Just short of a month ago, I was invited to Milan by my good friend Paolo. Paolo was my roommate back when I lived in New York (almost four years ago now). Paolo now works as the personal assistant to Angelo Moratti, who is a friend of Warren Buffet. Moratti had followed Buffett around his recent European tour to introduce him to new people, and the trip ended in Milan.

Paolo had invited me to the Buffett press conference to ask a question. See the full press conference on here: Part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4. I asked Buffet what he thought of the significance of true equal opportunities for men and women in the workplace, and a couple of innovative ideas for how to achieve it. The part with my question is part 2 — you have to scroll about 10 minutes 15 seconds in.

After the press conference, Paolo had also arranged a small get-together in a hotel suite, where Paolo, me and 10 other people got to speak to Buffet for about three quarters of an hour. He is completely down to earth and extremely fun.

When we asked him what his metric of success is, he responded with a beautiful metaphor: “How many people will hide you”, which is a reference to who would hide the Jews during WWII. If you have people who will hide you, you have achieved something — true friends. He is a great guy, enormous aura and has great empathy. It was a magnificent experience.

Of course, the weekend after the event was as much fun. Paolo, Stefan (my good friend, who joined for the Buffet event), Simon (my cocktail buddy and entrepreneurship thought partner), and I hit the town in Milan. We ended Sunday morning for a Mozzarella bar brunch. Below, all of us in a slightly misty Milan right after Sunday brunch on the way to the airport.

Yesterday was a beautifully sunny day, and I sat on the balcony of my friends Jesper and Mia’s apartment, reading The Adventures of Johnny Bunko by Daniel Pink. What a great read.

Written, or rather drawn in manga, Japanese-style print cartoons (very much like the Kita Koga series in the back of my favourite magazine Monocle), Pink conveys six career/life lessons. It is short and sweet, and the book is fun and enlightening.

While I do not agree fully with all of the points made in the book, I think that they make for a very good perspective. Here is a short bite of what I took note of:
Lesson number one that Johnny Bunko is taught is that there is no plan. I could not agree more. I have a strong preference for not planning (so I keep telling myself), both concerning small things (not packing in due time for vacation), but also in the grander scheme of life (not knowing where I want to end up). “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” (John Lennon).

What I also feel important about not planning too much for life, is that it is difficult to actually know what will be useful for you later in life. How can you possibly? And we need not go further than to our own house-philosopher here in Denmark, Søren Kierkegaard: “Life is understood backwards, but must be lived forwards (Livet forstås baglæns - men må leves forlæns).”

Building on that, Johnny learns that you can make choices for basically two reasons — instrumental and fundamental. Doing something for instrumental reasons is to do something for another desired and expected outcome, whereas doing something for fundamental reasons is to do it because you are inherently interested in it and not necessarily know what it will lead to.

There are many more goodies to go for in the book. Regardless of how you feel with what you are currently up to (doing your dream job — or — thinking seriously about doing something else) this is a fun and insightful read.

One or two of you may have heard “Fly or die” fly out of my mouth. I stole it — along with the headline — from Paul Arden, the author of these two books:

   

I read them a couple of years ago after which they ended up as shelf material in my apartment. On a lucky strike, I rediscovered them after a friend of mine returned them after having lent them for a while. I picked them up and read them again. And they are even better the second time around.

They are both easy and quick reads with Paul Arden’s input for how you can approach life. When reading, you may find that many of his ideas are self-evident, but give me, him, and yourself a break. Many of us need a push once in a while, and these books do it, so it’s fun to read. (Paul is a former advertising executive, so he has flair for good copy writing.)

Let me bring up just a few great passages, which are not only well-written, but also touches on important topics. Firstly, about our tendency to neglect to assume responsibility when things go wrong:

If you are involved in something that goes wrong, never blame others. Blame no one but yourself. If you have touched something, accept total responsibility for that piece of work. If you accept responsibility, you are in a position to do something about it. There are no excuses.

Secondly, about sharing ideas and how we tend to “sit on” ideas and knowledge instead of sharing. Remember, sharing is caring :-):

Do not covet your ideas. Give away everything you know, and more will come back to you. If you give away everything you have, you are left with nothing. This forces you to look, to be aware, to replenish.

And lastly, about problem solving leadership and taking chances:

If you can’t solve a problem, it’s because you’re playing by the rules.

(…)

But you must show no fear. It must be what you think, not what the client may think or your boss will think. This is your job. Don’t refer back to those in authority, they will play for safety. You’re on your own. Fly or die.

