How to ride a Mongolian Horse

Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Indonesia

So with the Nepal trek closed and an open summer ahead of me, I took up a very enticing invitation to travel in Tibet. But as long as we’d be in the hinterlands, we thought we might as well visit Inner Mongolia also.
First, I learned that if there was ever a battle for the most representation on tours between mainland Chinese and foreigners, the Chinese won long, long ago. I saw no other foreigners in Inner Mongolia, and on the plateau our foreigner group was outnumbered by Mainland tourists by at least 10-1.
The most famous land feature in Inner Mongolia are the grasslands, on which ride the famed Mongolian horses, whose masters reside in the equally famous roundhouses, eating giant servings of pure lamb meat. The visits to the Mongolian villages are a little touristy, with brief trots on horses, Karaoke lunches, and ongoing negotiations for goods and services. But when you can get away from these small negatives for a moment, and just look out over the expanse of land, and sit and watch the sunset, it’s really relaxing and pleasant. And the lamb was *delicious*, worth every jiao. But back to the horse-back rides: The Mongolian tour directors only let you ride very slowly, but I knew they can ride the horses much faster. How to get them to do that? To answer that question, I took a page from the Cargo Cultists of post-World War II. The Mongolians wear iconic, large brimmed cowboy-style hats, and I was watching some of them hit the horses on the rump to speed them up. (I happened to buy such a hat because I thought it looked cool). Adding a shred of creativity, I took my new hat off, and whapped my horse on the rump with it, and the beast TOOK OFF! I had never been so fast on a horse in my life, and when my initial surprise wore off, the speed was really enjoyable – the horses glide along more smoothly and comfortably at speed than they do in trot. As soon as my horse had gotten this impulse, my Mongolian minder shouted from his increasingly distant point “Drop the hat! Drop the hat!” no doubt hoping desperately that my stilted Chinese possessed the relevant vocabulary. I savored the experience for a few final, memorable seconds before I decided to be an obedient tourist and threw off the cowboy hat. I inferred, correctly that the hat is used in training so that the horses respond to it uniquely.
The grasslands turned out to be lacking in grass in favor of small shrubs. It turned out there were consequences of this which we learned through horseback riding. My horse was tripping every so often on apparently nothing.
“Me: My horse seems so tired . . . “
“Mongolian cowgirl: Didn’t you notice how skinny he is? The rain has been light the last year, the grass for him to eat so little”.
Turns out the horse was indeed scrawny, and I felt bad. I thought that in the US we solved these kinds of shortages with hay cultivation, markets, and transportation, but I’m not a farmer so what do I know . . . By contrast in the opposite corner of the country, the Tibetans definitely have hay figured out to feed their yaks . . .
Following a punctuating bubble bath party back in a Beijing Sanlitun nightspot we proceeded to the Tibetan plateau. If you ever gain the inclination to visit Tibet, please please take the pressure acclimatising train the 48 hour train in and don’t fly. The entire south-western third of China sits on a plateau. So we’re talking about a vast swath of planet Earth raised 4000 meters, or 13000 feet, above sea level. Turns out that the meter-feet conversion is important, because to an ear accustomed to customary units, the number 4000 sounds harmless enough. When the airplane sets down, the airport pharmacy (by the way, the airport has a pharmacy) chiefly sells oxygen bottles. And they are *very* necessary if you come into the country by airplane. Fatigue and headaches settle in quickly, and days later we’re making out way to 5000 Meters (16,500 feet) at Everest Base Camp. More than half of our troupe suffered altitude sickness at this altitude, and while the view of Mt. Everest was valuable, I suspect the sickest among us were unsure their malady-stricken stay at the camp was worth the photos.
We took the train back from Lhasa, and the rolling hills covered in (grassy) grasslands grazed by yaks was delightful. Our train passed through the highest train station in the world, a factoid which the train PA system dutifully recognized. The train sped straight through this notable station without stopping – I decided it was a tribute to the host country’s sense of face that they built this station – because there were no inhabitants, buildings, or crops to justify the station's existence.
Well with these travels completed, there really was only one more logical destination to pursue. Obviously I’m talking about Jakarta. Yes, with two weeks to kill, I had to go somewhere before my itinerary for a class business trek (observing and meeting with exotic tribal chieftains in Silicon Valley) kicked in. My thinking proceeded thusly: I had already visited or traveled through 70% of China’s provinces (which officially means its high time I saw as much of the US . . .). Therefore Jakarta, the rambunctious, unrestrained, burgeoning capital of Indonesia was the last backpacking itch I had to scratch. ( I'm saving Mt. Rushmore for later :) )
From an urban planning perspective, Jakarta is best compared to Los Angeles – a concrete jungle with little planning with respect to zoning and mall developments everywhere, while the megalopolis manages to avoid the street chaos of Mumbai or Delhi. I happened to show up at the opening of Ramadan (as the hedonistic revelers of the world do one big collective face-palm) which pretty much shut down recreational life in the city. That's okay - I always enjoy urban observation (I like to keep my eyes open to in any new city), experience a foreign lifestyle (I managed to observe Jakarta’s hip and beautiful while making friends with expat helicopter pilots in Social House - thanks to GN for the tip!). I skipped over to Bali in pursuit of kite-surfing. As I write I’m in Bali’s beach-chic Seminyak planning my itinerary to Lombok and the Gili islands where I hear the wind and facilities are appropriate for this.

PS, for this posts' photos, I know the bulk of mainstream readers like to see food and cultural stuff, but until the day this blog becomes reader-supported, you get what I like to post, namely . . . Solar-powered GSM phone antennae at 4000 M altitude!



and a solar powered water boiler near Sugatse!! Can there *be* anything cooler??



