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30 Jan 2017, 22:26
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31 Jan 2017, 13:00
| FROM IMD Admissions Blog: On culture, values and connectivity |
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The first two weeks are in the rearview mirror and although there is plenty of work on my desk that needs to get done, now is a good time to take a step back and reflect a bit on what happened so far. Tuesday evening and a cup of tea for a moment of quiet introspection. At this point, it’s of course too early to make a proper assessment of the program’s impact on my own personal development. The start-up projects have just kicked off and things are only starting to gain momentum. However, what can be mentioned at this stage is the continued emphasis on the importance of personal values and how much we are encouraged to use them as a moral compass when dealing with ambiguity over the coming months and beyond. Most of us here are looking at the long-term game after the program and are not keen on going for a “deferred life plan”, a concept against which Randy Komisar – partner at one of Silicon Valley’s most established VC firms and author of the “Monk and the Riddle” – warns every aspiring entrepreneur. We all understand that business can be a powerful driver of change, but succeeding at something you don’t care about and is not aligned with your own personal values, failing to express who you are, can only fulfil you so much. Recognizing one’s own core values is not just an exercise of self-actualization though. The world is becoming a more complex and confusing place. A more stressful place also. Today’s individuals – and by extent, their businesses – operate in a world where geographical boundaries have become less relevant and where different cultures, religions and beliefs are now more closely intertwined. In this globalized world, characterized by an international system that is heading towards multipolarity where no single great power will be able to claim world domination, complexity and unpredictability are on the rise. The landscape is continuously changing. Rapidity and flexibility in decision making are becoming increasingly important. We are moving into what Ian Bremmer, an influential political scientist and founder of Eurasia Group, calls the “G-Zero world”: a world without clear leadership that just witnessed the end of the Pax Americana. The guard rails of the global system expose their cracks, faith in others is fading, multilateral institutions are confronted with limited and dwindling legitimacy. Structures that were put in place to absorb shocks in the event of a conflict have been weakened. The very fact that the world is sliding towards multipolarity and multiethnicity implies that the ability to communicate and exchange across cultural frontiers gains increased relevance. Being able to communicate and exchange effectively while bridging the gap between religions and ethnicities is probably one of our single biggest challenges in a globalized society; a society that has effectively rendered irrelevant geographical distances but did not erase our cultural differences. Human societies are closer than they were a century or even a decade ago, yet they are still very different. The collision of cultures in this reduced space is at the base of various tensions around the world. Although divergent opinions and perspectives are a given between individuals coming from different cultural cradles, and can actually be considered a requirement for the emergence of a constructive relationship (otherwise, if we all think exactly alike, there is no real need to communicate and exchange), opposing views can be difficult to reconcile. Finding a middle ground requires a common language. Values are that language in the sense that they form the roots out of which every cultural arborescence grows, linking different societies beyond their conspicuous and evident expressions. In other words: values are cross-cultural links; the common ground on which individuals from very different and sometimes even diametrically opposed backgrounds meet each other. By committing to a recognized set of values, we make it possible for our counterparts to assess and understand a part of ourselves. We make it possible to connect. Consequently, identifying our own personal values in order to reflect and act upon them not only helps us move into a direction that is aligned with who we are, laying the foundation for a path that could deliver the kind of success – both personal and professional – we intuitively aim for but oftentimes feel inclined to avoid taking because of external factors; it also allows others to connect with us. Business always had and will continue to have a dialectal nature that requires similarities and differences. Correspondingly, the increased flexibility required by our changing environment can only make sense and work if it is set against the background of clearly visible and shared values. In many ways, a class of 90 students representing 45 nationalities and challenged as teams is a miniature version of what is – in my opinion – increasingly required in today’s world: a global generation that thrives on connectivity, embracing different cultural norms while promoting overarching values. Lucien  
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03 Feb 2017, 06:00
| FROM IMD Admissions Blog: Traditional Polar Bear Jump |