[All bolds in quotes my formatting]

If you have to choose the one over the other, I think the first one (It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be) is by far the best. But I’d pick up both any day.

Paul Arden has also written a new book (new and new — end of last year) — God explained in a taxi ride. Has any of you read it? If so, let me know if it is worth picking up.

Below is the stock price development of Bombardier, the company behind the infamous DHC-8 Q400, the past 3 months. The first serious SAS incident with this aircraft type, was on September 9 this year. Can you spot the trend?

I wonder what this will look like tomorrow morning when the stock exchange in Toronto opens. And I also wonder how other airlines will behave following SAS’s complete abandonment of the Dash 8. A move, which–by the way–in my mind was the only plausible course of action to maintain/restore long-term customer confidence and thus SAS itself.

Some of you may already have seen this Coke commercial, which recently started to air on Danish TV. It is actually a 2007 SuperBowl commercial. I love it and I wanted to share it with you; see it below.

More Coke commercials on the Coca-Cola website, and more SuperBowl commercials on SuperBowl Ads.

Yesterday, Apple announced the iPhone — something we have all been waiting for, for a very long time. And it’s beautiful!

And the effect of the announcement was directly traceable on the markets. Below is a picture of the share price development of Apple, Palm and the makers of BlackBerry for the past days. Ouch!

Chart from Google Finance

I bought a MacBook Pro (the fastest laptop on the planet) some time ago. So, naturally, I’ve been surfing the Internet for a lot of Mac stuff lately. This ad (one year old, when Apple launched their new lines containing Intel processors) is a perfect example of the ingenious marketing that they do. I love that company.

Marie and I are deep into our thesis, which I have promised to tell you about on several occasions. I am working on it right now, actually, but I just needed a break from it (which I then use to write about the thesis on this blog — what a break!).

We write about business strategy and how this can be coupled with the firm’s capital structure. Capital structure (also called financial structure) refers to the way the firm finances itself — very simplified you can either use your own money (equity) or the bank’s money (debt). Coupling strategy and capital structure theory is rather new, and hasn’t been done much before the very end of the 80’s — and there is still a lot of ground to be covered.

Within strategy, we look at innovation and to which degree the firm focuses its strategy on innovation and how it affects its financing decision. Our main hypothesis is that the more the firm focuses on innovation, the more it will use equity financing, other things equal. The immediate rationale for this is that equity capital is more risk-willing than debt capital — and when you have an innovation strategy, you take more risk than firms that do not have an innovation strategy. That is the basic notion, although there are plenty more arguments and details — but then I could go on forever :-).

Marie and I have been able to prove such a relationship between the degree to which the firm’s strategy is focused on innovation and its capital structure. We have looked at more than 2,000 companies, and our findings are quite significant. Below, I have quickly made a graph, that illustrates our findings (albeit simplified). Another interesting feature of our findings, which you can see from the graph, is the polynomial relationship (the famous s-curve).

That was the short story. I don’t think I’ll write much more about it on the blog, because it is somewhat different from the topics I normally write about. Still, if you want to know more about this and our findings, let me know.

As I have mentioned before, I’m currently writing my Master’s thesis — which I hope I’ll get the time to tell you about. The thing is, when I work on it all day, I really don’t feel like spending my evenings trying to write a post for my blog. At the latest, I’ll write up the ideas of the thesis when it’s done and over with. :-)

Anyway, because I’m writing my thesis I am re-reading a book I bought in the NYU book store in the fall of 2004 when I lived in New York City. The book is called The Elements of Style (by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White) and is about usage and style of well-written English. It is my absolute favourite book on the topic, it is short and it is to the point.

However, the point I want to make in this post is actually far from the subject matter of the book. But in the introduction to the book is an important point:

If you don’t know how to pronounce a word, say it out loud!

This sentence, one that William Strunk repeated over and over in his classes, is a metaphor or something bigger. Please don’t hide what you can’t do, because if you do, you’ll never learn.

There is a lot of talk about Google (GOOG) these days because they broke the 500 dollar/share roof. The valuation seems crazy, but I haven’t looked into whether it is sustainable or not, so let’s not discuss that :-)
However, I had a little look into the money Google spends on innovation (or research and development) versus Yahoo (YHOO) — and Yahoo has outspent Google every year for the past five years (I didn’t look further back). Still, if we look at the stock price since Google went public, Yahoo’s share price is flat compared to Google, whose share has quadrupled.