Since that picture I was in immense pain from a splitting migraine stemming from the reflected sunshine off the cooker. That moment was the last time I smiled that day. :(

Karmic Repair in Nepal

Holy smokes I’m in Nepal. I had some funny preconceived notions on what I would see here. For example, I thought that Kathmandu would look a lot like Darjeeling (mountain town) on steroids. I write having completed one INSEAD period since my last post.
I’m in this country on a social entrepreneurship trek. You see, before the beginning of the period, we had a choice of the following courses: Building Business in China, Building Business in India, Social Entrepreneurship in Nepal, and Building Business in Brazil. The Brazil trek got canceled for insufficient enrollment, and the remaining BRIC country’s course, Drinking Vodka in Russia, was expunged for unknown reasons. These days the talk is about BRICi, where the little I is for Indonesia. I am aching to visit that little i’s Jakarta, preferably as part of a trek in the autumn P4. Drumming up interest from my fellow INSEAD students is proving tricky, many are looking for the next sandy beach to visit on weekends . . .
One nice thing about elective courses such as these treks is that students are effectively self-selecting into affinity groups. So for example, I meet the guy who has spent his career to date with the Red Cross in sub-Saharan Africa, or the Bain consultant who worked with Technoserve on cashew supply chain optimization, also in Africa.
On this trek, we visited villages where their agricultural output has increased multiple times over allowing them to transition from subsistence farming to market participation with their surpluses. I like the examples of development initiatives where the target’s earning input has increased, as opposed to just making their life a little easier under their current income regime. This usually involves facilitating markets access. In one initiative I was part of, we were enabling lighting in a productized package for low income villagers in India. Perhaps the lighting could increase their productivity, say at night, but it was really about making the customers’ lives easier without necessarily increasing their earning power. On the other hand, it gives villagers who don’t have the income potential to buy the product something to aspire to. Seeking increased utility and status is a powerful force in capitalism – recall ‘the pursuit of happiness’, a notion whose effect on the world isn’t to be underestimated.
But it’s hard to productize the act of facilitating market access. In the case of the above village where they learned how to cross high quality strains of oranges with large size strains, or teaching drip irrigation to maximize targeted water usage without wasting it on weeds, there’s not much you can monetize except for consulting time, which is a subjectively valued product even in the first world.
We also visited a group of social entrepreneurs – they were an inspiring lot with such diverse projects in operation including breweries, training initiatives,distributed biofuel power generation, and housing conversion to traditional architecture styles. We also visited an urban housing project for the homeless, a community drinking water diversion project, and an instance of OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) in action for Nepali schoolchildren. Now here’s where I’m going to push the INSEAD brand. Whereas a student delegation from your typical, run-of-the-mill social entrepreneurship-oriented business school (ahem, Stanford) would show up on site, see some villages, take some photos, and ruminate on the airplane back home, we INSEAD students said, “Screw that, we’re cutting the original observation schedule short, and make a presentation to all the entrepreneurs we met and show them how to get the entrepreneurial ecosystem right-side-up again.” We created a brand and illustrated a pathway to bring up Nepal’s tourism, agricultural export, and hydropower industries, all under one licenseable brand (kind of like the ‘CE’ label for product safety) designed to inspire commitment in Nepalis and confidence in foreigners on their supermarket store shelves. Remember when you come to Nepal as well as your local organic supermarket storeshelf and see brand “Jaya” posted all over the place, you saw it here
first! Although seeded by our finance guy and our Red Cross worker, cheers to the consultants in our group for pushing the presentation structure along, you’re a tribute to your profession.
After the week-long class was over, we took a flight to the Himalayas and back - $140 for an affirmative response to the question, “Oh you were in Nepal, did you see Mt. Everest?”. Yes, I did, and here are the blurry pictures to prove it.
Alas, the summer is finally here. Many students are in internships with banks and consultancies. Following my unsuccessful “cross the t’s, dot the I’s” banking applications, valiant multi-weekend-in-the-Singapore-library effort at VC internships, and a few artistic stabs at industry, I’m once again mobile and traveling in Asia, my conscience restful in the knowledge that I pulled out all the networking stops at my disposal for an internship in the region.
So on deck we have Delhi starting tomorrow morning where I’ll catch the remainder of the Building Business in India folks, followed by Inner Mongolia in China, and then the holy grail of travel adventures, Tibet. My trusty cell phone camera is taking requests on what to point and shoot it at. Email them or send me a message via comment.

It's all optional

I wanted very much to be able to say I was in finals and so couldn't post this week, but then all of a sudden, finals just finished this morning, taking away my alibi, and providing you this post.
On Friday I said good-bye to the consternatingly cold weather of Fontainebleau, and a fresh hello to the local liveliness that is Singapore.
Today we will talk about Financial Options, yet we won't talk about how poorly I did on the recent Finance Exam :). I found options fascinating because a) they help you evaluate and negotiate for the kind of stock options package you offer or are offered during the creation of a new company (especially in my Silicon Valley home turf) but more importantly for b) their real life applications outside of finance.
What is an option? Most clearly but least precisely, an option is a contract giving its owner the ability, but not the obligation (thus the "option") to buy a stock at a future time, where the stock's value at the future time is unknown (even though the stock's value is widely known at the time of purchase). If such a contract could be bought and sold, (informal markets can spring up around even the most restrictive of options contracts) you can imagine it would be tough to assign a fair price to it. So we spent a lot of effort learning how to value options contracts. But I suspect that only a few readers of this blog would actually care how such a contract is valued. Suffice to say that the more that an option contract's underlying stock value fluctuates, the more valuable the option.

Instead, I suspect that many readers do care about the value of projects they undertake. Look at going school to learn a new skill with uncertain longterm payoff, or traveling to a new locale to look for otherwise unknowable opportunities, or starting a new business with uncertain outlook. Are these activities worthwhile endeavours? Well it turns out that each of these activities is a form of real option, only mildly distinct from a stock option. Because of the high upside in being able to replicate and scale an otherwise small but value-producing project, and the low downside being the sunk cost of exploring the basecase of the opportunity, then these kinds of explorations in aggregate become very worthwhile.

I have to wonder then whether, over many eons, we've evolved the risk appetite required to explore options - i.e. in exploration of new food sources. However, while I would argue that such risk appetite is a superior trait for populations, it may be of net negative value for any particular individual singled out of a population. Because, while a roaring success may benefit that individual as well as the population around him, say, if (s)he found a new food source and also could control its public distribution for his/her benefit, it could also turn out that the exploration fails, and the individual perishes from exposure to whatever risky environment in which he placed himself in the first place. So, extrapolated over many generations of natural selection, this successively repeated scenario would breed individuals into risky-options-seeking automatons, who don't necessarily do so on the net likelihood of their own benefit. In a large population of such risky-options-seekers, some would inevitably succeed, improving the lot of the population, but those that failed would be crossed off the natural selection list, even though the same traits were being exercised in survivors and non-survivors alike.

So when it comes to the value of risky-options on the individual basis, I would argue that the jury's still out, and that economic conservatism may be the individual's value maximizing choice after all . . .

