Today, the theme for the CBS Case Competition 2006 was officially revealed. The programme was quite impressive with three guest speakers on hot topics in business.

As the case writer, I presented and revealed the theme (photo on the left). I uploaded some of the slides I used (Slides: FUHU Presentation), if you want to have a look at them. Unfortunately, they are not self-containing, and you really need me present to get most out of them–and I haven’t produced hand-outs, so I can’t upload them. The slides are in Danish, but you should be able to gather some of it, and–in any case–you will be able to look at how I design slides.

Photographs from the FUHU/CBS Case Competition Rethinking Business Seminar (by Morten Maegaard).

I have been elected to participate on a team representing Copenhagen Business School at the inaugural Helsinki School of Economics Corporate Credit International Case Competition. The theme is extremely interesting and is a very hot one in risk management, so I am very happy to have been elected to the team.

It takes place on April 27 and 28, which will be my first visit to Helsinki. The team is Thomas Joachim Hansen, Christoffer Husted Rasmussen, and Stefan Jung, a strong combo in my eyes, and I am happy to be on a team with such outstanding professionals and fine personalities. It is going to be great.

Photo: The Helsinki Cathedral, built 1830-1852. Often used as a symbol for the city.

I previously commented on Google’s China launch. Since then, Google has put a post up (Google in China) on their web site in response to all the negative press and blogging they have been subject to since the China launch:

Google users in China today struggle with a service that, to be blunt, isn’t very good. Google.com appears to be down around 10% of the time. Even when users can reach it, the website is slow, and sometimes produces results that when clicked on, stall out the user’s browser. Our Google News service is never available; Google Images is accessible only half the time. At Google we work hard to create a great experience for our users, and the level of service we’ve been able to provide in China is not something we’re proud of.

This problem could only be resolved by creating a local presence, and this week we did so, by launching Google.cn, our website for the People’s Republic of China. In order to do so, we have agreed to remove certain sensitive information from our search results. We know that many people are upset about this decision, and frankly, we understand their point of view. This wasn’t an easy choice, but in the end, we believe the course of action we’ve chosen will prove to be the right one.

Launching a Google domain that restricts information in any way isn’t a step we took lightly. For several years, we’ve debated whether entering the Chinese market at this point in history could be consistent with our mission and values. Our executives have spent a lot of time in recent months talking with many people, ranging from those who applaud the Chinese government for its embrace of a market economy and its lifting of 400 million people out of poverty to those who disagree with many of the Chinese government’s policies, but who wish the best for China and its people. We ultimately reached our decision by asking ourselves which course would most effectively further Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally useful and accessible. Or, put simply: how can we provide the greatest access to information to the greatest number of people?

Filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world’s population, however, does so far more severely. Whether our critics agree with our decision or not, due to the severe quality problems faced by users trying to access Google.com from within China, this is precisely the choice we believe we faced. By launching Google.cn and making a major ongoing investment in people and infrastructure within China, we intend to change that.

I thought the decision made sense before I read this (read my post: Google Launches in China), and I still do.
Prominent Google observers still don’t see the positive in the decision. (John Battelle: The Real Irony Here).

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From the book Karaoke Capitalism (by the authors of Funky Business:

- In 1998, CBS, Fox and ABC paid $12.8 billion to broadcast National Football League (NFL) games until 2005. The very same year the Minnesota Vikings franchise was sold for $250 million. In fact, the three networks could have bought all 30 NFL teams and had free broadcast rights forever. They didn’t.

Unless there is more to this story than this, it a big Oops. Read more fun quotes at Stefan’s Karaoke Capitalism post.

Google has launched the localised Chinese version of their web site, Google China, albeit not fully equipped with all features found at Google.com. Google has for a long time postponed going into China, because of the censorship restrictions imposed by the Chinese government, which Google has found incompatible with their values. Although Google.com is also censored when accessed from China, this censorship is exercised by the government and not Google themselves. Now, however, Google has followed in the footsteps of competitors Yahoo! and MSN, and launched a localised Chinese version with voluntary censorship.

Critics believe this decision conflicts with Google’s Do No Evil mantra. From a business perspective, however, the decision makes perfect sense: (1) Competitors are already in the Chinese market and more importantly (2) via the Chinese version Google now gets an inside, controlled approach to the censorship as opposed to the external censorship applied to Google.com. The latter will enable a better understanding for search and internet patterns of Chinese web users, but, in the long term, also offers the possibility of increasing bargaining power towards the Chinese government with regard to censorship.

Examples of censored searches include queries for the Tiananmen Square massacre and the—in China forbidden—Falun Gong movement.

Read more: Here Comes Google China, Google Joins Chinese Censor, and Google Makes Right China Decision.

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I told you about Guy Kawasaki’s new blog before—and it keeps getting better. One of his latest posts is about how you get a standing ovation, i.e. how to present well. He has eleven good points (go to his post for full details):

1. Have something interesting to say
2. Cut the sales pitch
3. Focus on entertaining
4. Understand the audience
5. Overdress
6. Don’t denigrate the competition
7. Tell stories
8. Pre-circulate with the audience
9. Speak at the start of an event
10. Practice and speak all the time

I think they are all good points, however, I disagree with point 5. It can be as disastrous to overdress the audience as it can be to underdress it. Preferably you should match-dress it, which goes well in line with Guy’s point 4: Understand the audience.

