success: how many times we beat UT each year! Last night our boys did exactly that with a 10-4 trouncing of the Longhorns at Minute Maid Park. Coming into the game UT was ranked #4 while Rice had slipped to #6; I’ll hope to see those rankings reversed when the new poll results are released on Monday.

As a former Rice student-athlete myself, obviously I’m biased in supporting Rice, and it’s certainly easy to hop on the band wagon and support a team that wins most of its games every year. However, I will argue that there are a few things that truly do set Rice apart. First and foremost is the quality of our student-athletes. Having roomed with one of Rice’s best pitchers of all time my freshman year (4-1-3), I have witnessed first hand the well rounded, intelligent, high-caliber individuals Rice puts on its roster.

Second, Rice baseball is an inspirational story. 15 years ago, we had nothing; we were a no-name program in the middle of a region already crowded with talent (UT, UH, A&M, Baylor, LSU, etc.). As the smallest school in the NCAA, we would never have athletic funding pouring in from alumni and supporters. Then came head coach Wayne Graham, who propeled us to the national scene with incredible recruiting and a winning vision. It has been amazing to watch Rice move from an off-the-radar team to a Cinderella story to a David that is always counted among the Goliaths of college baseball.

It will be tough this year to be so far away from the action–especially as I follow Rice’s CWS progress from our Discovery Trip in Tanzania. However, it will take much more than several hours time difference and several thousand miles to prevent me from supporting the Owls. To Rice Be True!

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.

Sustainability

I’m not sure if it is intentional or not (I suspect it is, as every part of this program has been planned out in excruciating detail.) but over the past two weeks our courses have taken on a sustainability theme.

In Entrepreneurship we have been studying cases of social entrepreneurs, startups that help people and/or the environment while still generating profits. In our presentation skills workshop, one group presented, received feedback, and then re-presented a new system for measuring the net social value added to society by businesses. In POM we have studied how one of the world’s largest power companies was able to develop and implement a social responsibility plan with very little time and budgetary requirement. Tomorrow in Economics we will analyze the economics of trade, development, and sustainability.

It’s great the way it all comes together from several different angles. Because this is a general management program it is important for us to understand how a key goal (in this case, social responsibility) can be accomplished by different business functions–individually or all together.

Furthermore it is gratifying to me personally that IMD emphasizes sustainability. As anyone who has read my first blog entry will know, sustainability is very important to me and I’m pleased that this program does more than pay it lip service. I can see on their faces that there is very genuine interest and inspiration in my classmates too. We are not here just to learn how to “get rich.” We are here to learn how to be more effective at making the world a better place. It’s a hell of a challenge, but it is worth it.

Production and Operations Management

American professor Corey Billington teaches our Production and Operations Management class where we never know exactly what we’re going to get. Our first few sessions were focused on supply chain optimization but now we have transitioned into driving innovation. Today’s case is about one of the world’s largest power & gas companies which created an award-winning Corporate Social Responsibility strategy in only one week. Naturally they had some help from IMD.

As a former HP executive, Corey has a great deal of industry experience to share, which he does by providing “management tips” in each of his lectures. I have found these very useful as they’re a part of the curriculum that you can’t read in any book. His greatest contribution today, though, has been quoting the Major General song from Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance–“with many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse!” It takes me back to 5th Grade, when I was the Pirate King in our class’s production. No time to reminisce, though; the coffee break is over so it’s back to business!

Cigars and Porto

Cigars and port go together like ramalamalamalamalama-dingdong. Tonight’s meeting of the IMD Cigar Society was a wonderful, relaxing experience with 15 or so current and former IMD students. I puffed on a Monte Cristo while catching up with classmates and meeting alumni. Although I broke my rule of never drinking vintage port younger than I am, it was the right call. The Ramos Pinto 1982 was delicious and full of fruit. The Taylor Fladgate 1985 was darker, richer, and had an incredibly long finish. To quote my friend Ron Moore, those blokes sure know how to make port!

By the end of the night I had melted into my chair and was ready to roll home–unfortunately “home” is up a steep hill, so rolling was hard. This kind of sublime evening was very welcome before what promises to be a very intense week.

Many thanks to Daniel, a German classmate, who helped me with my smoke ring technique. Who cares about accounting? If I make it out of this program with improved ping pong skills and the ability to blow Gandalf-like smoke rings, I’ll call it a success–an expensive, hard-earned success.