“Dieter, you always seem to be in such a good mood. How come?” people asked me several times during the last couple of months. Well, there is no easy and general answer to that, actually I don´t even think to have the insight and competence to write about the exact “how”.

However, I myself try to apply the following guidelines, each day, in every situation:

1. I can choose whether I want to be happy or sad, put myself on a positive or negative attitude towards life / topics / situations. I want to think positive!

2. Moaning about something doesn´t count. If I am not pleased with a situation, it is me who can do something about it – either I try to change it or I leave it and look for something else. I am in charge of myself!

3. Destiny exists and most things happen for a reason. Sometimes it is very hard, even impossible, to see the “why” behind it, it may even never be revealed during the time of life. But as long as I can honestly tell myself to do everything as best as possible, I know that I will be guided to a direction I will be happy with. I have faith!

To some this may sound weird, but up to now, learning to stick with those guidelines and apply them over and over again, served me very well and turned out to be very enriching. And during my MBA experience I had the chance to think of this topic a lot. I would like to share with you some of those experiences that gave me new brain food and kept me getting to see things from new points of view. To do so, I want to recommend you some videos I had been shown during several MBA classes.

First, let me introduce you to one of the most fascinating and inspiring speeches I´ve ever seen so far in my life. It can be viewed (as well as some of the other recommendations to follow) on a platform called “Ted.com“. I highly encourage you to have a stopover and spend some time there. Fascinating!

About the talk:
Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one.

About the speaker:
Brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor studied her own stroke as it happened — and has become a powerful voice for brain recovery.

The Link:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

I also highly recommend the following talks:

Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert asks “Why are we happy?”:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html

Barry Schwartz talks about “The paradox of choice”:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html

And finally, the French Bhuddist monk Matthieu Ricard talks about “Habits of Happiness”:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/matthieu_ricard_on_the_habits_of_happiness.html

Try them, I´m pretty sure you won´t be disappointed!

More to come with the next blogs!

So, if not started yet, go for the quest for happiness. I wish you all the best that you find your very personal one!

Best,
Dieter

… and a valuable one, indeed. More than ever counts the saying “Time is money”. Actually, it is even worth more than that. But the last weeks, it did not appear to me as if time was a constant. Recapitulating the last one and a half months since I last made an entry in the blog, and the 5 months I am in Barcelona so far, time went by in no time. So many events had taken place, all of them with lots of new and interesting experiences, sometimes not too nice ones.

ESADE Career Week, for example, a great opportunity to get to know companies and their representatives, coming from an industry, finance and consulting background. Be it Nike, JP Morgan, BCG or Roland Berger, they and many other companies had the chance to meet us, let us know about potential internship opportunities, held first interview rounds and took away CVs with interesting profiles to start their search for the best.

Be it also the trip to a vineyard, together with and organized by our friends from IESE, where we were able to see how CAVA, the famous Catalan beverage, is made. A great opportunity to network with our friends from IESE while having lots of fun and enjoying the afternoon with an excellent and huge lunch, including salads, barbecue, and a wine tasting.

Or all the group works I had to do together with the six people I was assigned to at the beginning of the MBA. Especially funny was the Marketing project we had to do where we had to develop a new product. Me and my group were assigned to develop a new Yogurt for the Spanish market during the Marketing class, very interesting and stimulating. And we really managed to do so, coming up with a very interesting idea and concept. We will continue to further develop it during the next trimester in the Marketing II class. Therefore, I won´t say more at this moment !

And of course, there was the LEAD program, as already mentioned in the blogs before. Very good to learn more about oneself, one’s own strengths and weaknesses, and how to best evaluate and approach them. Unfortunately, due to a very weird circumstances (the majority of the class wanted to delay the course due to a test for Managerial Accounting that was set for the next day and find a new time slot for the LEAD as fast as possible), the usual schedule for the program was delayed more than one month, leaving myself a bit disappointed for it is one of the classes I am most eager to have to learn new things. As said, I wasn´t happy with that for I knew that it would be almost impossible to find another time slot soon and fast due to the very compact schedule we already had. And so, LEAD was rescheduled from the beginning of November to the end of December. In my opinion, we, the students, as well as ESADE can be more professional with such situations. I do not see it as too much professional to “beg” for a delay of a fixed and long time planned program just because of one small (30% of overall grade) test and get it approved. The good thing about it is, that we are already in talks of optimizing such situations, with ESADE more than willing to learn and get even better. This is what I indeed call professional and forward thinking!