Here is a slide illustrating that point exactly from a presentation my good friend Thomas Joachim Hansen and I held yesterday.

If you want to get ideas, don’t kill them:

“An idea is delicate,” said Charles Brower, the head of an advertising agency. “It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.”

Then, aside not killing ideas, how do you get (more of) them? I thought that I’d share with you some of the thoughts I had during my latest read, Jack Foster’s How to Get Ideas. Jack is a former creative director in the advertising industry (in which he has worked for 35 years), and the people in that business are among some of the most creative on the planet.
Don’t you know these people who seem to be able to come up with ideas one after another—they could put them onto an assembly line if they wanted to. How on earth do they do it? Jack has a very good story:

When I was a kid I hung around with a guy named Johnny-Boy Boyd. JB was a klutz. Accidents just seemed to happen to him; if one didn’t run into him, he ran into it. Nowadays psychologists would say that subconsciously JB made accidents happen, that it was his way of getting attention. Back then we just called him “accident prone” and let it go at that. As an adult I hung around with people who were “idea prone.” Ideas just seemed to happen to them the way accidents happened to JB.

So how do we get ideas to “happen to us”? I think one of the most important things is putting your mind, both your conscious and sub-conscious, to it. If you think you can’t (or don’t want to) get new ideas, then you won’t get them.

After that, I think the most important thing is to feed your mind with raw material. The reason for this is that “an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.” (James Webb Young). So, if an idea is a combination of something you know, then you better know a lot.

What’s frustrating, however, is you don’t know what you need know. Again, looking at the very idea-prone people you know, notice how they know crazy details about crazy stuff. They suck information out of everything, because what if they need it?

One way of going about this is to do new and different things all the time. Read new books, different books, do different things, meet new people—and—ask a lot of questions; obvious questions, stupid questions, questions that have already been asked, questions that have never been asked. In this way, you’ll position yourself better to get new ideas, I’m sure… or that’s what Jack Foster says in his book anyway, and I think he is on to something.

Another thing that I think he is on to, is the paradox of creativity within limits. Sometimes, posing limitations on your creative process can help idea generation. He offers a story from his teaching, where he tells his students over-night to produce a poster for a Swiss Army knife. The next day, students complain that it was so difficult—and some were not able to do it at all. In another class, he gives the students the same task, however, they need to come up with 10 proposals for the poster—not for the next day, but for after the lunch break. The result was dramatically different, and the students were much better at producing ideas.

It is a paradox. In The Courage to Create, Rollo May calls it a “phenomenon.” But he explains “that creativity itself requires limits, for the creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.”

This post is already too long, so let me just finish with yet another quotation from the book:

Man can live without air for a few minutes, without water for about two weeks, without food for about two months—and without a new thought for year on end.
–Kent Ruth

Let it better not be us that do not get a new thought for years on end :-).

The book is extremely well written has countless anecdotes, which you will want to read if you like well-placed stories that illustrate important points (about the process of getting ideas).
Read more:

• Jack Foster: How to Get Ideas
• James Webb Young: A Technique for Producing Ideas (a classic, which Foster references numerous times)
• Wikipedia on Ideas

(All quotes in this post are from Jack Foster’s book, if you had not figured it out already :-) ).

The best case competition in the world — at least I think so :-) — is now blogging about everything from organising the competition itself over the life of the organisers to competition tips and tricks… you name it. The entire organising committee will be blogging.

CBS Case Competition is the first on the planet to blog — we define case competitions :-). It is the work of the PR/Marketing and IT groups of the organising committee, and I am really impressed with the speed and professionalism with which they have carried it out.

I hope you’ll go pay the blog a visit — I will be blogging both here and there — and participate via comments. Also have a look at my blog profile at the CBS Case Competition blog.

I try to buy as many books about presentation technique as possible given certain (and other) constraints such as money and time — and given that the book at hand looks sufficiently interesting, of course.

So, when I heard of Cliff Atkinson’s book Beyond Bullet Points, I quickly put it on my Amazon wish list, because I hate bullet points on slides — they are misused, abused and what is even worse. Finally, this September, I got around to buying it. Here is my take:

The message of the book is essential: Stop using overcrowded slides, stop being bound by the standard bullet point template and start to think. I like that. And Cliff has a very good tool kit to use, if it is difficult for you to move from bullet point slides to “simple” slides with practically no text in them.