Although I do not have all of Guy’s experience, I also have a couple of tips, which I go by. They all point to the fact that the good presenter should own the room—be omnipresent. How to get there is very difficult, but one step of the way is to realise that you have to speak to everyone (or as many as possible) in the audience—they have to feel you are speaking to them (and—almost—them only).

I try to achieve this by being enthusiastic about what I talk about. When people feel you are enthusiastic, it is much easier for them to be so as well. It is much nicer to hear from someone who loves what he does or speaks about, than a boring nuthead.

I try to connect to the audience, so they feel I am in the room. It is as simple as establishing eye contact while making key points, but also utilising other body language—smiling (!), using my arms, using the depth of the room (walking to and from the audience) (not just the width—walking from left to right on the stage).

Finally, I try to be sincere. If you’re faking it, there is a good chance the audience will spot you, so you might as well just lay it off to start out with.

In summary, my three points, for now, is:

1. Enthusiasm
2. Connection
3. Sincerity

Go own the room.

From Autoblog:

With more than 5.9M vehicles sold in China last year, the country has become the second-largest automobile market in the world, moving ahead of Japan (which saw 5.8M new vehicles sold in 2005). China’s sales represented 8.7% of the world market, or about double its share back in 2001.

Not surprisingly, 5.76M of those vehicles were domestically produced, as China’s market remains very difficult to crack for importers.

The market in China remains highly fragmented, with the largest producer - First Auto Works - grabbing less than 17% of the market.

One of my friends told me: “I don’t know much about China, but if you multiply anything by one billion, it’s fine with me.” This is true, but you cannot always multiply things by one billion in the case of China, whose domestic market remains very difficult to get into. Lack of regulation in some cases, over-regulation in others, and lack of a developed domestic demand (China’s growth is mainly export-driven, not driven by consumption) are real challenges, which need to be faced if one wants to even get a chance of getting close to the one billion multiplication. Given the export-driven growth, it is nice to see that consumption grows, in this case with cars. Still, domestic cars take the majority of car sales in 2005. Let’s see what 2006 brings.

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The incredibly intelligent songwriter and absolutely wonderful singer Tina Dickow (her English artist name is Tina Dico) won the P3 Gold award this evening. P3 is the leading national Danish broadcast radio. She worked hard for it and deserves it——congratulations Tina.

(Photos: Press Photo from www.tinadico.com)

Together with 29 top graduate students, I am going to China (Google: 660m hits) in April to try to gain a deeper understanding for their culture, doing business in and with China, and to solve a specific, concrete problem of a Danish company present in China. We will also visit the facilities of a number of Danish corporations as well as we will be visiting Chinese firms.
Before going there, I will spend a lot of time on catching up, which is why I will be starting a blog post series on China containing whatever I tumble across: History, Economy, Business, Architecture, and other musings as I see fit. I will, of course, also update you more detailed on the contents of my trip, as they unveil.

Welcome to the China Exposé.

(Photograph is from the Great Wall of China.)

Guy Kawasaki is off to a flying start, after he started blogging just before we turned into 2006. Read his latest post on the Top Ten Lies of Venture Capitalists.

My sister has started a blog about Illustrator. She has never used the application before; hence she will take readers from the very beginning to—hopefully—some very cool tutorials when that time comes. Her first post.

Good luck and have fun, Charlotte.

I just read one of the best blond jokes, I’ve ever read. Check it out.

In the buzz of web 2.0, I had heard about a service called del.icio.us for some time now—actually for a very long time. And I had gone to their website several times to see what this was about, but every time I found myself leaving their website, because of lack of intuitive design, explanation of purpose, and clarity of contribution to the user. Well, call me a late adapter or whatever you want, but now I finally signed up. And I love it.

• del.icio.us is a web service where you save all of your bookmarks online, so you can access them from any computer. That’s not new. What’s great about the service, however, is:del.icio.us makes it extremely easy to find your bookmarks again, because you “tagged” them with a number of keywords of your choice and saved them in a flat hierarchy. The easy retrieval of your bookmarks is one of the real advantages.
• Super fast and easy saving of bookmarks is also a huge advantage, because saving a bookmark, then, does not become an obstacle. Further, if you run Firefox and install the del.icio.us extension, you are really rolling.
• You can browse everyone else’s bookmarks—on the fly. So you really know what moves the web (and/or the world, for that matter) the second you surf. This can also be done by keywords, of course.

So I like this web service a lot. It also makes it a lot easier for me to do my links page, right here on my blog. If you visit it, you will see a lot of output coming directly out of my del.icio.us bookmarks, most notably the tag cloud. The tag cloud contains all the different keywords I have assigned to my bookmarks. The biggest and brightest are the keywords that have been assigned to bookmarks most often. Go explore it on my links page.