Coming up, look for discussion of the Singapore MBA student lifestyle.

Feeling the Timbuk2 Love . . .

In our Processes and Operations Management class, we study the mathematics that allows some businesses to operate, and causes others to fail (I use the words ‘allow’ and ‘cause’ carefully). Our most recent study was the company Timbuk2. Timbuk2 is the yellow-swirly branded maker of messenger bags founded and headquartered in the City and County of San Francisco. Not all of their bags are made in the city anymore, but a respectable number of them are, and certainly the highest margins are earned there on a per-bag basis.

Timbuk2 is justifiably special to me. I purchased (or rather, my father purchased for me) my first Timbuk2 bag in 1998, priced at $70. It took me through the end of high school and throughout my undergrad years commuting to class on rollerblade. The laptop-messenger pictured is the third bag I’ve owned. It has seen me through all weather conditions in more than ten developing and developed countries. The company continuously fixes design faults and adds appropriate features as the model matures.
(I think it’s notable that the original messenger bag remains offered today for precisely $70, considering all of the things that affect price change over time, including but not limited to manufacturing cost, inflation, consumer demand, and the company’s preference to maintain consumer’s psychological price anchors.)

Earlier after first arriving on campus for the MBA program, no one ever had reason to give my red-and-grey shoulder bag a second look other than that it appeared a bit odd – why not a leather satchel? Now people stop me in the hallway and ask, “Hey, is that a Timbuk2 bag? We just studied that company in our operations class.”

It is definitely a point of pride that we can (or that at least someone can) still make things in San Francisco. The trick is customization. Many companies manufacture uniform, low cost products in China and ship them over a long lead time over water to the US. Apple can contract to manufacture uniform high price, high margin products, and fly them to the US. Dell and other laptop manufacturers can, only after extreme capital equipment expenditures, contract to manufacture customized high price, high margin products to be flown to the US. If you’re a small concern operating locally, you’d better manufacture customized products and capture as much of a consumer’s willingness to pay for the customization as possible. That’s what Timbuk2 does for a significant segment of its products. The rest follows the first China (and Philippines, it turns out) outsourcing model of long lead manufacturing and sea freight.

The company was covered in our operations class for two reasons. First, for the customization (and associated value-add) capability from its website, and second, from a manufacturing process called “bump back” which for its novelty is something I’m still trying to nail down. And as I’m studying for finals, I have to become pretty familiar with this operation.

Entrepreneurship

It’s rare that I read news that actually has a near term affect on my life and those around me. I think we are bombarded with a lot of noise for the sake of infotainment. When I read a newspaper under a time constraint, I challenge myself on how much I can ignore, instead of seeing how many morsels of happenings I can suck from the headlines. So I derive some kind of mildly schadenfreudian pleasure from (non-catastrophic) news events that actually affect me and people around me.

Case in point. Recently a volcano blew in bankrupted Iceland. (My finance professor relayed a quip from their Brit lenders, “We asked for cash, they sent us ash”). Who knew that volcanic ash clouds could down airliners? Anyways, it has caused transportation chaos throughout Europe. To exacerbate things, the French rail network in the vicinity of Paris went on strike. That left only the Eurostar (Chunnel) line (remember two posts ago?) operating. People around me were definitely affected. A friend missed a UK interview, the CEO of the company that designs Ferraris could not fly in, and half the class missed a long-planned sports trip to Barcelona. But there's no reason why the volcano has to stop erupting anytime soon, so my flight to Singapore in early May is in jeopardy.

On with the week’s post. Entrepreneurship – A five-syllable buzzword if ever there was one. It captures imaginations, it instils fear. For some it represents dreams to be fulfilled, and for others I suppose it ranks with having root canal at the local dentist. I wanted to talk about INSEAD with respect to entrepreneurship. Distinct from departments such as Marketing and Strategy, which I think are all critical for entrepreneurial endeavours, INSEAD offers these courses specifically for Entrepreneurship on the Singapore campus.

Startup Bootcamp
New Business Ventures
Entrepreneurial Leadership
Entrepreneurial Field Studies
Building Business in China
Building Businesses in India
Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Brazil & Emerging Markets
Explorations in Social Entrepreneurship
Business Planning Workshop
Effective Fundraising for Entrepreneurs
Realising Entrepreneurial Potential
Private Equity (read, 'Venture Capital')
Entrepreneurship in Action

It’s actually impossible to take them all due to schedule conflicts. Even given the largest set of courses that don’t conflict with each other, I doubt that even the most entrepreneurially minded students would take them all take of them. After all, there’s other interesting courses like Business to Business Marketing, Strategy for Product and Service Development, and Economics and Management in Developing Countries.

I took the Startup Bootcamp weekend course already. This was a fantastic retreat, comprising fast paced business plan writing, cash flow formulating, and pitching competition. Thirty of us arrived to the offsite Friday evening, had an idea brainstorm, and formed into groups (companies). The next day, we clarified the ideas, fleshed out the business model, rigorously defined how cash is transferred from customers to ourselves, and after running cash flows in Excel, determined the net value of the company. Sunday we prepared our pitches to Venture Capitalists (VCs) - short and sweet, perhaps thirty seconds per person. Of course the preparation took much longer than this. As a model, the instructor brought in the former CEO of NASDAQ Europe. This added in the appropriate level of stress and sweat.

Some people may pursue the ideas coming out of this event, most probably will not. The point is that we all came away with a rigorous early stage execution formula applicable to any endeavour we will set out to accomplish in the future. I am most grateful to our instructors and entrepreneurs in their own right, Paul Keweine-Hite and Peter Sage for their offering their time. Photographed is the practice pitching session.

When I applied to INSEAD the first time, one of my biggest fears was that there wouldn't be other entrepreneurs or support for entrepreneurs on arriving here. After deferring to pursue my business, reapplying, and finally entering, I'm rather pleased with the enterprising aspirations of many of the folks I've met and what's on offer, although the final verdict for the courses won't come until after I've taken them.

"IT Rep!"