He introduces a running Hollywood metaphor and compares the making of a presentation to the making of a movie. It is a good and useful comparison — and his introduction of two techniques, namely the story template (equivalent to filmmakers’ manuscript) and story board comes directly out of this comparison. The story template tool is the single largest takeaway from the book — and you can download it for free (Word template) here.

On the negative side, the book is extremely repetitive and in some passages very basic. And, it, especially the repetition, becomes boring at times – very boring. And for savvy presenters (and savvy Keynote/PowerPoint users), it may not be a revolutionary read, in fact it may be the contrary.

Finally, let me just share a quote from the book, which is very true, but may be obvious, but nevertheless, sometimes, someone has to state the obvious. And Cliff does it well:

You use PowerPoint well when people don’t even notice you use PowerPoint at all. The last thing you want is for someone to compliment you on your slides — that would mean that the medium called attention to itself instead of your ideas. The most important outcome of the presentation is that the audience understands the meaning you intend to communicate. When you finish the presentation, you want the audience to talk about your special ideas, not your special effects.

You can also visit Cliff’s website and his blog.

All in all, the book is good, if you have difficulty in producing text-light slides, and seem to be stuck with bullet points. If that’s the case, buy it.

Also read:

• Go Own the Room: Sincerity
• Great Presenters
• Those Who Practice Improve
• Visual Display Workshop

This is the first post I’ve written, which is rather technical in nature (not really, but it’s the most technical I’ve ever written on my blog anyway). It is about deriving an expression for how changes in leverage, profitability, sales, and firm value multiples affects value creation, and by how much. The reason for writing this post was that I couldn’t find anything on the web, which satisfied me in explaining the derivation—so I did it myself.

We can look at value creation in companies in many ways—however, generally, we define value creation as the value created for shareholders from one point in time (t) to another (t+1), as follows (where S is equity value):

We are often interested in analysing exactly how this value came about, i.e. which factors influenced the value creation. As mentioned, there are several ways of looking at this and of breaking it down—here, I will focus on the very popular break-down into debt reduction, multiple expansion, and growth in earnings. The latter can again be divided into sales growth and margin expansion.

In other words, we want to arrive at an expression that groups value creation into what was created from debt reduction, multiple expansion, sales growth, and margin expansion. (more…)

Management guru Tom Peters presented in London one of these days. Although I like Tom’s writing, his slides are not the prettiest on Earth. But they are worth while, and the ones from his London event is one of the best sets I’ve seen recently. In them, he treats topics such as:

• Women - and why they contribute/will contribute more to GDP growth than emerging markets (the BRIC countries) or the Internet
• Washing your hands - is the single best thing you can do to stay free of diseases
• “Nobody gives you power. You just take it!”

And much, much more. They are really worth while, so go have a look, a laugh, and gain some insights (albeit, not from slide design :-) ). Here is the link.

China trip, Day Eight—April 13: About half way through the trip on this beautiful, sunny Thursday. The sky was still a bit clear from yesterday, but it that slowly became history as the day passed by. We started the day at the Renmin University (the People’s University), which has a new and pretty campus in a quiet and quite nice neighbourhood. Picture of one of their, I guess main buildings, below:

The entire morning was a seminar with a couple of presentations on human resource management in China by some of their MBA students, which was followed by a discussion with a number of MBA students. It was interesting to see their perspective on things, and—especially—debating culture. We had to “warm them up” in order to really get the debate going, and, still, at that point you could not be entirely sure that what we heard was their opinion or that of someone else (say, Chinese Government?). In any case, all of the students were friendly, warm of heart and sociable.

In the afternoon, we had paid a visit to the Beijing Biotech and New Medical Development Center. It was, mostly, a sales pitch: Why place your pharma R&D in Beijing? and like-minded questions were answered. But useful stats and historical developments came about as well.

In the evening, and one of the many high-lights of the trip, was a visit to a theatre showing the story about Kung Fu; expected, but fascinating choreography, music full of fantasy, and a visual experience of calibre. I could go there again. Picture, below:

China Trip, Day Seven—April 12: On the programme for today was a visit to the Danish embassy and hereafter the Danish industrial company F.L. Schmidth. During the night there had been hurricane winds, which completely cleared the usually dusty air and smog-filled sky, which was wonderful. You really feel the clean air, when you took a breath, and you could see the sun for the first time, because the smog had been blown away. On a day like this, Beijing started looking attractive and got the nice spring-feel over it. Everyone had their sun glasses out. Our embassy was situated in an Embassy neighbourhood, so it was a rather calm place, with almost no traffic and people, but a lot of fences and guards. The nice weather, though, made these rather cold surroundings seem nice. Below, a picture of the entrance to the Danish Embassy.

