Our MBA life was full of events last week. As part of our MBA program we had a visit plus Master Class at the E.ON, we visited the German Chancellor’s Office, we had a Bergfest and auction for Social Impact Club and we also visited two very interesting companies in Berlin (Zalando and Springstar). Mix all these with MBA classes, group works and UEFA EURO 2012 and you have a nice picture of how our last week looked like.

Here I would like to share my experience and impressions of one of our company visits – Springstar. I and my classmates had a choice to visit Springstar or Zalando. I chose Springstar as I was and am interested in Internet startups and wanted to see the people working in that kind of business and get some insights. I will not exaggerate to say that our visit was awesome. We had a privilege to meet and talk to two of the managing partners and the head of HR of Springstar and also to the managing director of Airbnb. It was amazing to see all these young, smart, passionate and yet simple guys who were very open and eager to share their experience and success and also failure stories with us. Where else could we get so valuable insights and advice if not from the passionate people working in such a cool company as Springstar? The informal and warm atmosphere in the office, their openness to discussion and the entrepreneurial spirit were powerful magnetic forces that were pushing us to stay there longer. Besides, one of the interesting and surprising things was that not only we MBA students had gathered information about Springstar and the people who we were going to meet, but they also seemed quite informed about us. At some point, one of our classmates even joked that it was becoming scary how much they knew about us. In the end, we left the office full of enthusiasm and passion, and I am sure, many of us will continue keeping contact with these wonderful people.

even in the midst of an extremely busy module (counting down to summer break though – holler) the MBA class of 2012 managed to squeeze in some necessary time to play some ball, eat burgers and dogs, and get drunk together…all on a weeknight. impressive huh?

now i know what you’re thinking: were the burgers delicious?
answer: they were

but the real important thing was the energy and vibe of the bergfest. i didn’t mention yet that this bergfest was organized by the (kick-ass) social impact club in an effort to raise money for laptops for less fortunate people in Haiti, and for our consulting project in october, which will be along the lines of working with a social entrepreneur in an underdeveloped/developing country. so in an effort to get extra support for our initiatives, we invited the EMBA class as well as all staff and faculty. the turnout and vibe were great: people were smiling, having a great time, and even enjoying the unreasonably low temperatures of german summer. i even got to perform a couple of songs with our sole turkish student, the beautiful Gizem. and thanks to her wonderful singing, everyone who was there now has the fever.

in the end i think the most important thing we learned was that there is truth in the idea of getting people drunk before asking them to bid in an auction (suckers!!!), because we raised a solid amount of money and couldn’t have done it without everyone’s help and support. so, a special thanks to those who bid in the auction (warning: i’ll renege my thanks if you don’t pay up!) and for those who aren’t even a part of the social impact club and still worked their asses off for us (mba’s, emba’s, staff, and faculty). i think we were all feeling the love, and without that you’ve got nothing (that’s real learning )

that’s all from me.

much love,
rafi

I love walking around Berlin and try to do it several times a week. On every walk I see something that makes me pause, pull out my camera and realize that Berlin is an amazing city. Last week on my way back to school to get in some study time, I came across the craziest sight yet. Three men in matching colored jumpsuits climbing the river wall right in front of ESMT.

We wrote the corporate finance exam yesterday. It totally lived up to the savage reputation it maintains within the ESMT course outline. However, here I am a still alive and thriving. Where is this undue student smug coming from? It certainly has nothing to do with a confident exam result forecast for finance!!! Nope, the platform for my raised spirits is surely in relation to the real MBA program outline.

You see, right at the very beginning of the program, Zoltan will introduce you to the MBA curve. It’s crazy and eerily accurate. The MBA curve is a forecast of your mental trajectory throughout the course. I believe with the finance exam behind me, I have emerged from the very worst of my own personal MBA curve.

You will hear this phrase very often, “The one-year MBA is intensive and demanding.” The demands are not incremental from day 1 the programs lives up to the expectations it has laid out for you. The pressure is a cooker the only way you can prepare yourself, is to clear the decks and make yourself as flexible to meet the demands of the program in itself. Manage your expectations of what it is you would like to achieve and what it is that you can achieve in relation to the intensity of the course. More importantly be kind to yourself. This year is about integrating broad knowledge, deep analysis, piercing insight and mastery of your own self.

I am going to attach a great photo, completely unrelated to the sober advice I have just distilled. It is a photo of the canoe Saturday with Rafi, Shamil, Alberto Elad and Lina. Picture this: 6 MBA students: an Isreali, Spaniard, American, Colombian, Russian and South African climb into a canoe. The canoe never made it across the lake. We didn’t even get half way across the lake. It was not for lack of direction, it had more to do with the beer garden distraction. In fact the ONLY destination that we managed to row toward with any amount of success was the beer garden…. Twice! Thank goodness we don’t have a crew team at ESMT…… yet!