One responsibility I've undertaken at INSEAD is to become IT Rep for my section. It certainly takes up a lot of my scarce, scarce time, so let me illustrate:

Each class intake of 500 students is divided into about 7 sections of around 70-75 students. Fontainebleau campus has 4 such sections. At the beginning of the curriculum, the sections' students elect representatives - Academic reps to interact with the professors, Career reps to interact with Career services and keep students apprised of upcoming recruiting events, Social reps to organize parties, and an IT rep to spearhead mitigating IT and facilities issues the students face. I'll preface the following by repeating the classic IT person's lament, that when systems are working, little credit is given, but when things go wrong, much credit is taken.

Many components come together to give a school its reputation. From the point of view of its students, INSEAD's greatest strength is its faculty, who are truly superior. There are long term faculty, and temporary visiting professors. Both are exceedingly strong. INSEAD's next strength is it's career services. Career services work efficiently and tirelessly to get consultancies, banks, and industry to come onto campus for recruiting. The largest and top-tier consulting firms maintain consultant-caliber staff exclusively for recruitment from *this* school. (What is a consultant? You're forgiven if you're as unfamiliar as I was before the beginning of term, but you'd be better served by your own research into this than my explanation). Then, after school culture, the remaining component that drives a school’s student experience, and by extension it’s reputation, is the quality of its facilities and IT (Information Technology) systems. These include all of the PC’s on campus, the campus local area network, the campus connection to the outside world, PC virus security, e-mail services, and about 20 other items all of which, like parts of an automobile, require regular attention and maintenance.

Unfortunately, it is at this point that the school falls far short of the mark – printers fail, the network goes down, email (e.g. from recruiters) stops receiving after filling an unbelievably low 100MB quota, and much, much, more.

One thing I recognized early on starting the MBA program was that the many and disparate IT problems the campus faced were organizational in nature, not technical. For example, follow this train of thought: “Why is email down? Because they haven’t upgraded to a new mail server version. Why not? Because there are IT contractor issues. Why? Because they don’t have enough budget to properly incentivize the contractor or hire a superior one. Why not get quality in-house IT specialists? Because if you inadvertently hire the wrong ones in-house, they are too expensive to fire because of severance pay laws here in France. Why hasn’t someone figured whatever issues, stopgaps, drivers, and incentives exist or are necessary to make the organization robust? Because management, at some level, is not yet up to task.

I actually sought the challenge of figuring out what process distills human and human-created issues into tangible real-world physical effects. Looking from this point of view, you begin to understand that airplanes don’t fly because of differences in air pressure across a wing, they fly because Boeing/Airbus and the airlines will them to fly with no tolerance for failure.

To become a ‘rep’ , one runs for the position in an informal election. So I ran unopposed, for the rep position because I knew there were problems that needed to be solved, and I figured I was as reasonable a choice as the next person to solve them, and do a favor for my class in the process. My campaign platform noted all the problems we face and getting responsiveness from the IT department + facilities. There were three other IT reps, and they made clear early on that they didn’t share the same level of enthusiasm as I did for “getting things done”.

But over time, the class perceived my role as being Mr. Fix-It, instead of the role I intended: someone to take complaint surveys and push for organization change while learning more about how people and organizations work in the process. While I found the undesired fix-it view disheartening, it also pushed me to find the people throughout INSEAD responsible for how things work around here. Now I can solve most major things that go wrong in a technology-enabled classroom with a phone call or polite text message in French, and the relationships I have with the staff give me a peek into what isn’t working on an organizational level. By contrast, I’ve heard that the other reps experience great frustration because they didn’t know where to start when a problem struck and the pressure from the class built to do something about it – one rep even quit because he couldn’t handle the pressure.

It was about halfway through the first 10-week period of school that the senior class’s rep got on board my campaign and we managed to identify exactly who in the IT department it was we were supposed to meet with in order to start getting things done. Org chart? No way; doesn’t exist even if people weren’t too fearful of their jobs to give us one. What about tips from previous years’ reps? Well although these kinds of efforts have been taken up before, there’s very little continuity from intake to intake in the one-year MBA. Along with so many student clubs, like industry and affinity clubs, on campus, everything gets built from scratch every 6-months to a year. This phenomenon which in part represents the efficiency of the INSEAD curriculum, also represents a lack of continuity, deteriorating the effectiveness of the clubs (and the reps) – the contacts they make, and the cultures they create. For efforts expecting only long-term results, you have to pursue them knowing you and those around you won’t get to benefit from them since they’ll graduate in less than a year. Instead you operate on the knowledge that you’re helping the next class, and that has to be enough even though you know the next class will never tangibly realize what you did to make their experience better, or be able to thank you for it. In turn, we know that we are benefiting from earlier classes of students in perhaps intangible ways.

Eventually we managed to get weekly meetings in place that people actually attend. And after all of our haranguing, the IT Department is starting to “get it”. We’re seeing some specific improvements we’ve pushed for, like replacing lots of the printers with new ones, making some Windows7 support software available, and more excessively mundane issues that 1) drive people nuts when they encounter them and 2) don’t need mentioning here for their sheer obscurity. I have another meeting with the Dean of the school coming up. And after newer updates to my section and new surveys I’ve taken from them on their complaints, now I have enough political capital to get org charts and start asking about incentive schemes without feeling like I’m trodding on sensitive territory.

We at INSEAD like to compare ourselves among the top and penultimate tiers of American business schools. These include (not exclusively) Harvard, Columbia, Wharton, Stanford, Sloan, and Kellogg, Fuqua, Haas. If we expect to truly hold our own, IT+facilities absolutely have to be improved.

More than any student on this campus I am acutely aware of IT systems near term future. In light of that, to future MBA's intending to spend time on the Fontainebleau campus, I have to make the following recommendations: 1) Bring and rely on your own laptop - for example, an Asus mediabook is ideal – reliable, very portable + good size screen, long battery life. 2) Foot the bill for a Blackberry, it provides a lot of communications robustness independent of INSEAD systems. You'll be on a contract with Orange that you can, with some trouble, get out of if/when you switch campuses.

Having covered IT more than anyone should ever have been interested, look for discussion of Entrepreneurship next post, and Social life in a following one.