After our morning visit, we split up for lunch. A couple of friends and I headed for PizzaHut to get some real proteins, something we had been missing ever since we got here. What stroke us about the restaurant, which is a normal McDonalds-like fast food restaurant in Western countries, was that it was a really upscale, nice restaurant here: Marble floor, starlight ceilings, luxury couches to sit in and so on. And—not to forget—the toilets were the nicest we had seen so far here in China, and they were up to par to any Western luxury restaurant.

Our afternoon visit was with F.L. Schmidth, a Danish industrial that makes concrete factories and related things. Their head office is located in a good looking apartment/business cluster called East Lake, which is in a very nice part of Beijing. East Lake Villas was actually established many, many years ago by another Danish company, EAC. Below a picture of the entrance to East Lake.

The audience doesn’t need to know if we are using 35mm slides, a Mac, a PC, an iPod or displaying slides from Keynote, PowerPoint, or something else. The content of the message and our connection with the audience are all that matter.

From Carlos Ghosn: The little things matter over at Garr’s blog.

Day Three—April 8: Eating breakfast on this—another grey (grey because of smog, not because the sun isn’t shining)—day, I was amazed by the fact that the Chinese seem to eat the same kind of food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner: Rice with eggs, chicken, dumplings with mixed meat, water melons, etc. Then, so am I on this trip :-).
This was the day where we were going to visit the Chinese headquarters of Novozymes, the company around which the cases evolves. Below, a photograph of their building.

Novozymes’s Finance Director for Asia gave us a more detailed presentation on their activities in Asia, as well as surprising and knowledgeable insights during Q&A. Novozymes produces enzymes and micro-organisms (if I get the time, I’ll write more on the company later) and relies heavily on patent protection of these products in order to stay profitable. To my surprise, in China, intellectual property rights issues are of no concern to Novozymes—their products and the processes to make these are simply too complicated to become victim of the normal Chinese culture of copying things ruthlessly.

We were also introduced to NNE (my unofficial explanation to this abbreviation is Novo Nordisk Engineering), which—like Novozymes—also originates from the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk. NNE is an engineering consultancy and has managed the construction projects of both Novozymes’s headquarters and their production site in TEDA (an economic development zone a couple of hours north of Beijing by car). In the case we’re solving, the issue is an expansion of Novozymes’s production capacity, which is why the viewpoint of NNE is extremely relevant. Below is a picture of Novozymes’s Asian Finance Director, Mads, and NNE’s General Manager for China, Christian.

After having spent the day at Novozymes, including an hour or two of case solving, we headed back to the hotel. I headed out to Beijing’s pedestrian street with a bunch of people to have a look—it is actually a pretty normal pedestrian street with McDonald’s, Nike, Häagen-Dazs, adidas, and what else you could imagine. Evidently, there are also stores carrying Chinese-made products, for instance, a store carrying all kinds of “cutlery”, i.e., chop sticks (photograph below).

This was also the day where I bought an incredibly expensive ice cream from Häagen-Dazs (RMB 60, just below EUR 10, which is about the same as three good evening meals would cost you here) and some of my friends ate beetles, so we covered a lot of ground.

I have not read Timothy Koegel’s The Exceptional Presenter yet, but Tom Peters posted about it on his weblog (He Has a Point: A Damn Good One). Tom extracts one simple, very obvious, but—often—very forgettable piece of advice from this book:

Those who practice improve. Those who don’t, don’t

What people often complain, however, is the lack of time to practice, and maybe this should be linked to the fact that the pay-off from practicing is not immediate—it is somewhat distant in most cases. What Tom points out about this book in his post, is that one should simply seize more opportunities to practice, such as in everyday tasks:

One of Koegel’s greatest contributions is suggesting-revealing the fact, the great news, that we have many, many mundane opportunities to practice! He offers numerous ideas. Using people’s names in conversations is very powerful. So practice it at a party this weekend. Smiling is a matchless “weapon” for winning over audiences … so be aware, in family communications, the degree to which you smile, or don’t. In my case, and my wife laughs at me over this one, I spend as much time spell-checking and working on grammar-word choice on emails to old friends as I do when writing something formal to a prospective Client: Every time I communicate with anybody is an opportunity to improve my communications effectiveness.

What a wonderful point. Every time we communicate, we have the chance to improve our communication and presentation skills. Seize the opportunity and Go Own the Room.