One of the private highlights has been the visit of the ORISHAS concert. Orishas, a Cuban music band (more infos www.orishasthebest.com), and one of my most favorite ones, played recently in Barcelona, presenting songs from their new album. Very energetic, great rhythm, astounding live performance, fascinating not only me but the whole audience. That really wowed me! If you ever have the chance to see them live, DO SO!!!

And there were the final exams we had to write during the whole last week. Two exams every day, each one 2-3 hours long, with little time to prepare beforehand due to other projects and assignments that had to be finalized. But finally, the first term is over and everything went all right, leaving us with 3 weeks of holidays and time to wait for the results of the exam.

Time went by faster than expected. Five months in a glimpse of a moment. With great moments indeed, but on the other hand, fewer time to care about relationships with friends and family as originally planned. Each one of us has to deal to balance his personal triangle of economic, social and cultural situation in order to avoid a personal corrosion of his character. And seeing the economic one as being to get the most out of a scarce resource, with time being the scarcest resource for all of us, it is crucial to focus on this one even more intense. Relationship, the right ones, should always come before business, as one of the professors of our class told us, in order to avoid this corrosion of ones character, in order not to dedicate ones precious values for something driven mostly on a short term basis, to live and be happy at the very end of the day! This is what I didn´t enjoy at all, being “trapped” in the “MBA realm”, endangered of the corrosion of my own character. I want, I must and I will change this.

As for now, I am eager to enjoy some nice and relaxing days with my family in Bavaria and go back to Frankfurt to see some friends before going back to Barcelona to celebrate the beginning of the new year there. I look forward to experiencing a great time in 2009 as well and will try to continue with those short comments here.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you!

Best
Dieter

Not much to say this week, still miss to write about what has happened the last two weeks. Why, you ask? Well, go check the content of the blog called “About the miracle of …”, the passage referring to the workload of the MBA. I was looking forward to getting the real MBA started…and now I know that it has. But see for yourself, a brief wrap up of last weeks schedule:

Monday:
6.30am: Get up and get the day started
7.30am: Arrive at ESADE and prepare the day
8am: Attend class “Applied Quantitative Modeling” (AQM)
10am: Leave class AQM to attend a one-on-one coaching session
12pm: Return from Coaching Session to class AQM
12.30pm: Lunch time
1pm: Work on Spanish homework
2pm: Attend class “The Global Context Of Management”
3.30pm: Have coffee break while having discussion with other Exec. Member of ESADE Consulting Club (have been elected into the council to be responsible for the marketing activities of the Club for the next year)
4pm: Attend Spanish class
6.30pm: Have coffee break and prepare for group meeting
7pm: Group meeting to work on Economics and Marketing project
10pm: Leave ESADE towards home with a stop by at Burger King for an evening snack
11pm: Have some conversation with my Spanish speaking flatmates and continue working on individual and groups assignments
2am: Go to bed

Tuesday:
7am: Get up and get the day started
8am: Arrive at ESADE and prepare the day
9am: Attend class “Financial Statement Management”
12.30pm: Lunch
1.30pm: Work on Spanish homework
2pm: Attend class “Organizational Behavior”
3.30pm: Leave ESADE to see the doctor in order to have my injury checked
(Quick summary: Mid September, I went up the stairs at a metro station, slipped and crashed with my shin directly on the edge of the stair. The shin was swollen as thick as a tennis ball and left a wound open. I went to a doctor a week later and he gave me some salves to disinfect the wounded part, letting me know that the healing process might take some 2-3 weeks. Now, after more than 5 weeks, it still hurt and I was afraid that the wound had been infected, risking of having a sepsis. Luckily, the doctor assigned me a good health and told me that nothing was going on with the shin. He told me that it might continue to hurt for another 2-3 weeks for I really must have squashed the muscle. But nothing serious can happen now onwards. What a relief!)
4.30pm: Stop by a costume shop in order to buy a costume for the upcoming ESADE Halloween party on Friday (I hate disguising, that’s why I only bought an Elvis wig and some glasses.)
5pm: Attend the rest of the Spanish class
6.30pm: Have coffee break and prepare for group meeting
7pm: Group meeting to work on the 15-minutes presentation due every Wednesday in the Marketing project (have new product developed and introduced into the market at the end of the first year, in my case, a “Blockbuster” Yoghurt)
10.30pm: Leave ESADE towards home, having take-away Sushi
11.30pm: Continue working on individual and groups assignments
3am: Go to bed

