Liftoff Friday 6.50am from Copenhagen Airport, headed for the HHL Challenge 2005 at the Handelshochschule Leipzig, Graduate School of Management. We (Marthe Gundersen, Stefan Jung, Thomas Joachim Hansen, and I) were selected from a pool of applicants to be one of eight participating teams in the competition, which had a focus on DHL’s move of hub to Leipzig, a possible development of a Leipzig logistics cluster, and a third Harvard logistics case.

The first part of the case was to be handed in at noon, so we were working in the plane on the way to Berlin Tempelhof and in the train from Berlin to Leipzig. (BTW: Danish train standards are way behind the German.) Although we were stressed, we managed to meet the noon deadline. The remainder of Friday was spent doing the second part of the challenge (the Harvard case), which was to be handed in at midnight.

Saturday was presentation day. Below is a photograph from just before we are going to present (from left, Marthe Gundersen, me, Stefan Jung, and Thomas Joachim Hansen). Unfortunately we did not make it to the top two, who were the only ones placed.

However, we got to do a lot of sightseeing in Leipzig in the afternoon, including a field trip visit to the DHL hub. Saturday night included sightseeing of the Leipzig night life. Sunday was spent in Berlin hunting football matches, Internet cafes, and Starbucks – and a little sightseeing.

Yesterday evening, I came back from Karlsruhe, where we participated in the Business Masters 2005 (my first post on this). Unfortunately, we did not make it to the finals, but competition was very tough. The–very interesting–case was about Lufthansa, one of the main sponsors of the event.

We made a lot of good points in our analysis, in my opinion, but there is some improvements to made when it comes to implementation. In this regard, it was inspiring and helpful to learn from the finalists–and for that matter, from the organizers, and Booz Allen Hamilton consultants, who constantly were there to ping pong with you.

The event was organized extremely professionally, and we had a great time meeting the other teams and solving the case–Work hard, play hard. Below is a couple of “work hard” pictures taken with my cell.

Browsing my photographs, I found a picture I took August last year when I was studying at NYU. Sometimes, I dream myself back to the city, but–as alluring as dreaming maybe–one should always try to breathe in the moment. In fact, I find there is some healthy balance to be found between past, present, and future in which your mind should be. Where is it exactly? In any case, in these minutes I dream.

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”

I read this at a visit to The Quotations Page. Ellen Goodman, American Journalist and a Pulitzer Prize winner, on normal life. I do not agree with this rather pessimistic view–you should love what you do and be passionate about it. But I like the irony of the quotation, and it does stress the point that if you do not like what you do, then irony catches up on you.

I am absolutely stunned by how quickly my friend Stefan Jung has absorbed blogging as a way of expressing himself. His blog is hilariously funny and deadly serious at the same time.

Especially, I would like to point attention to his two recent posts on English vs German as the official EU-language and Absolute Vodka Advertisements.

A couple of weeks ago, I finished reading The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. In summary, it is an easily read book, well-suited for relaxation, but it doesn’t make your mind wander off or challenge some inherent beliefs you might have.

The book rides on the historical faction wave, which most people are introduced to by Dan Brown’s bestseller novels. The Rule of Four evolves around a book called the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which means Poliphilo’s Struggle for Love in a Dream. It was printed and written in the fifteenth century—mainly in Latinate Italian, including phrases and words in Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew—not to mention extra-ordinarily many self-invented words. Many scholars believe that the book is full of riddles, and it is in this web of riddles that Caldwell and Thomason build their story. Other than the fact that the Hypnerotomachia is a real book, there is no assurance that the rest of The Rule of Four is factual, rather the opposite.

The main characters in the book are Paul, Charlie, Gil, and Tom (the main character)—four Princeton undergraduates in their ultimate year working on their respective theses. Tom is the son of a famous scholar who mainly researched the Hypnerotomachia, the book Paul is writing his thesis on. The dynamics between the two solving the riddles in then spiced with the killing of a school-mate, Tom’s ups and downs with his girl friend, and how Charlie and Gil are as friends. It is a page turner, but nothing ground breaking.

What I think is above the book’s own standard (although nothing like F. Scott Fitzgerald or his peers), is the description of the books characters—Tom, who hates doctors, because they lost his father after a car accident, describes his friend Charlie, who studies medicine: “He’s the strongman of the local ambulance squad, the go-to guy for tough cases, and he’ll find a twenty-fifth hour in any day to give people he’s never met a fighting chance to beat what he calls the Thief.” (p. 27 in the 2005 Arrow Books print) It has almost a chapter like that on each of the main characters, where the person is painted nicely, but with few really golden phrases.

All in all, if you have read The Da Vinci Code (which I haven’t), I am told that this is a book you will love. If you’re more into heavy or beautiful novels—or both (which I am) this will not meet your standards, in my opinion. However, I found it very relaxing, requiring almost no note-taking.

Read more about:

• The Rule of Four at Amazon.co.uk
• Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
• The Rule of Four

My good friend, Stefan Jung, has a new blog post on happiness, where he uploads a lot of pictures of happiness from a photography competition.

I thought that was a very nice idea, so I just dug up a few pictures from my archives.

All the pictures are from a camp near Mullsjo, Sweden, except no. 3, which is from Bryant Park, NYC.

The last couple of weeks, some of my colleagues and I have been going crazy with riddles, brain teasers, and tests. It started because we needed to hire another one for our team, and then BANG we were giving each other brain teasers all the time. It’’s like being back in elementary school (or at any i-bank/consultancy interview, for that matter).

It made me think back of my 7th grade physics teacher. He was young, cool, and loved to tease us. We loved to tease him back, of course. He gave me a riddle, which I spent nearly a month trying to figure out.

This is a house, or a box, or whatever you might call it. It has 16 walls, which I numbered arbitrarily. Now, in one continuous line, starting either inside or outside the house, cross all of the walls, but never cross any wall more than once. Can you do that?

I never figured it out during the month, and I think I found out that it has no solution. At least that’’s what I maintain to this day to keep some of my 7th grade self-confidence. You’’re welcome to second-guess me, of course; let me know.

Go to BrainBashers for a collection of riddles, teasers and a lot more. Let me know if you have any good links.

Today, my team and I got the very pleasant news that we qualified for the Business Masters 2005 case competition. Jubii! (Yahoo! in Danish :-)) We were one of 12 teams selected from more than 180 applicants to participate in Karlsruhe, based on our motivational essay, cvs, and our pre-case solution.

The team consists of Stefan Jung (his blog), Christoffer Husted Rasmussen, Maja Kuhnell Frederiksen, and myself. (Photographs below of Stefan, Christoffer, and Maja).

I just ran into the inspiring website of Ralph Goings, an American photorealist painter. Photorealism, or superrealism, was an art movement that began to surface in the late 1960s in America and Europe, and Ralph Goings in considered to be one of the “original” or first-generation of American photo-realist painters.

Being interested in both photography and painting, this art movement is very fascinating to me. Although not photorealistic, a lot of my paintings have been painted using some of the same methods that the photorealist painters use, for instance, the use of a projector.

Pay a visit to his website – I think it is worth while.