Busy weekend - Visit to my god daughter

Went to Gruyere yesterday. Then went to watch “Perfume”. Today, I took a 2 hour train ride to go see Daniel who just gave birth to a baby two weeks ago, and my god-daughter: Emily. Things are good with them. It’s the first time Emily recognized me, and she was happy to see me. We went to take a walk together, and I let her ride on my shoulders for a while. We painted together, I read her stories when she was taking her afternoon nap. (YiChun, stop cringing) She seems happy. I think going to kindergarten has really made a difference for her. She is happy, still a little shy to show her affection, but she know how to demonstrate it much better now. It’s amazing what a few months of kindergarten has done for her. Things seem to be on track for Daniel as well. I am really happy for the family.

September

I found an ice cream joint named after me!
Sweden, what a place. Man, the babes! It’s so unfair. The “average” girl there are quite a few notches higher than anywhere else. Amazing. Oh yeah, the reason I was in Stockholm is because of the Ericsson project. I spent three weeks in September working on the project. It hasn’t been the easiest project because of the dynamics in our team. I seldom stereotype, but why is this French guy just soooooo hard to work with. The last time I found it just impossible to work with someone was 5 years ago at VeriSign with Boob.

Check out the Ice Bar picures!

Stockholm

Sep 2, 2006 - 130 Photos

August

Getting back into the swing of classes. But they were not the traditional classes. They were classes in ethics, negotiation, and crisis management. I learned that form an ethics standpoint, I am an consquentialist, someone who thinks the end event is most relevant.

Then came the company presentations again. This is when the stress among my classmates started. It’s kinda mass hysteria. I think we must have been told 150,000 times this year that we are 90 “exceptional people”. It’s amazing how some of these 90 exceptional people let the job hunt get to them. Sure, we are in need of jobs, but if we are truly exceptional, experienced managers, shouldn’t jobs just come to us? Relax, people. What’s more worrying is how some people have what I called a “shotgun” job search strategy. They will interview with any company, any position, just to make sure that they land something. I heard someone who had 23 interviews in 2 weeks. It’s just amazing. All the workshops, all the stuff the career office has been telling us all year: be focused, choose a type of position, choose a few companies you really want to work for, and go for it. I am not sure what a power tools company, a commercial boiler company, a wood products company, an oil company, a flavor company, a high tech company, and three consulting companies have in common, but I am sure whoever has 23 interviews must have put them together in a coherent, focused job search strategy. I’d certainly love to hear the pitch though.

In some ways, I am not better, I did apply to l’Oreal. Why, you may ask. Well, I guess they marketed themselves well at the company presentation. I truly believed that they are hiring for talent, and I was looking for a totally different industry to work in. I fell for it.

Traveling for the Ericsson project meant I had to travel. And that did it for me. I had traveled enough during my VeriSign years. The horror came right back to me. It reminded me how I said I would never travel like that again. I didn’t want to do it any more. That meant no consulting for me in the future.

The interview process also helped eliminating options. I failed out of all the consulting interviews. Or in the consulting lingo: I was “dinged”. Before I came to IMD, all I wanted was to work for Bain or McKinsey. I wanted to work for a top rated consulting company because it guaranteed a good income, provided for interesting, challenging work, and some social prestige. Bain didn’t recruit on campus, and I interviewed with McKinsey and Monitor. It was actually fun preparing for these interviews. The case interview style is interesting but I am not sure how effective they really are. It does test for approaches and nerves, but I am not sure how good they really are. Regardless, I was happy to not get any further with the consulting interviews. Monitor deserves a special mention here. The guy that called me back to give me feedback was really up front and honest with me. He said that he could see that I am an action oriented person and might not be the best match for a consulting company. He also said that the passion I have for people really would make me a better manager than a consultant. Furthermore, he said I already have some management experience and why not just continue on that track, and move up the ladder. All good, solid observations and fitting recommendations. That truly affirmed my choice to not go into consulting.

The other option was TECOM in Dubai. What a place to go work! The company is basically the investment vehicle of the prince. If you want to work on projects that are well funded, TECOM is your thing. But, I just can’t imagine living in Dubai. I am having a hard time trying to decide whether to live in Lausanne next year already because I don’t speak French and have a social network. Dubai? U kiddin?

July

July was a welcomed month off. I did some serious traveling. YiChun and I spent the first week with Steve and Mike in Tuscany. Nothing against my Italians, but I only went because of my buddies wanted to go to Italy. Although I must admit that the house we rented was really really nice. I loved it. Tuscany really was beautiful. I really enjoyed it there. The Italians had better luck than the Argentines as the World Cup continued during our stay in Italy. They were certainly no less crazy about football than the Argentines. We were in Sienna for the Germany match, and in Florence for the final match against France. I must admit that I was kinda in pain during the final match suffering from hangover from the previous night’s drinking.