Wednesday:
7am: Get up and get the day started
8am: Arrive at ESADE and prepare the day
9am: Attend class “Marketing I” and present weekly results of project to class
12.30pm: Lunch
1.30pm: Work on Spanish homework
2pm: Attend class “Economics”
3.30pm: Have coffee break and shortly meet with group
4pm: Attend Spanish class
6.30pm: Have coffee break
7pm: Work individually on assignments and prepare for ESADE Consulting Club executive meeting
8pm: Meet with other members of the Exec. Committee of ESADE Consulting Club
9pm: Wrap up Exec. Meeting Consulting Club
9.30pm: Leave ESADE towards home, having all you can eat sushi
11pm: Continue working on individual and groups assignments
2am: Go to bed

Thursday:
9am: Get up and get the day started and set the clothes washer to be finished at 9 pm
10am: Arrive at ESADE, prepare the day and continue work on individual assignments
12pm: Attend class “The Global Context Of Management”
1.30pm: Lunch
2pm: Attend Investment Banking seminar
6pm: Have coffee break
6.30pm: Work individually on assignments
9pm: Leave ESADE towards home with a stop at Pans&Company
10pm: Do the laundry (put the wet one on the clothes horse and get the one from last week ironed
11pm: Have some talks with my Spanish speaking flatmates and continue working on individual and groups assignments
2am: Go to bed

Friday:
6.30am: Get up and get the day started
7.30am: Arrive at ESADE and prepare the day
8am: Attend class “Managerial Accounting”
12.30pm: Attend meeting of the Executive members of ESADE Consulting Club during lunchtime
2pm: Skip regular Consulting Club meeting in order to attend “Crack the Case” seminar held by former Roland Berger employee
5.45pm: Leave “Crack the Case” seminar 15 minutes before actually finished in order to attend a meeting with my Marketing Group and our tutor professor at another ESADE Building
6pm: Meet with group and tutor professor to talk about next week´s Marketing presentation
6.45pm: Leave towards home
7.15pm: Arrive at home and welcome a friend who will stay during the weekend
8.30pm: Go to have dinner
10pm: Get back to flat and ready for the ESADE Halloween party
11pm: Head over to the ESADE Halloween party at Club Elephant
5am: Go to bed

Saturday:
11am: Get up and get the day started
12pm: Have breakfast with friend
1pm: Do individual assignment
4pm: Have coffee with friend and go shopping together

6pm: Continue working on individual assignments
8pm: Get dressed up, have dinner and have a bar / club hopping
6am: Go to bed
Sunday:
12am: Get up and get the day started
1pm: Have breakfast with friend and lead him to the airport bus
2.30pm: Work on individual and group assignment
6pm: Watch F1-One seasons finals while meeting with a friend of mine from Germany to play online
11.30 pm: Go to bed

Funny week, with time schedules and workloads I was used to have while working. And this will continue as such throughout the whole first year.
More to come soon…

Can anyone of you answer that? Maybe yes, maybe perhaps, maybe no.

Well, Mr. Michael E. Porter, himself being a professor at Harvard Business School and being seen as THE guru of strategy, seems to have some profound answers. Those and many other things related to strategy were we able to encounter in our first class of the original MBA program called “An introduction to general management and strategy” during the last week. Each day five hours of class, followed by an average reading workload of some 50 pages for the following day, followed by the reading and the preparation of a case for the next day. Plus, my group had to prepare a presentation about Inditex (better known for its most famous brand Zara), where we had to present a SWOT analysis and give an outlook of possible future strategies of the company at the end of the weak. By the way, now I know one more meaning of SWOT analysis: the original Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats one, and the new one: Such a Waste Of Time as our professors warned us that, as important such an analysis is, you might easily get lost and the time spent might not always be appreciated by everyone.