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Today’s guest entry is by our Jordanian participant, Mohammad Alsele. One of the reasons I chose IMD to do my MBA was its focus on leadership where it consistently ranks high on this scale. Our Leadership stream started last week, and it’s been an exciting learning process. One of the concepts that came up during the lectures is that our MBA experience is an immersive one that is uncommon in the sense that the personal and professional lives of all the cohort are closely linked and integrative. We are forming professional teams for the coursework we have, and at the same time forming social groups around various interests and affinities. Such an experience might not happen in other schools where cohorts are considerably larger. One of those social and affinity creating activities is a tradition that was started few years ago, which we call the Polar Bear Jump, where we take a plunge in the cold waters of Lac Léman during January. It’s something I never imagined myself doing, and was quite skeptical about taking part in it when I first found about it. I’m not an experienced swimmer and was worried something might go wrong because of the thermal shock. However, I liked the idea of trying something new, after all, this year is about new learnings and experiences; I shouldn’t miss out on any chance to experience something new and exciting that will create memories with my classmates and develop our bonds. While organizing the details of the jump, I voiced my concerns but received lots of support and encouragement. Some colleagues took similar dives in the past and a couple of others are trained life guards. They were available to take care of the less experienced ones should the need arise During the discussion of the jump, came the idea of increasing awareness of environmental changes and creating a fundraiser to support real polar bears. Their natural habitat is shrinking and that reduces their opportunities to feed and reproduce. Again, there was an overwhelming support from the class to the idea, and I realize that despite the diverse backgrounds that each of us bring to the program we have a lot in common. Awareness and the desire to give back to communities are positive traits that we share. The date for our jump was set and we were lucky that it was one of the warmer days of January. We met at IMD campus, all excited and looking forward to a new experience, some of our colleagues and partners joined us for moral support and some partners even took part with us. You could sense the high level of energy by the lake side on that day, our shouts and screams echoed all around. When the moment came, I hesitated for a few moments but I had trust in my colleagues and that nothing would go wrong. I took the plunge and it was an amazing feeling of euphoria and – may I add – a little pride. I did something new that I never imagined doing. Here’s a glimpse at the jump! My personal learnings from this experience are not to shy away from new experiences and that our motivation is within ourselves. Mohammad  
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06 Feb 2017, 00:00
| FROM IMD Admissions Blog: A little bit of this and a little bit of that |
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Hope all of you are doing well and are enjoying reading about our journey as much as we are enjoying sharing it with you. As I reflect on the 3 weeks that I have gone by, I feel very time warped as I can’t remember what happened when… So much happens everyday.. Yet I also realize that we are already in February and time has just flown by. We have been assigned our respective groups and have had a chance to meet the founders of our startup projects. It is all picking up pace now! We had the first entrepreneurship class last week by Prof Benoit Leleux and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The beauty of these classes lies not in the fact that all the cases discussed in class have been written by him but that he has been involved in every case. Learning doesn’t get any more real world than this! This class has added a whole new dimension to my approach towards analyzing businesses. It has made me cognizant of the fact that as environment changes, businesses can evolve drastically and hence it is imperative for a business plan to be an evolving story than a static one. I have also begun to realize why VC’s focus so much on teams. Another exciting event of last week has been our leadership experiential. It seems me to that this is the most well-guarded secret of the IMD program. All my questions to several alumni in the past about what this involves have always gone unanswered. So, I have to keep up with the tradition and I won’t share much about what the experiential entailed but more about our learning. Involving a series of team based activities, the exercise is about looking at self in a group setting. We get to reflect about own behaviors both positive and negative from our own analysis first and then based on feedback from others. These exercises are like a mirror which show us who we really are. We get back to the point of reflection again as we think about what we can do to improve and evolve as better leaders. Unfortunately, this unique experience and many others morph into some form of assignments eventually which need to be finished so that they can be graded. Speaking of assignments makes me realize that there is a whole lot of reading to be done for next week and fretting too much or thinking too much about it doesn’t change the outcome! I was told by students from last year how it could get like a pressure cooker in here in the first half and now I am starting to realize what they truly meant. Priyanka  
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06 Feb 2017, 06:00
| FROM IMD Admissions Blog: Photo Blog – 1st Leadership Experiential |
These photos have been carefully selected to ensure no secrets are given away to spoil the surprise elements for future generations of IMD MBA participants!  