We made a quick stop in Vienna then headed to Ireland. Upon arrival in Ireland, YiChun and I were stopped at passport control. With my US passport, I didn’t have a problem, but they didn’t accept YiChun’s Schengen visa. Huh? Ireland is a part of the EU, right? Yes, but they don’t participate in the Schendgen. Well, how would I know? We called our host there who is a Taiwanese diplomat to seeif he could do something. Since he had just arrived in Ireland a couple months ago, he wasn’t able to help. So we stood at the passport control at midnight, waiting for the guy to tell us that we need to spend a night at the airport and take the next flight back to Austria. But he was nice, he gave her a landing visa, and we were let in. We talked to the Taiwanese ambassador the next day and he said he had never seen this before. So, what else could go wrong? Anyway, we went to collect our luggage. Well, Ryanair screws up yet again (they should have stopped us from boarding the plane when they saw YiChun didn’t have an Irish visa). YiChun’s bag was no where to be found, and mine was still sitting on the luggage belt. Ryanair’s counter was unattended, and we couldn’t get anyone on their customer service desk either. Through some kind of magic, YiChun convinced a guy to go to the loading area and found her bag.

Heading out of Ireland, and we flew back to continental Europe. The original plan was to fly to Paris, see how it is and how we felt, and maybe stay in Paris. You won’t believe how hot it was in Paris. We sat in the taxi to go to the train station, and it was 41 degrees in the taxi! 41 degrees! That was it, we are going back to Lausanne.

After a few days’ rest, we headed into the Alps with a classmate of mine. YiChun left a week after. It was a good July, a lot of traveling, a lot f time spent with YiChun. It wasn’t without problems but we made it through know each other a lot better.

Cry for me, Argentina?

Buonos Aires. What a town. I must say the most memorable part of the trip to Argentina was the trip to a ranch outside the city. It was a first hand lesion on how to not screw up the economy for a country. The cattle farmers were in the width of a populist policy (classically Argentinian). The government claimed that the beef export was driving up beef prices in domestically, so it banned ALL beef export. Well, what they didn’t take into consideration was the fact that beef and soya bean export are the two largest source of foreign income in Argentina. Banning beef export just took out a large chunk of GDP, while Argentine beef production was way above domestic consumption. So cattle farmers were left to survive on other lower margin farm products. It only took 90 days for the government to reverse some of its own policy by announcing a quota system. It finally started to figure out the policy might do more harm to domestic economy than initially thought (or maybe they didn’t even think about it hence the populist policy).

Then 6 months later it decided to increase the quota again. Well, the bad part is that most cattle farmers had stopped to raise young calves in anticipation of a market slump and now they have missed the season to raise calves, there is no quick way to catch up. It’s amazing just how a government can really run a country to the ground. Don’t forget, just 50 years ago, Argentina was the 5^th largest economy in the world!

Since the currency crisis 5 years ago (the government decided to devalue its currency by 2/3 overnight), Argentina has seen great recovery, the economy has been growing 10% a year. But based on the conversations we had with companies, and academics, the general perception is that Argentina is bound to have a disaster every 5 to 10 years, so it’s better to be prepared for the next one.

Argentines are crazy for football. We were there for two of the World Cup matching. The won the first one, but lost against the Germans. They went nuts after the win, people poured onto the streets, and partied all night. The loss was equally devastating, it’s like the country just went into depression. I guess much like people in Taiwan, seldom do the people get a chance on the world stage and the appearances are way dramatized.

With all that said, Argentina does have it’s attractions: the view, the steaks, and beautiful women (highest plastic surgeon per capital in the world). The prices are climbing back up, but still somewhat reasonable for foreigners. I picked up a CD suit for $400 J (Needed it for interviews)

Accounting Relaunch

Yes. I haven’t updated the blog for a long time. Ok, let me do a quick run down of what happened since June.

June: Well, I failed accounting, so I had to do a re-take of the final exam. You probably know that I have had problems with the professor, Stewart. Jerk. But what was interesting was the stat one of my classmates found (he also failed accounting). During the semester, Stewart picked out 10 people who were not doing well in accounting and just gave us a hard time. Then, out of the 10, 5 of us were failed. Was it just coincidence, or does he just pick out the bottom 10, then the bottom 5 to fail? I for one, felt pretty comfortable with the accounting final. I really didn’t think I did that poorly. Anyway, so the first day of my July vacation in Tuscany, I had to talk to Stewart.

The first day of school, the MBA progrma director mentioned that there were a few of us that still need to pass through the hurdle of accounting. I think the whole class knew exactly who we were. Anyway, I was sick of accounting and just didn't study for the re-take. Took it C-O-L-D. The re-take was harder and I thought I did better on the final.

I PASSED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Stewart, if you are reading this, I just want to let you know that I would have sign the contract to say that I will never take an accounting job if you had asked!)