What is strategy? Mine definitely was to get as much out of the course as possible as I love the subject and want to continue working as strategy consultant after the MBA. And, to anticipate the outcome of my strategic goal: YES, I had an amazing time, with very interesting course material and a lot of new things to learn, exactly what I had expected! One reason for that is that we had been given the perfect environment! Why? Well, the two professors we had were, in my personal opinion, simply brilliant! Silviya, who has a PhD in Management from IESE Business School and taught Strategy across the MBA and Executive programs, and Luis, who also owns a PhD of IESE Business School, a bachelor degree in business administration, piano performance and music theory and, amongst other things, was Postdoctoral Fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management. They really boosted the course to a level I haven´t seen before. The level of interaction was amazingly high, they regularly managed to present very interesting and high ranked lecturers from the business world (e.g. a former CEO of one of the worlds leading candy producers) and they even invited us to go on an excursion to one of the most famous Cava producers in Spain / the World as part of a case study we had to do about the wine industry. If there is anything I might mention to improve, then that would be more a thing for the administrative office at ESADE than with those two. For there might be a chance to improve the communication towards the students as soon as new information of course material is available (here: centralize it to one distribution channel rather than to use four, as it happened in that course and most of the students couldn´t read the information due to the first lecture).

The groups work though that was given to us and that we had to finish until Friday and present in front of the class developed quite interesting this time. First, we needed until Wednesday evening to meet for the first (time and neither had gathered information about the corporation nor read anything about it to start a profound discussion of how to continue. We therefore tried to structure the agenda more or less by guts feeling and decided to split up the work on the seven of us to prepare each part until the next day. The next day arrived and we all joined again, prepared but unstructured. Trying to solve it needed time and some discussion and we ended up still being at the University at 10 pm, with a slight sense of aggression and infuriation in the air for still not having finished the presentation. And you know what? The presentation at that time still didn´t look good, at least in my opinion and what I had learned about in my previous job as Consultant of how to build a good presentation. The end of the story of your first small group conflict: I offered to review the presentation (what finally took me until 3.30 am in the morning, and it still wasn´t that good, in my opinion that is). The next day after every one of us had been able to think about what happened over night, we agreed to talk about other ways of dealing with similar future situations and establish a project management structure as our new strategy.

At home, the strategy of having asked the one girl from Mexico to leave the apartment and having picked Cynthia from the Dominican Republic seems to be a complete success! She is responsible, talkative and has a really nice character. Hope this momentum in our flat keeps on going!

So what? Be aware of your mission, formulate your vision and build a strategy that includes your competitive advantage to succeed in reaching where you want to go. It´s all about strategy: Strategy as a subject, strategy within the group, strategy at home, strategy for oneself and for life! You better make sure to think about that one again. The better you do, the better you most likely will you succeed. I´m glad to have the LEAD course mentioned before. I consider this to be my way to think about my personal strategy again, sharpen and maybe readjust is. More to come for sure!

———————————-

P.S.: Allow me to give you as reader of these lines an additional reading strategy and advice: An amazing classmate of mine, Morgan, who has a BA degree in literature, regularly writes outstanding and most creative blogs about her experiences in Barcelona and during the MBA. Go to http://morgans-musings.blogspot.com/ and see for yourself why she bets that elephants taste like mushrooms!
]]> http://thembaexperience.wordpress.com/2009/03/03/what-is-strategy/feed/ 0 thembaexperience http://thembaexperience.wordpress.com/2009/03/03/about-the-miracle-of-delivering-the-material-of-a-quarter-of-a-whole-ba-in-business-administration-in-just-one-single-month%e2%80%a6/ http://thembaexperience.wordpress.com/2009/03/03/about-the-miracle-of-delivering-the-material-of-a-quarter-of-a-whole-ba-in-business-administration-in-just-one-single-month%e2%80%a6/#comments Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:06:33 +0000 thembaexperience http://thembaexperience.wordpress.com/?p=5 ]]>

September had arrived, and along with it the start of the Pre-Term course. Pre-term is something you can best describe as a one month period in which the basics of the most important economy related subjects are being injected into students brains – especially those of non business backgrounds – in a highly accelerated manner. This includes the courses Financial Accounting, Economy, Business Law, IT-Technology and Managerial Statistics. Classes start at eight in the morning and usually end at six in the evening, being accompanied by group work after the classes until nine or ten in the evening and individual study afterwards on a personal preference.

