BusinessWeek's slideshow of Queen's School of Business

My colleague Manish sent us an interesting link to this slideshow at BusinessWeek:

Queen's School of Business Tour

Je suis arrivé au Brésil.

Temperature at 9 o' clock in the morning.


At my uncle's in the middle of São Paulo. Yes, it's true.


Tomorrow, the beach! See you in 2009.

The consultant's suitcase

I am looking for a new suitcase for next year. Being a management consultant living 5 days out of 7 in a hotel will certainly be a new routine for me. And, since it will be quite a tough routine, I am doing some research to get the basics right.
But it is not that easy to find out what I'll need, consultants don't seem to blog too much (with the exception of Paul Dunay, maybe, but social media is his speciality). And, surprisingly, luggage manufacturers don't seem to have models aimed at the 4+1 management consultants, which indicates that, just maybe, this is a niche which could be filled. At least it gives food for thought for the future of this blog.
I decided that, for a 5 day stay away from home, I would need the following:

• an extra suit (jacket and pair of trousers)
• 4 or 5 shirts
• at least one t-shirt, if not more (have to figure out if I should wear undershirts)
• 3 or 4 ties
• a pair of jeans for the evenings
• an extra pair of shoes, just in case
• underwear and socks
• one pullover, possibly
• a pair of shorts for sports. If the hotel has a pool, speedos
• toiletries

I used the tip to start with half of the suit jacket, fill the case with the rest and then flap the other half of the jacket over the other clothes. This should avoid getting the jacket creased across the middle, it makes sense.

Surprisingly enough, I found out that all of the items above fit in my carry-on (inflight) trolley. I wasn't very confident it would, but suspected it. That's why I did this small experiment. It worked.

Next week I'll take this trolley with me and look for a substitute. After all, althought it is still in good condition, its looks aren't what they once were. But it has served me well since 2004: China - Brazil - Germany - Brazil - Germany - Moscow - Germany - Brazil - Germany - England - US - Canada - Germany - Belgium. Not too bad for a case that cost me around 15 dollars, if I am not mistaken.
I am also talking to some of my consulting colleagues to see what their experiences are. What has worked for you?

Defeat of purpose

This is for my college media and design professor Luli Radfahrer, who posted a similar picture after a trip to Holland. The picture above comes from the same country, from Utrecht, and is a counter-example of good design. The flies, btw, are stickers, not originally placed by the manufacturer.

Harmonica Masters' Workshops 2008

It was great to be in Trossingen again and feel kind of at home once more. I was very fortunate to meet several of my friends, listen to great music and see the first snow of the season. It was a great weekend, even though I am really, really tired.

A familiar view

 

I took this picture when the ICE back from Stuttgart was passing exactly in front of my former apartment in Mannheim. Nothing special about the picture, but I just found it interesting to be suddenly in one of the trains that would bother me for months with their screetching noises...
BTW, the building to the left is a DHL building.

And thanks to Facebook updates...

I met these three wonderful girls for 20 minutes while changing train connections in Mannheim, tha was great! And this is maybe my favourite Mannheim photo ever! Don't you agree?

After the Delloite Minis...

I present you the PWC Minis!

At least they have Cooper in their name...

Added-value Graffiti

400 mini Delloitians

I am staying at a hotel near the Delloite building in Diegem, Brussels. To get to the train or bus stops I pass their parking lot, which is packed with blue Cooper Minis, often with Delloite green side-view mirrors. I then asked one of the Mini drivers about the cars and she told me that Delloite had hired 400 new people and they all got Minis to start with.

Vilvoorde

The DHL SPL office is in the town of Vilvoorde, just outside Brussels. I took the chance on Thursday after work to explore the streets a bit. The following picture is a 360° panorama taken from a roundabout.

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

I am testing drop.io with this picture, but you can try to download the original panorama here.

I made some other stitches and put them up on drop.io too: http://drop.io/vilvoorde.

Of course there are more pictures and you can take a look at them on Picasa, it is worth it.

080925 Vilvoorde

19th EBS Symposium

I applied for and was invited to the EBS Symposium this weekend. It is an impressive event held by the European Business School, a private institution, and its students. It seems that 1200 people were invited, among students, young professionals and representatives from the business world.
The list of speakers was also impressive, with many high caliber personalities there. Unfortunately, many simply didn't show up, maybe because of the consequences of the games played in Wall Street last week. But, just as an example, the German or European bosses of the main consultancies were all there. Again, impressive.
I stayed with 4 other students i nthe apartment of 3 EBS students. This was a good thing, as this created a group of familiar faces with whom I spent most of the time during the event.
We were well taken care of. Besides the simple, but free accomodation, we had a very good shuttle service, all meals taken care of, internet access and even a very nice party on Friday evening, at a winery. I didn't stay for the party on Saturday nigh.
Some of the talks were very good, like the one from John Major and the one from Dr. Burgess, EMEA Chairman of BearingPoint. Other talks were not as good and I missed one or two talks because they were post poned or simply cancelled, without notice. But there was always something going on, so that was ok.
Furthermore, there was a good career fair and pre-scheduled interviews with interested employers. The list of companies was very good, of course. But after being in Berlin, Mannheim, Darmstadt and München at career fairs, you start recognize some of the faces and new information gets more scarce. The interview with KPMG was very interesting, though, and I got the confirmation that I would be invited for the next partner round. But this will probably be after Belgium and Brazil, in 2009. Let's see.

