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Speakers at ESADE
Besides the two classes we had yesterday, we somehow also managed to squeeze in three good speakers on campus.
In our entrepreneurship class, Christopher Pommerening, Partner at Barcelona Venture Capital Fund and serial entrepreneur talked about his experiences and gave us great feedback on the business ideas we pitched to our class.
Just before that the ESADE Media Club brought in the Senior Manager for Strategy&Planning for Yahoo! Europe. In a one and a half hour session he covered a lot of ground talking about the online media industry, valuation of online businesses and the strategic challenges Yahoo! is facing.
In the evening, marketing club, brought in the head of Marketing & Sales of the Italian sports goods manufacturer Tecnica. In a another one and a half hour we learned about Tecnica’s multi-brand approach and positioning strategy in the exciting sports sector. All in all a pretty cool day and many thanks to all my colleagues at the clubs working hard to get these speakers on campus!
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Georgetown Strategy Worldcup
One of the most exciting things when you do an MBA are the opportunities outside of the classrooms. You can engage in sports or business clubs, go to different guest speakers, fairs etc. One of these things are case competitions that many MBA schools are hosting throughout a year.
Three friends and I made a spontaneous decision to participate in the Georgetown Strategy Worldcup when we had lunch together out on the ESADE terrace one day. A week later we received the case prompt for the first round. It was about Germany’s planned subvention for the Opel/Magna deal and how Daimler should react to these plans. The case reflected the emphasis of the competition – combining strategic decisions with public policy issues. Some days after submitting our presentation we received the good news that we were selected as one of 5 teams (out of 29 initially) that was invited to Washington DC to participate in the final round.
With this invitation we also received our new case prompt. We were to analyze the situation of GMO authorization (genetically modified organisms) in the EU with regards to changes that have recently been proposed by the European Commission. We started working on it right away and were quite startled by the complexity of the topic and by the huge amount of information out there.
We finally left Barcelona for Washington on Wednesday with the submission deadline just 18 hours away. It would be the quickest flight all of us ever had. 9 hours went by very quickly as we were frantically producing slides on the plane. We submitted just in time and had about a day to prepare our presentation. We finally presented on Friday, April 9th. We had 15 minutes, a real challenge to cover all we had prepared …
Luckily we were the third team to present, so we had the chance to see two other teams presenting after us. All of us were very impressed by the presentations of the other teams from Duke, NYU, University of Maryland and Georgetown. So it came as a little surprise to us, when at 4pm our team was announced the winner of the Georgetown Strategy Worldcup!
It honestly was an amazing experience. Working in a team of friends with complementing strength is really rewarding. We met a lot of new people, also because the Georgetown MBA was also so nice to invite us to their annual MBA formal Friday night. We partied hard and on top of that DC spoiled us with clear skies and some perfect spring days! What a weekend …
Exams…
I am writing this blog entry between the two exams we are having today. Operations I exam was on from 9am to 11am and in about an hour Finance II will test our brains. This whole week is dedicated to exams. We don’t have any MBA nor Spanish classes, which is good because we have time to concentrate on preparing for the exams.
What made preparing a lot easier is working together with my fellow students. Many have organized prep sessions in their study groups or formed other groups with complementing strengths. But most amazingly about 200 pages of summaries, Finance formula sheets etc etc found their way to my mailbox in the past few days. I can hear people discussing finance and operations issues on tables and on the hallway and have not met anybody that wouldn’t be willing to help someone else if he or she can. So thanks to everyone that shared knowledge, I really appreciate it!
BARCELONA!
Although it is raining today, I have to write something about the “Barcelona advantage” here. Apart from cultural and culinary highlights the weather definitely contributes to this advantage. An example:
- Sunday, 7th FEBRUARY, 11.30 a.m., breakfast on a friend’s terrace at about 20 centigrade!
- Sunday, 7th FEBRUARY, 2.30 p.m., starting to go through my readings on the beach …
About the readings or classes in general this term: while the first term leveled the playing field (basic finance, accounting, marketing, etc) this term goes more into depth. Sunday’s readings for example were for Global Context of Management. A class I really enjoy because topics are discussed that I think every MBA student should think about. Today’s GCM class is about income distribution, last week we discussed corruption and next week we’ll find out more about international law when we look at Pinochet’s extradition. I really enjoy discussing these topics with my classmates, which is working out well in this class being split up into three groups (20 each).
And that’s it for this post. There are midterms going on and interviews are happening or are just around the corner …