I must admit: the first time I went to the class and heard the lecturer talking about Financial Accounting as of what it is, why it is necessary, what a balance sheet is all for, I was thinking of not being in the right place. This was basic material during my BA study in Banking and Finance, as well as it was with the content of the other subjects. This seemed to get quite a relaxed month, at least this is what I was thinking in that moment. The other way round it was. Although the material was quite simple to understand, the pure mass of class hours, group work and individual homework was incredibly high. Plus, there was the need to prepare the CV and cover letters for the internship applications for the consulting companies, additional other lectures from external providers with topics such as “How to read through the Financial Times” (a really interesting seminar by the way) and things to prepare for the Leadership development program. Here in special, we had to select some 20 people out of our private and business life and ask them to give us feedback about ourselves through an anonymous questionnaire provided by ESADE. This is part of an extensive 360 degree feedback each of us had and still has to go through. At that moment, please allow me to say THANK YOU to all my evaluators who, by spending their valuable time going through the questionnaire, have provided me with invaluable feedback about how they see me. I will atone for that, for sure!

Obviously, a quite intensive month, especially for the non-business-background students. And at the end, the first final exams arrived – at least in some subjects where we were not be graded on the quality of group works, presentations or some other tests during the term. It was amazing seeing all the people prepare like there was no other thing going on, especially in the subjects Managerial Statistics and Business Law. After three years of having been completely out of University, this was interesting to experience and stimulating at the same time. I actually do not yet exactly know why, but that´s how it felt. Overall, I consider it a good start: nice to get used to the University life as well as to long days and nights working, to getting things done again and being productive after a month of more or less relaxation. And congratulations ESADE: I would have never considered it possible packing so much information in just a single month and still leave it manageable. But I actually expect the level of working hours and stress to get raised even more soon, and really look forward for it!

At home in my flat, things have developed quite interesting. As I haven´t had the chance to be there a lot due to the work we had to do at ESADE, I hadn´t been able to see my new flat mate (a Mexican girl) a lot – actually it was twice the whole month. But what I obviously could see is that she didn´t seem to take seriously the responsibility and things she had to do at home. No cleanings were done during all the time by her. She neither changed that habit after I told her that – and for I had never seen her at home, I communicated like on the “old style”, getting a piece of paper and a pen, writing a message and leave it in her room. I did that a second time, but no reaction at all. That is not tolerable! At the end of the month, she left the apartment based on a decision made by the rest of the people living in the flat. A new flat mate, a girl from the Dominican Republic, was soon found. Now it´s me plus Cynthia, a Mexican girl, plus Cynthia, the one from the Dominican Republic, plus Israel, a guy from Mexico. An interesting combination – three Latin Americans and a German – with the common language being Spanish. I love it! Best to practice my Spanish! Let´s wait and see how it will evolve during the next weeks.

There is one thing I haven´t mentioned yet but is really important for me, and I´m actually glad that it seems to work more or less: The fact that I was able to keep in contact with my friends and family I had to leave behind. And with my godson, who turned three years in September, and his amazing and lovely family! Hope, we will have more time in the next weeks to stay in touch! I will continuously work on that, promised!

The first three weeks of August passed by so incredibly fast and the 25th of August, the first day of the ESADE 18 months MBA program had arrived in no time.

The Introduction week was there. All students received a schedule of what they were about to experience during the upcoming week – a mixture of getting to know each other, getting to know the most important organizational issues, getting to know ESADE Career Service and the next steps we had to do in order to go for an internship application for summer 2009. The whole week was amazing. All new students were present, people from 34 different countries from all over the world and everyone with at least 2 years of working experience in the most various areas. Motivated, open minded, curious about the others, but at the same time somewhat insecure of what will lie ahead of each of them. First issue on the schedule: the welcome by the ESADE officials and a “Get to know each other” round where everybody of the 120 students was asked to tell a bit about him/herself. Amazing and refreshing, this is the best way I can think of to describe how this was like…”I worked as a portfolio manager for a famous investment bank.”, “I had my own business in the diamonds industry.”, “I used to sell drugs for a pharmaceutical company.”, “I have a degree in literature.”, “I was a priest”…I could easily continue. It was just astonishing, how many different characters had been gathered in one place, every single one with his/her very individual story and history. Some speak more than five different languages; others had been travelling and working over almost half of the world. And there was I, having lived roughly 28 and a half out of 29 years in one country, speaking three languages, being equipped with some 8 years of work experience in the German banking industry as well as in the consulting business. I was curious of especially two things: how much will I be able to learn from my new colleagues and how much will I be able to share my experience with them? That really excited me!