I have put some pictures up on Picasa. I hope you enjoy them.
Tomorrow I should be leaving to Brussels, finally.

Tayloring marketing campaigns

It is impressive how it is now easily possible to create billboard with location specific data. It makes targeting much, much more effective. But it increases the probabilities of mistakes. You don't have to aprove one design for a whole regions, but dozens, hundreds or even thousands. In this example, the ad directs you to places where you can get the catalog near the billboard. Note that the word "Straße" is mispelled.

Welcome to the Mannheim FT MBA 2009!

Last year we were not able to attend the graduation ceremony of the Mannheim FT MBA 2007, as we were already scattered around the globe, having the first subjects of our own course.
This year things are somewhat different, and we have students staying in Mannheim for their complete MBA. So they were able to attend our ceremony and even our party afterwards. It was cool to meet them by chance yesterday and see them officially for the first time today. It is a pity that this will also probably be the last time that the two classes meet in such big numbers, but I am happy to say that they are a really cool bunch of guys. And there is even another Brazilian to make things a bit more fun!

 

Welcome guys and girls and all the best for your MBA! Don't forget to learn how to row, go the the Schneckenhof parties, check out the Hafenstrand bar in the summer, eat takeout food from Mr. Chang, watch videos in the classrooms in N2 and go to the Pfalz for some wine tasting.

The Mannheim FT MBA 2008 is officially over!

And the ceremony was really nice, the "Rittersaal" at the Mannheim University Palace was a great place to celebrate it.

 

And the party afterwards was even nicer! I am still coming down from the thrill of it, I had a blast and was very happy to meet new people, enjoy the company of good friends and have my cousin representing my family.

Everybody almost done, short update

 

All groups have handed in their dissertations (as you can see in the picture) and most of the groups have done all their presentations too. So, this week is dedicated to finishing things in Mannheim. My group still has to prepare the results for the company (we'll meet one last time next week in Hanau), but most people are going after their own things: job search, apartment search, vacating the apartments in Mannheim, buying dresses and shirts for the graduation ceremony, receiving relatives who have already arrived for the party on Friday, etc.
We are also slowly saying our goodbyes. Yesterday we had a nice get-together at Markus' place, on Sunday I even went rowing one last time, tomorrow some people are meeting in Frankfurt, Thursday is Hafenstrand and Schneckenhof double party night and Friday is Friday.
Personally, I am moving to Darmstadt first and have 3 or 4 interviews scheduled in the next 10 days. There is so much I want to do, but I seem to have too little time. Nonetheless, I am still able to "waste" time reading a book or surfing the internet, when I should be concentrating on work. So let's try to do the latter.

Now I can say that it is almost over

We had the final presentation of our thesis today at the Heraeus site in Hanau, and all went really, really well. Heraeus is an interesting German, family owned high-tech company and it is not everyday that you have the opportunity to present and discuss your findings to the two most senior managers of a company with 12 thousand employees in over 70 countries and a turnover of more than 11 billion Euro. Yeah, billion.

Our academic supervisor, our project sponsor (head of corporate development) and a great team!

The presentation went smoothly and was actually fun. I was very happy with the results of the team and so were the professor and the company, I had the impression. It was an intensive 2 months of work, getting ourselves into a very new subject for us, but the conclusion we got were solid and useful for the company. And we learned a lot, especially from the 10 or so interviews we conducted with senior managers from important corporations.
But not all is over, we still have 50% of our thesis to be written this week and, after that, we all will be MBAs, deservedly.

But tonitght we have decided to commemorate a bit. And I should go back to where the music is playing.

Façade in Mannheim

 

Just one spot I discovered today Mannheim. I must have probaly seen it almost everyday while walking to class, but hadn't paid attention to it.

This is the great team I have been working since June. During this project, we have interviewed all 5 Business Units of Heraeus to establish the technology fields we would look at, I developed an online algorithm for skimming the internet, we identified over a hundred information providers, had interviews with high profile professionals in 3 international high-tech corporations and got in touch with at least 2 VC firms.
There is still a lot of work to be done (like preparing the final presentation and actually writing the thesis), but I am very happy with the results so far, considering all the other paralel activities that have taken place (like job search and rowing competition) during this period.

Another Mannheim night scene

 

View of the train station.