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09 Feb 2017, 08:00
| FROM IMD Admissions Blog: New website launch |
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We are happy to announce that the full-time IMD MBA Progam has a new website that has just gone live! We hope you’ll like the new structure and content as you explore our program, and look forward to hearing your feedback. While the website is a great starting place, we are always happy to welcome you to the campus so that you can discover the atmosphere for yourself and talk about your profile and options. This month, our official Campus Visit will take place on Monday, 27th February, 10h – 17h30 This visit is a chance to get a tour of the campus, attend a program presentation and Q&A session, have lunch with our MBAs and observe a Startup class in the afternoon. However, if visiting Lausanne is not an option, we would also be happy to welcome you online for a virtual visit on Thursday, 23rd February at 15h or Tuesday, 7th March at 12h. Registration for any of these events is available here. Hope to have the chance to meet you, Suzy  
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14 Feb 2017, 06:00
| FROM IMD Admissions Blog: Photo blog – February class |
A few photos of the MBAs working on a class assignment…  
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15 Feb 2017, 15:00
| FROM IMD Admissions Blog: One month in… |
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I was told quite a few times by IMD and other MBA alumni to savor every moment of my year here at IMD because it’s going to be the best year of my life and it will be over before I know it. Now that we’re at the one month mark, I can’t quite decide if the first month flew by in a blink of an eye or if it feels like I’ve been here for a lot longer than that. In many ways, our time here seems to have gone by in a flash especially when you sit down and think of how much we’ve done. The sheer amount of material we have covered in Accounting, Entrepreneurship, Finance, Marketing, Leadership, Economics, and Operations classes is quite staggering and as I write this I still can’t believe we’ve gone through it all. Not to mention the extracurricular activities we’ve done including leadership experiential days in the French mountains, meeting with our assigned startup companies, executive coaches, and psychoanalysts. Needless to say, the pace here is not a leisurely one and every hour counts so prioritizing and budgeting your time is of the essence. At the same time, it feels like we’ve been here for much longer that just a month. I think this is because of the personal element and how deep the bonds between the different classmates have become. As you walk up and down the halls of IMD and see the MBA students socializing, joking around, and helping each other on assignments you get the sense that we are a big family that has known each other for a very long time. This isn’t a huge surprise given the small 90-person class size and how much time we spend with each other. But it is still wonderful to see that we can connect so deeply even though we come from 44 different countries and pretty much every industry out there. We were recently told that you will learn as much or more from your classmates than from your actual professors at IMD. There is no doubt our faculty is world class and I have been nothing but impressed by their teaching but our classmates with their average of 7 years of experience in different industries all over the world are deep wells of knowledge and experience that I have already started to tap into. We are capitalizing on this by creating industry clusters that range from Finance and Consulting to Pharma and NGOs so that those interested in those industries can meet with experts from the program and engage with alumni and others at target companies. As I reflect back and look forward to the rest of the year, there isn’t much to complain about except that the program is very much frontloaded for the first 4-6 months. The high workload can make getting away for a quick weekend somewhere nearby or even enjoying Lausanne and getting to know your classmates outside of the IMD bubble a little difficult. That being said, it’s nothing crazy and it does teach you the art of balancing priorities and budgeting your time extremely well. After all, it makes sense for a 1-year MBA to be that much more intense than a 2-year program. Til next time! Mo  
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16 Feb 2017, 08:28
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17 Feb 2017, 03:00
| FROM IMD Admissions Blog: An insight into enrepreneurship |
Today’s guest entry is written by one of our Swiss MBA participants, Philipp Bächtold, who is part of the startup team working with loanboox. His team members are Rahul Adhyapok (Indian), Valeria Cuevas (Mexican), Kuniyuki Furuta (Japanese), Sathappan Sathappan (Singaporean), and Chen Wang (Chinese). Within the entrepreneurship stream, we are given the opportunity to work with a start-up from Switzerland. We chose loanboox – a very innovative fintech start-up from Zurich which won IMD’s start-up competition in 2016. loanboox is already the biggest P2P financing platform in Switzerland and was named by Swisscom and the think-tank E-Foresight as one of the 10 most relevant Swiss fintech start-ups. loanboox’s platform went live in September 2016 and has since become very prominent in the press after it reached 1 bn CHF traffic in its first four months, outperforming even the most optimistic expectations, as you can read on https://www.finews.ch. Working with loanboox under these circumstances is thus an exceptional opportunity to get insight into the world of entrepreneurship. For those of you who don’t know loanboox yet, the start-up basically wants to become the preferred player in the business-to-business direct lending market, matchmaking institutional borrowers and municipal lenders in Switzerland. Local governments can