This period is tough

The "elders" of the school, those students who entered 5 months earlier than we did, warned us: The second period (in which we are currently in) is much harder than the first period, completed in early March. They are correct in terms of work quantity - we have almost one new case per course per session to review before the start of class (after which commences some Harvard-style Q+A). But it's not as heavy on completely new, brain twisting concepts. Put-call parity is one notable exception. Instead, the coverage feels much more practicable than last period - especially Strategy, Marketing, and Leading Organizations. I spent pretty much all day yesterday reading the optional reading - because during week this reading is the first thing to get de-prioritized, assuming it ever makes it into the work queue at all.
Ah, "de-prioritize" - that practice I partake in on a daily basis. Reminds me of a little story this week - I was walking with some of my Chinese peers, who were speaking in Mandarin amongst themselves. What you find among Chinese who've spent a lot of time in international circles is that they often use English words intermingled with Chinese speech. Instead of just being a widely used technical English word, it might be an English word that conveys a special idea or emotion. Recent examples I've picked up include "frustrated" and "de-prioritize". I'm interested in language usage, so I asked my Chinese friends why didn't they just use the Chinese word for "de-prioritize" - after all, didn't this word exist in Chinese? Their response: "Of course we have this word in Chinese!". To which I said, "Great! So what is it?" About two minutes of head scratching and nervous contemplating ensued, after which they could not come up with a suitable word to describe de-prioritization. I'm fond of supposing that words and linguistic constructs in modern Chinese should reflect the accumulated collective experience over 4000 of Chinese history. So I retorted, "You mean in 4000 years no Chinese has ever de-prioritized anything? Man, you guys work HARD."
Last point on Chinese - I thank you for praying to your favored Supreme Being, minor deity, or capricious zephyr for my success on the Chinese exam. I've passed INSEAD's exit language requirement, and so it's one more major hurdle off my plate!
I realize I'm remiss on photo-posting. There's been a number of recent photo-heavy events for which I've sworn not to post photos, due to the cross-dressing nature they may or may not depict. Such is culture at INSEAD. Off to an IT meeting, I'm representing the class to improve our ancient IT systems vis-a-vis the school administration. One day that quixotic effort will be worth a blog post in itself.
Also on deck for coverage: Next week I must write about the Entrepreneurial Bootcamp we had. Stay tuned.

London

I missed last week's post -- a digression for which you have my apology. It was the middle of finals, and although getting into the top percentiles isn't my top priority (and if it was, it would be exceedingly challenging ; there are some smart cookies at this school, and relative to me, far more than the 30 it would take to bar me from the lofty end of the curve) I did study hard. Why study so hard, so much as to shirk blogging responsibility, if not to outcompete the Jones'? Well, because I'm trying really hard to actually learn useful material at this school. I know that once finals are over I won't try so hard to sort out everything I was exposed to. I had to turn exposure into practice. And lets face it - this school is expensive - I want to have knowledge to show for the digits missing from the bank account.
This past week was a student holiday. After a day of catching up on personal admin, I hopped on the Eurostar train with direct service from Paris to London. Most other students went to any among Morocco, skiing in France, or to warmer climes in the country's South. I participated in a business case competition at Imperial College whose campus is set against London's Hyde Park.
The Chunnel is an amazing achievement. And even though the tunnel is treated as a monopoly, and even though this monopoly *still* loses money and has to be bailed out by the two governments that supported it, I'm still thankful it exists. Because a flight plus associated trains would take twice as long and cost at least as much. Curiously, Ryanair, the low cost carrier, doesn't offer a Paris-London route. This seems strange, considering they could outcompete the Chunnel train hands down. I wonder if they managed favorable tax status with the UK/France governments in favor of sidestepping competition for the lucrative government-backed rail route.
People say London is expensive. With respect to taxis, this is absolutely true. It cost twenty pounds to take a typical trip of 2 miles. The dollar is trading at 1.5 to the pound. For food, this poor value is less the case. It also cost twenty pounds on average for the restaurant meals I ate in different part of downtown - and those meals were *excellent*. The key is ethnic food. You're not (easily) going to find a "British restaurant"; they abdicated superiority in food preparation long ago. (all though fish and chips in pubs abound) But Indian, Chinese, Thai, and many other kinds of food abound, and they're done really well. Lastly, a decent seat to watch a Broadway-caliber show costs 35 pounds if purchased shortly before showtime (if seats are still available). I saw "Avenue Q" -- hilarious!!
The business case competition was for the organization called One Laptop Per Child. For some reason I find technology for emerging markets and developing world consumers really enticing. OLPC grew out of an MIT Media Lab project under Nicholas Negroponte whose goal was simply to get a ruggedized, simplified laptop in the hands of every poor rural kid on this globe aged 6-12 years old. It took some finagling, but against odds (not worth explaining here) I managed to get registered for the event and to join one of the other INSEAD teams at Imperial. The challenge was straightforward. The OLPC project has been having difficulty getting traction from developing world governments to subsidize and order the computers. They invited students from Cambridge, London Business School, Oxford's Said school, and INSEAD to compete in proposing a roadmap for creating a sustainable market for OLPC-style laptops into childrens' hands, whether they fall under the OLPC moniker or not.
What I found especially interesting was how the competition played out - Two finalists were announced, from whom one winner was selected. However the tension represented by the two finalists beautifully reflected the internal tensions at work in how I see my career developing: One finalist was, proudly, from INSEAD (alas, not my own team). The teammates represented the best of the INSEAD MBA tradition, made up primarily of former and likely future consultants. They identified an opportunity for corporate sponsorship, and a long term pathway for local component production to lower the devices' cost. The presentation slides were polished silk, and they delivered them well. Now the second team was a group of undergraduates studying at Imperial College -- two electrical engineers, and two scientists. I remember them as being very charming when I introduced myself to them before any finalists were announced (the b-school version of, "I knew them before they were big"). They didn't answer the competition question directly, but instead identified the incumbent OLPC cost as too high, and so proposed and photoshopped up a similar product they estimated would have significantly lower cost - change the LCD to an e-Ink screen, turn the device into a monolithic tablet instead of a foldable laptop. The decreased cost would increase uptake, they theorized. Guess who won? Well today, it was a victory of the engineers over the MBAs. I was simultaneously hurt as an MBA and exceedingly proud based on my engineering background - certainly a conflicted state, especially while I was defending the judges' decision to my fellow MBAs.
My class consists of many former engineers. I frequently study with one of them for final exams. A technical PhD followed by related production work in the telecoms industry, he progressed much, much further into his engineering career than me before starting business school. He remains (for the time being at least) imaginative, and tries to explore different possible approaches to a problem at hand. I can see him struggling with the way case problems are posed at INSEAD, enough that I find it depressing. Depressing because they are the same struggles that I have, but somehow it seems more difficult for him; trying to apply as much cold logic as possible, incapable of accepting the likely but inexact solution (that challenge right there encapsulates perhaps 80% of our struggles with Financial Accounting, by the way). One time for both of our benefit, I had to derive a microeconomics concept in engineering terms. Other students would have found this work unnecessary, taking the concept on faith without needing to generalize it to underlying fundamentals, the better to apply them to any new situation posed. By this point I'm suspecting that the other students' approach is superior, not just for this school, but for life in general. (Somewhere in Boston now, a thousand MIT professors' voices scream out in unison).
So the ongoing conflict is this: Do I leave my engineering mindset behind? Success on the more difficult problems in MIT problem sets and projects usually required out-of-the-box thinking - for example marrying an otherwise unrelated concept learned in a completely different technical discipline to the problem at hand to achieve success. This is what the Imperial engineers did. In business school, we're conditioned (or we condition each other?) to think in a very conventional way. No surprises needed, no a-ha moments. Just take the data at hand, and assemble it appropriately to identify the path forward. This is what the INSEAD consultants did. Summary? If a war rages between engineers and consultants, or the engineering mindset and the consulting mindset, then the engineers won last weekend's battle.
And so today I am back in Fontainebleau for our second of five periods. Courses are Marketing Management, Processes and Operations, Managerial Accounting, Leading Organizations, and . . . one more that doesn't come to mind right now. Let's hope it's titled, "Improving Memory 101". I regret that Macroeconomics isn't being taught until the third period of this year. I would have appreciated having more time to stew on this interesting subject before graduating. It's sort of like the Microeconomics course I took back in undergrad (and again last period) - in that you can observe what they teach playing out around you every time you open a newspaper.
Lastly, please wish me a little bit of luck. I just took my (written) Mandarin exit language exam. Although I'm borderline for passing it, I think I have a good shot at it. If I'm too borderline, I'll have to take an oral exam, in which case please wish the gods of foreign speech synthesis to smile on me that day. I'll know the results in a week or so.

