I'm a bad blogger

And this should come as no surprise to anyone who might or might not read this, some time in the future. Sorry. It's been a very busy couple of days... my last post was on Wednesday; on Thursday we started the first Integrative Exercise, which went as follows:

Thursday
1pm: Receive a 30 page case on the Khala, a joint-venture project to launch a "motorized bicycle" in Pakistan, based on the Velosolex that was sold in France from the 1940s until early in the 'aughts':What you're seeing in a somewhat regular bicycle with a motor bolted onto the front wheel. You raise and lower the motor directly onto the wheel using some sort of lever, and there's a clutch and throttle on the handlebar. It's basically the poor man's moped, if you can imagine what that might look like. So, we read the case, in our study group, and we have until noon (12:00) Friday to come up with some sort of plan and present this plan. The challenge of the case is very broad: essentially, they have a product and some spare floor space in a factory, but not much else. The case asks us to construct a plan to market, distribute, sell, and finance the operations, based out of Karachi, Pakistan. We had a bit of learning to do.

The target agenda was to be done for the evening by midnight, and went something like this:
4pm: Analytic brainstorm (economics of the region, industry, and product)
5pm: Analytic content gathering (fill in the blanks from the brainstorm)
6pm: Strategic brainstorm (given the above, what do we want to do with this thing?)
7pm: dinner
8pm: Strategic content gathering (given our strategy, let's fill in the blanks on how to actually do this. e.g., what does the advertising spend look like, how many people do you have to hire to run the factory, what price do you set, how much money do you need to borrow, and when, etc. etc.)
10pm: Review strategic content, and prepare storyboard of presentation.
11pm: Review storyboard.
12pm: Finish for night.

We actually finished at 4:15am, and when we finished, there were still 5 or 6 groups working. We were actually lucky, because we had the latest presentation slot on Friday... many groups had to present at 8am. Things went somewhat smoothly until the 8pm Strategic Content Gathering section, when it fast became apparent that even with the best laid strategic plans, we could not pull together everything required to launch the Khala (the case's working name for the bike) in 2 hours. In retrospect, not much of a surprise. I get quite cranky by 4:15 in the morning, and I was our group's project manager for this... I'm happy to report I still have friends!

So, home at 4:30am (literally... the clock tower beside my house chimed as I was unlocking my door), and up again at 7:30 to be back at work for 8am.

Friday
8am: we actually all made it in on time,