I came across this very interesting blog looking at the different challenges of starting a business between Paris and Berlin. The Blog is called Rude Baguette, but it is not at all rude. Here is the summary:

“To be straight upfront with my judgement: Berlin really rocks and is on the fast track of becoming the European startup hub, relegating Paris and even London from the champions league into the national leagues. You’ll think that this is easy to pretend, right? After all, the most asked question during Next Conference was “is Berlin the Silicon Valley of Europe?”. Different people had different answers to this question, and I don’t think this point really matters a lot. Venture Village already wrote about it 6 months ago. My personal conclusion is based on several discussions that I had with entrepreneurs and VCs last week in Berlin, on some key facts that can’t be disputed as well as my very own experiences in France and Germany”

Click on http://tinyurl.com/dxzxonw for the full article

Today, we interviewed around 8 HR personnel from Nokia Siemens Networks as a part of our Strategic Human Resource Management coursework. My mentor from NSN helped me gain those contacts & my entire team (Team Satie – Ai Nakajima, Sarah Wright, Daniel de la Cuesta Navarette, Chen-Wei Tang & yours truly) was impressed. The organization was challenging. We had to conduct 8 interviews in 1.5 hrs during our lunch break. There goes our lunch break, I thought. We split the work & started interviewing the HR personnel. My interview was particularly interesting because of some information I got to know later today! (Read more…)

One thing I really wanted to become, during the first module, was an expert on Iceland’s economy. Sounds so random. But after many sessions of being squashed into the group study room by our professor to sift through enormous amount of data about Iceland in like 40 minutes, I was extremely motivated.

Before that, I knew nothing about Iceland except the name of its capital. The only Icelandic I knew was Magni Ásgeirsson, my favorite contestant in the Rockstar Supernova 2006. Anyway, it’s okay if you did not find any concrete data in those few minutes. Just talk about the financial crisis in general. It always works.

Now, I have abandoned Iceland and moved on because there’s no time to look back. This year, we don’t think about the by-gones. The mantra is to ‘move on’.
No fretting, no sighing. Leave those human tendencies behind. You are not happy with your managerial accounting exam? Get over it. May be you can think back on it after the year. But right now, there are zillion other things being bombarded to you, like the fascinating assignments of Corporate Finance. Watch out!

We recently attended our first class on entrepreneurship taught by Professor Stefan Wagner, which led me to think about my first business. When I was ten years old, I determined that I could meet the needs of the local fishermen (I lived on a small private lake in Michigan) by selling them worms to use as fishing bait. My business plan was simple, I drew flyers and made copies on colored paper using my father’s copier and paper, distributed the flyers by hand into my neighbor’s mailboxes, and waited for the orders via the family phone. The worms came from under railroad ties at the community beach, and came packaged in recycled margarine tubs. The selling price for 10 worms was a $1.00, and priced to match the competition (the local gas station).  Not surprisingly, the cuteness factor of a ten-year old girl selling worms led to two sales and a profit of $2.00 (see below for my costs).

$0.00 – Advertising Costs

$0.00 – Telephone Line

$0.00 – Cost of Worms

$0.00 – Cost of Packaging

$2.00 – Sales

$2.00 – Profit

While, I did earn a profit, my business quickly went under due to lack of demand. Using the knowledge gained thus far in my MBA I can identify two factors that destroyed my business. First, earthworms were not the preferred bait used by the local fishermen and there was not a viable market for my product, and second I was selling a good that was free to everyone in the neighborhood, and thus not selling a good but a delivery service. Additionally from a sustainability viewpoint, using a shared resource could lead to a tragedy of the commons in which my business and the local fishermen could have destroyed the earthworm ecosystem by overharvesting. Moreover, given that my packaging was recycled and based on my family’s consumption of margarine, that I was not being charged for my telephone usage, and that my advertising costs were subsidized by my father’s employer I would have to say that even if there had been demand for my product there were several other factors limiting my growth.

The last two weeks, we had lectures on Markets & Regulations by Prof. Paul Heidhues. It was a very interesting course, where we dealt with Mergers & Acquisitions, Anti-trust, State subsidies, etc. When reading through the assigned material, I observed the shift in forces in the EU competition landscape. I’ll concentrate on mergers & acquisitions to demonstrate this shift. (Read more…)

Off late, I’ve been Tweeting & posting Facebook updates on the status of 2012 Mt. Everest summit. What has summiting Mt. Everest got to do in an MBA blog? It’s completely out of place, isn’t it? Well, actually not! Summiting Mt. Everest calls for a lot of decision making, en route. A bad decision simply costs your life – that’s about the size of it! Really simple, isn’t it? (Read more…)