find potential lenders through loanboox’s online platform, which makes the financing process easier, more transparent and secure and less expensive, by eliminating the costs for brokers. This is a truly disruptive business model. So far, the Swiss market has been highly responsive to the platform launch, having a market share in Switzerland of nearly 20% in the targeted segment already, leading to the ambition to tackle additional markets. And this is where we IMD MBAs come in. After a kick-off meeting with the founders at IMD and a subsequent visit to loanboox’s office in Zurich, we are now ready to support their ambitions. The expectations and pace have been high but so has been our learning curve. Only one person in our international team of six has prior knowledge of the financial markets. A crash course from Bloomberg and chats with various experts at IMD have been inevitable. Preparing immediately implementable and actionable items are the deliverables we are expected to work out until April. Exciting times are surely ahead of us! Philipp  
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20 Feb 2017, 01:00
| FROM IMD Admissions Blog: An insight into entrepreneurship |
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Today’s guest entry is written by one of our Swiss MBA participants, Philipp Bächtold, who is part of the startup team working with loanboox. His team members are Rahul Adhyapok (Indian), Valeria Cuevas (Mexican), Kuniyuki Furuta (Japanese), Sathappan Sathappan (Singaporean), and Chen Wang (Chinese). Within the entrepreneurship stream, we are given the opportunity to work with a start-up from Switzerland. We chose loanboox – a very innovative fintech start-up from Zurich which won IMD’s start-up competition in 2016. loanboox is already the biggest P2P financing platform in Switzerland and was named by Swisscom and the think-tank E-Foresight as one of the 10 most relevant Swiss fintech start-ups. loanboox’s platform went live in September 2016 and has since become very prominent in the press after it reached 1 bn CHF traffic in its first four months, outperforming even the most optimistic expectations, as you can read on https://www.finews.ch. Working with loanboox under these circumstances is thus an exceptional opportunity to get insight into the world of entrepreneurship. For those of you who don’t know loanboox yet, the start-up basically wants to become the preferred player in the business-to-business direct lending market, matchmaking institutional borrowers and municipal lenders in Switzerland. Local governments can find potential lenders through loanboox’s online platform, which makes the financing process easier, more transparent and secure and less expensive, by eliminating the costs for brokers. This is a truly disruptive business model. So far, the Swiss market has been highly responsive to the platform launch, having a market share in Switzerland of nearly 20% in the targeted segment already, leading to the ambition to tackle additional markets. And this is where we IMD MBAs come in. After a kick-off meeting with the founders at IMD and a subsequent visit to loanboox’s office in Zurich, we are now ready to support their ambitions. The expectations and pace have been high but so has been our learning curve. Only one person in our international team of six has prior knowledge of the financial markets. A crash course from Bloomberg and chats with various experts at IMD have been inevitable. Preparing immediately implementable and actionable items are the deliverables we are expected to work out until April. Exciting times are surely ahead of us! Philipp
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21 Feb 2017, 02:00
| FROM IMD Admissions Blog: Inspirational ideas wanted, come to Lausanne |
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Today’s guest entry is written by MBA participant, Alessio Orlando, from Italy. Other members of his startup team are: Mohammad Alsele (Jordanian), Abhijat Chahal (Indian), Martina Heyse (Brazilian/Italian), Qin Li (German), and Zhe Yuan (Chinese). When you start classes at IMD, if you still do not know that Lausanne is a hub for start-ups, IMD and Entrepreneurship Professor Benoit Leleux will make sure you are fully aware very quickly. With the annual IMD Startup Competition, the school recruits the most exciting ideas and MBA and Executive MBA participants work on their projects. Our group has the opportunity to work with Intento, a start up in the field of MedTech which developed a technology to help severely paralyzed stroke patients recover motor function in upper limbs. The solution is based on functional electrical stimulation and it is by far the most user-friendly solution on the market. Intento founders are two young PhDs from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Their competence and communication skills allowed us to take an immediate deep dive into the challenges the company is facing. The product will soon be launched on the market and we are all very excited to help them in this specific phase. Visiting Intento’s office and getting a demo on their incredible product was inspirational. In fact, apart from the content of the project, this is also a tremendous opportunity to see what a start-up looks like from an inside perspective. We can talk with real entrepreneurs, discuss how they came up with the idea, how the idea evolved into the final product and, of course, how they are dealing with the financing challenges. The founders’ stories are full of passion and persistency. The presence of IMD, EPFL, University of Lausanne and big healthcare companies create a very dynamic and favourable environment for fresh ideas to become a reality, especially for MedTech start-ups.  Now it is on us to give a valuable contribution and help their dream come true. Alessio  
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22 Feb 2017, 01:17
22 Feb 2017, 01:27
22 Feb 2017, 01:32
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