Two other things I want to emphasize that were really good during that first week of introduction. First, there is ESADE Career Service. Even though the real MBA program hadn´t started yet, one thing had been driven into us right away from the very beginning: THIS IS NOT JUST FOR FUN! THIS IS SERIOUS! PREPARE NOW! IF NOT, OTHERS WILL AND YOU MIGHT NOT GET THE JOB YOU ARE LOOKING FOR! Not only did Career Service tell us that all over again (and by the way, I strongly believe in those words). They guided us from the very first day and provided us with tools of how to best do so. Although our internship is supposed to be during the summer break in 2009, we found ourselves right in the middle of the application procedures, updating our CV´s, writing Cover Letters and listening to recruiter events, all provided and supported by Career Service. Furthermore, each one of us got his/her individual Career Service advisor. Very professional in every way and always . I definitely was more than surprised.

Another thing definitely worth mentioning was the two days Offsite in Cardona, a small town two hours away from Barcelona. We went there the second and third day of the Introduction Week, not knowing what we had to expect. But we´ve heard that others before had been doing a Dragon Boat race. And having done that before and considering it to be an amazingly funny event, I got excited as soon as I heard about it.

The whole event in Cardona actually was about getting to know each other better, especially the groups of six to eight in which we should be put later on. The idea behind it is to be put in small groups that stay together until the end of the first term in December, having to solve all given group works together. The groups were assigned by ESADE so that no one could just choose as wanted, to guarantee the maximum learning experience for every one of us. Another goal was the start of one course of the program called LEAD. This is the Leadership Assessment and Development course that is crucial part of the MBA program. It is all about personal and leadership development, doing self assessments about your personal strengths and weaknesses, future vision, preferences considering professional life, private life, ways of learning, an external evaluation of people you know from private and business environment and so on. In short, a huge and all-embracing evaluation of oneself, a definition of how to best reach ones goals and what to do to get there by means of personal development. It sounded like there was a lot of work upfront but that definitely seemed to be worth it! Cardona was the aforesaid start of all that, and what a nice and funny, but also instructive start that was. We basically had to do two major team exercises during the two days.

The first day, two groups were put together at a time to form a large group of about 13 people. We were informed that a huge accident had occurred. A huge amount of “toxic waste” had to be disposed as fast as possible. To do so, each group had to select a team head, six “helicopters” and six “transporters”. The transporters had to, surprise, transport the waste blindfolded, solely guided by the instructional voices of the helicopters and not allowed to directly communicate with the team head. The helicopters on the other side worked as intermediates between the transporters and the team head, forwarding his instructions to the respective transporter and the other way round. With that setting given, the “toxic waste”, a plastic ball, had to be transported with a vehicle; a plastic bucket put upside down and hung up on with three ropes that equally balanced the bucket. Each transporter had to grip one end of the rope. In a combined action, transporters coordinated of what to do by the helicopters communicating of how to best transport the waste from point A to point C passing point B (a distance of roughly 50 meters in total) with the team leader had to physically transport the ball on the bucket, being blindfolded all the time. The ball wasn´t allowed falling off the bucket. If so, the group had to go back to the very beginning and start again. And I tell you, having been both the transporter as well as the helicopter, it is really difficult to get the ball on top of the bucket. Too confusing? Well sorry for the moment. However, feel free to ask me of how it worked in detail individually, if interested. The essential point out of it: through a quite simple and very funny exercise, we simulated a situation that can easily occur in an organization and were able to extract several learning points during debriefing. Simple but effective!

In the second outdoor team activity, randomly formed groups, different from the ones mentioned before, had to build a real car and participate in a race tournament against the other teams at the end. Each group was given certain restrictions regarding the minimum safety requirements and a certain budget to buy material needed to build the car. It had to be either pushed or pulled by man/woman-power, carrying along one person. My team consisted of almost every background: engineering, politics, finance, literature and disaster management…the last one probably to be seen as some kind of omen. We actually succeeded to build a two-wheeled car that was pulled by three people in front. But, sad but true, after having been involved in a crash with another team during the race, our beautiful car fell apart into its components. Tough luck for us, but most funny overall indeed. We all were exhausted afterwards, for the temperature had risen up to about 30 degrees Celsius until the end of the event.