Singapore on the Horizon

This post will probably apply more to prospective MBAs. "One School, Two Campuses" - part of INSEAD's brand. INSEAD comprises one campus in Fontainebleau, one in Singapore, and depending on how you do the accounting, various modest research centers scattered across the globe, though strangely, nary an office in the USA.
You'd think that a student could freely change campuses to suit his development and career needs subject only to course offering schedule. However in practice, there's scarcity. And where there's scarcity, either a central body has to allocate the scarce resources, or you set up a market. True to b-school form, INSEAD chooses the latter. By contrast, my undergraduate institution used a randomized lottery system to allocate dormitory rooms.
Here's how INSEAD's worked this year - they will probably use something similar in following years. INSEAD has 5 2-month academic periods, just like quarters or semesters, only shorter and much more stressful. 200 "points" are allocated to each student. They can use these points to bid on any combination of course electives and campus exchange. The minimum successfully allocated bid becomes the amount deducted from all bidders' point accounts. Most students I know bid a combination of their maximum allocation of 200 points across two or three periods' worth of exchange. Period 5 during France's winter understandably shows the highest demand.
So as you can see from my bids, I successfully pushed for Singapore during Periods 3, 4, and 5 (We are just finishing P1 now, entering P2), betting all 200 of my points. Because of the minimum-successful-bid deduction, 115 point still remain. Having just received the bid results yesterday, I must now buy a plane ticket and arrange housing - which brings me to the second topic for this week's post: Time.
Time management is a force that unceasingly breathes down everyone's neck. We even learn about something called "time abuse" and "time abusers". A time abuser is clinically defined as "every one of us". The first step to reconciliation with these difficulties is accepting that "you can't do everything". It hurts, many of us try to, taking on new responsibilities as we find we have a modicum of free time. None of us wants to miss out on anything. (The "senior class", called P3's, have gotten so used to this that you can't get them to commit to *anything* - they're completely maxed out, and if free time develops, they wish to cherish it).
Time management is a source of stress. During January and part of February, the biggest time sink outside of school work was French registration, car, and insurance, and being unstructured required the most effort to plan. By contrast, academics are already largely pre-scheduled and structured, so it doesn't stress me out to progress in them. Now, let's look at my to-do list:
1) Pay my speeding ticket (done!)
2) Write this blog post (in progress!)
3) Provide status update to the class in my capacity as IT rep (whew, there goes my school anonymity - but if another student couldn't figure out who's writing this by this point, they shouldn't be at this school . . .)
4) Plan period break trip (way behind on this - many students are going to Morocco, and I'm beginning to think I should have joined them.
5) Buy ticket to Singapore.
6) Set up residence in Singapore.
7) Execute errands associated with my company
8) Continue career development via networking and internship applications.
There are more, especially with respect to my company, I'm just not showing. Notice the lack of academics in the to-do list - unless there's a particular project or paper coming to a head, they won't show up, because I treat it as the default activity to execute during almost all other free time. This is arguably unhealthy, as perhaps the default activity should be heavy socializing (ie. as one has time). I sneak it in during some evenings, but in this I fall far short of my peers. It probably deserves more priority. We were taught a four-quadrant approach to prioritization which the gurus of time-management will recognize immediately - I think it's time to exercise it. Successful implementation of that method is probably even more valuable than all of the courses combined.

INSEAD, Week 7

Socializing is an integral part of life at INSEAD, although the students I'm sharing the library with this Sunday might debate that. Partaking students call it "networking". I can be on board with that. I've been doing a whole lot of networking recently.
The workload has been lower the past week, perhaps to give us more time to focus on career identification. Sometimes the school, vaunted as it is, resembles an exalted careers placement service on steroids based on the emphasis that is put on job finding in the form of on-campus events, CV reviews, and industry info sessions. Of course the school is excellent, and I'm not just saying that to promote the brand. The professors are tops, the students are engaged and serious, and the alumni network is far reaching. I'm confident that given the diligence I'm supplying, the school will enable me to find, earn, and accept the position that is best suited to my growth as an individual while also satisfying material needs (in spades, hopefully). I thought I'd illustrate the socializing-career connection through the attached images. First image (grainy, above) is a recent party near campus. Remember, this is network-building. Second image (below) came from my tooling on the two alumni network databases to which I have access. It is a listing of number of school alums by work country, filtering for a few randomly-thought-of nations. Yes, some countries still aren't making either list, but I thought this was a reasonable illustration of network breadth. So when you're trying to set up that all-important business deal or emerging market entry into Cambodia, you know who to talk to. Well, this is an anonymous blog after all - if you don't know me, you'll have to exercise the 'Comments' feature. In fact though, just because someone shows up in a database doesn't mean a lot can come from reaching them. In my limited experience with this, connecting with people via an alumni database simply removes one or two layers of unfamiliarity, but you still have to 'prove yourself' to the person to whom you're reaching out. The partying from the first photo? Maybe it serves to strip off a few more layers . . . of unfamiliarity. And to have a really, really good time while we're all trying to learn the nuts and bolts of modern business.