The stay in Cardona was made perfect by an awesome come together of all students and ESADE staff during the first evening. I can hardly think of a better way of getting an MBA started! Thanks ESADE!

Its Sunday, the 05th of October 2008, I´m sitting in the living room of my flat, listening to the sounds of Juanes “La camisa negra”, enjoying the first few days of spare time. Pre-Term at ESADE has ended and all firstyear MBA students have four days off to use as the want before Term 1 starts on Monday the 06th. All of my colleagues in the first year can enjoy those days indeed for they have passed the Pre-Term exams, some astonishingly good, others glad to have reached the minimum requirements, but all with lots of effort and team spirit they have put into during the past month. Some have left town towards Oktoberfest in Munich, others went to San Sebastian to enjoy more of the Spanish flair outside of Barcelona, and some just stayed in town – such as me. I really welcome the possibility to have some time to reflect about the things happened – to have the chance to think and write about my personal goals and vision in combination with my unique learning style I learned to have during Pre-Term – to finish the required description of that vision my coach, to whom I was assigned to in the Leadership development program, needs before our first one to one session in the middle of October. To simply live …

…my first weeks in Barcelona have been really exciting. Not as one would expect it from a person being there for the first time. No. Actually, the first time I had been to the Sagrada Familia was in the end of September, and to some other famous sightseeing places I still haven´t been yet. Honestly, I wasn´t in the mood to go for a sightseeing. I usually like to do this, with my camera being my best friend during that time. But it was different this time. As I think about the why, I can think of three reasons:

First, I had to find myself a place to live. And whoever had been to Barcelona before and tried to find a proper place to stay knows that this is quite a difficult task, assuming that you do not want to pay some 600 Euros or more for a 20 square meter apartment. One of the really good things about ESADE is that they really care about their students right away from the beginning. They try to help new students offering the possibility to have a housing agency to help you find a flat in Barcelona. Really nice, but in my case a bit like worthless. They weren´t able to find an adequate flat for me. Trying to continue the search on my own, I figured out once again that the internet is a marvelous invention. It was quite easy, considering my previous knowledge of the Spanish language, to surf through some Spanish housing sites to find offers of already existing flat sharing communities looking for a new flat mate. After having seen five apartments, I decided to go into a flat in Les Corts, a residential area of Barcelona, 15 minutes away from the famous Camp Nou where the F.C. Barcelona is located. I would be living together with a Mexican girl, a boy from Chile and another one from Spain. Nice combo to enhance the Spanish again. Quite a small room, but for a price of 330 Euros and 40 Euros of additional costs each month. I moved in there on the 01st of August.

Second, I needed a break from all the administrative things I had to take care of the last weeks, such as the dissolving of my flat in Frankfurt in which I had lived for more than six years or the termination of my work with Commerz Business Consulting (CBC) / Commerzbank where I had worked for six years, doing Inhouse Consulting at a Consultant level with (CBC) for the last three years. I just wanted to relax and enjoy the beautiful weather by going to the city beaches of Barcelona. And Barcelona offers some nice possibilities to do so. So I just did it and my skin got colored.

And third, I wanted to get to know my future classmates, wanted to experience new cultures and meet new people as soon as possible, best before the start of the MBA program. And again, the internet, and especially Facebook, offered a great possibility to get in contact with my future classmates. The ones, who were already in town regularly met to have dinner, go out together and get to know each other better. I even got to know a lot of students from IESE, another really well know University for its MBA program here in Barcelona. It was amazingly refreshing getting to know new people, all with the most different backgrounds, and every single one with his/her unique character and the characteristics of the respective country, having conversations either in English or in Spanish.

This was one major reason I took the MBA, to gain personal experience, to grow personally by getting to know more cultures, different kinds of backgrounds.

I was curious and excited to meet all the other students as soon as the MBA program was about to start. To explore more of this NEW, this world of Barcelona and the MBA, this life as a full time student, this different cultures and characters involved!