INSEAD Week 6

It's still very icy and cold here in the Fonty forests. The township I live in is as innocently charming as ever, as you can see by the photo I've included today. This past week was a Culture Week, which means that one of the many ethnicities on campus organizes and hosts a set of themed events. Since this week's was Latin week, everyone from South and Central America participated in organizing events such as a Cuban musical group playing mostly Buena Vista Social Club hits to accompany a Cuban dinner, a Caiperinha night, and a Mariachi band to kick off the week. . .
The Indians are also pretty good about hosting Culture Weeks almost every year. One thing I haven't heard talked about is Anglo-Saxon week. The professors certainly refer to this group frequently enough when talking about financial norms, and it's a common phrase in French parlance to refer to those barbarians across the channel. So I began asking people what they would like to see in an Anglo-Saxon party, but unfortunately whatever springs to their mind just doesn't capture their imagination in the same way that a crowded room full of brightly-colored clothing clad folks dancing meringue with sloshing glasses of Herra Dura in hand does.
Life is *just starting* to settle into a rhythm around here. . . thank God . . . I have a Prices and Markets (Microeconomics) exam in the morning, time for me to get some sleep.

INSEAD Week 5

The focus of the past week has been for financial services industry presentations. These have taken place in the evenings after classes, with successive sets of representatives from Barclay’s Capital, Nomura, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Citibank, and the venerable Goldman Sachs. From the presentations I attended, I noted on average 40 people attending each presentation and networking/drinks event that always follows. However the Goldman Sachs presentation saw some 150 people show up, easily half of the Fontainebleau class. The hiring drive on the part of banks in general is much greater than last year, it seems the directors of the planet’s financial resources are making up for lost time from 2008-9.
Attached photo is the audience during the Goldman presentation. I found the Goldmanites (I have no idea what they call themselves) to uniformly speak in very hushed tones, even when addressing the full amphitheater – as if to implicitly advertise the emphasis they place on discretion with clients’ information. By comparison, Morgan Stanley who presented right afterwards were very lively and animated, showcasing their culture in direct contrast to the Goldmanites. Most of the other bank presentations I saw fell somewhere in between in terms of energy shown during the presentation.
The schedule at INSEAD is becoming increasingly rigorous. Courses alone wouldn’t stress me out, but add them to personal administration with respect to localizing/registering in France, and job searching activities and all of a sudden the 1-year MBA becomes much more challenging in practice than it sounded. The school’s Career Services is truly a machine, and the hiring process particularly with respect to financial firms is extremely regimented. In contrast to the intended order behind this approach, all parties (banks, school, and students) universally agree that the only way to actually *get* an internship with a bank is to network relentlessly with alums and friends who currently work for them. Because otherwise, the banks don’t have any way of differentiating among the hordes of similarly highly qualified CVs they receive.
This weekend saw an American themed party in one of the biggest chateau residences featuring frat-style drinking games and people dressed in football jersies. Americans, like every nationality, are a minority on the campus. Kind of funny to look in on how others perceive your culture. Actually, I felt honored that there were enough salient aspects of American culture that it would be even possible to have an American themed party. Cheers!

INSEAD Week 4

As I write I am downloading a powerful antivirus program called Kaspersky. I reviewed a lot AV software to get rid of the worm on my computer. This worm kept infecting my memory sticks (I disinfect them easily now), and blocked my access to the websites of AV program vendors as well as Microsoft. This is an old virus from over a year ago - its called conficker or else follows the conficker model. I learned how to disable part of the worm’s functionality so I could access the antivirus website and download their latest software.
And for the hours I spend doing this, I wonder how much of life I’m missing out on considering the weather is finally turning up, and there is a forest complete with deer, boars, and foxes, *in my backyard*.
I got my new car on Tuesday. And I *love* it! If you ever thought it would be empowering to drive your own car across the European highways, well, it absolutely is. However, France is a police state with respect to motor traffic. Identifying whether it’s legal to park in a given space for a given amount of time is unbelievably stressful in a crowded downtown district. And they make use of automated speeding cameras, one of which caught me last night. It was a 90 kmh zone, and my heavy foot late at night in the deserted rode put me at 105 kmh. To put that in perspective, that’s going 65mph in a 56mph zone. That’s ticket worthy. Not looking forward to sorting out how to find my 140euro ticket (going exchange rate: 1.4 dollars to the euro!) since the car owner address on record is still the previous owner’s. My roommate had the same experience in roughly the same location that same evening.
Doesn’t change the fact that I love my car. It is a stick, 1999 Renault Clio, blue, petite, and absolutely responsive. Last night I took my roommate to Paris, and door to door from my forested hamlet to the cabaret smack in the middle of the Champs-Elysees it was 1 hour. Definitely feeling the empowerment after 2 weeks of bumming rides of people.
So speaking of the car, and deer, turns out we have to be very careful driving on the forest roads. Last night as we were returning after a long but disappointing night in the City of Lights, a fully matured buck carrying a beautiful set of antlers bolted across the road about 20 meters ahead of my car, itself going about 100kph. Not a lot of math tells us that I was less than a second away from becoming an accomplished if perhaps personally maimed deer hunter. By the way there’s a lot of awareness on campus for drunk driving. One of the principal ways in which students have been injured in the past is drunk driving in the forest in their tiny cars - they say that in an accident, the deer and boars running around will usually win. Years ago the Dean had to make an unfortunate phone call to the parents of two students because of that.
Between the student body and the administration, everyone puts in a lot of effort to ensure a lot of camaraderie on campus. How to accomplish this? Lots and lots of socializing! That’s part of what you are accepting in an MBA, not just net present value valuations, double entry bookkeeping, and monopsony buyer theory, but the connections you have with your fellow students after you graduate. After a year, if there’s a great esprit de corps (I always felt a lot of this at my undergrad institution), then that can serve everyone in the future. If instead there was a lot of acrimony over the year, then that damages the network going forward. This opens up a discussion on self selecting groups and elitism, to which my response is, “If I know you and I trust you, I’m going to help you when you need it”, no matter whether you’re associated with a brand of any organization or not. And I wish, but don’t expect, others to treat me the same way. And if I don’t know you? Well I can only hope to have a positive influence anyways through the minute macro effects of the career I will choose.

In the meantime, I’m going to speed on European autoroutes:



Also I wanted to finally post the forest video I owed from last week...

INSEAD, Week 3

Life at INSEAD is starting to settle into the rhythm we can expect for the next few periods. I now have a local bank account, a mobile phone plan, a new Nokia E63 , and very very soon, a car (a 1999 Renault Clio). Looking forward to regional trips, and I’ve already promised some people I’ll help them go clubbing in Paris on weekend nights with it.

Today is Sunday, a day of rest. In France Sunday is a day of rest whether you want it to be or not, and if you’re not careful, Saturday quickly becomes a day of rest as well after a late morning following a night of revelry. Scarce business hours are maintained very strongly. We’re in classes all day every day, so going to school and getting personal administration done are mutually exclusive tasks. Today I cooked three times! I cooked an omelette with fried peppers and onions for breakfast accompanied by tea and rye loaf with brie cheese, a very elegant pasta with white and the rest of the brie for lunch (Provencal spices, salt ad pepper), and steak and rice with more fried onions for dinner. My roommate from China got a few mouthfuls of the steak and didn’t regurgitate, so it passes. A delicious day, and I’m happily full.

INSEAD’s core curriculum for the first period contains these courses; .1 Prices and Markets (another name for the Microeconomics we all know and love), 2. Uncertainty, Data, and Judgement (that’s one course, not three) which captures Probability Statistics, and how not to make an ass of oneself in gambling kinds of situations. 3. Financial Markets and Valuation evidently taught by the runner up for Austin Powers’ Dr. Evil until Mike Myers decided to play the part himself (I’m serious, all our professor needs is a shaved scalp and a white pussycat to stroke and he’s him, accent, attitude and all. If you ever read this, Professor, know that I actually really enjoy your courses and you’re a fantastic instructor. . . ) (phew) Then come the “soft skills” courses, those are Ethics and Leaderships. No, the Leadership classes aren’t all taught on ropes courses, but I wish they were. Ethics is actually really interesting. I like all of the discussions where we’re debating shades of grey – which I usually debate while coming from their dark side.

Speaking of the finance class (because it really is fascinating, Professor) I was noting that the course isn’t teachable without interjecting precepts of good ol’ capitalist thought which, true to form, Professor provides in generous servings. He emphasized above all else the value of "maximizing the size of the pie" (like, as opposed to consideration of that pastry baker's free time), and that maximum economic efficiency was enabled by the combination of price knowledge, private property, and greed. (Greed, you know, like in the academic sense . . . ). That opening class made me imagine what it would have been like for students behind the old iron curtain to take an economics class - I'm sure they got their dose of the party line while they were still absorbing the course syllabus too - must discussion of the prevailing philosophy of economic management precede the rest of a finance course in any society? Does the study of finance exist independent of the values and political philophy containing it, or is it always a colossus with clay feet? Makes me wonder what they're learning right now over at Tsing Hua. "Well, first you hack into foreign companys' servers, harvest whatever intellectual property you couldn't get from earlier joint ventures, and then use that edge to develop the harmonious and yet newly competitive society. Above all keep the nation's currency domestic and undervalued". I'm just kidding, I'm sure our peers over there are learning all of the free market theory we are. But I wonder if they are as surprised as we are when it comes time to apply theories like consumer value and pricing efficiency to the mundane act of buying a cell phone plan and realizing that practically there are only ever two or three cell phone carriers to choose from inside these free markets we're all members of. .

My roommates have each been sick the past two weeks. Last week on Saturday there was a party sponsored by one of the management consultancies (brand name, you’ve heard of them, don’t need mentioning in case their recruiters manage to lurk my blog). For many it went until 4am, and folks didn’t get home until 5. That really screwed up the week that follows for a lot of us – there were a lot of sleepy folks on Monday, and the academic schedule and homework commitments for the first three days were relentlessly unforgiving. Fatigue took its toll on peoples’ immune systems. Wednesday morning saw many people coughing throughout lecture. Amazing that with two sick roommates I’ve remained healthy. Come a short respite Thursday morning , everyone got in what personal and admin activities they could. My teammate got a perm (you look great!), I put a downpayment on my car.

Now let’s see, I need to put up a picture of something. What do I have . . . (browsing through my Flip camera videos) I will try to upload a few videos (and if you watch carefully, I even risk blowing my anonymity – could this be a start of a trend towards full disclosure . . . ? Scary . . . ) The first video is as titled, a snowy entry to campus. The second video is during a trip with Outward Bound (like a ropes course, but very organizational theory oriented). Hmm, Blogger's not letting me put up the second video, (why am I still using this service?) So perhaps I'll add the Outward Bound video to the next post.

Week 2

A week of registration, paperwork, and early socializing
has passed - between the heavy schedule at school, and the
short french work schedule and workweek, it's really
hard to get anything done outside of class.  Remaining
major tasks include getting a car and cell phone plan.
As promised, this post has three images - the first is one
I made showing the relative size of France vs. some states
in the Western US.  I think if you put California and Nevada
together, you have a landmass pretty close to the size of
France.  For some reason I was curious about that.

Second image - the omelette I made with Indian spices
borrowed from my roommate who hails from their source.
He taught me a recipe for a simple Indian sauce oriented
toward vegetarians.  To which I added chicken.

Third image - some of my teammates, among whom by sheer
coincidence, is my second roommate from China.  Here's hoping we
don't kill each other by the end of the semester!  Pictured are teammates
from Greece and Zimbabwe, and missing is my Lebanese teammate.
Top that for diversity Harvard Business School! 

MBA

(changes: edited for spelling) I arrived in Fontainebleau two days ago. The town is located about
one hour south of Paris by train. I'm set up in a house I arranged
with my classmate Bo while I was in Shanghai. This house is awesome.
It's quite big, and there is ample room for the three housemates (plus
a charming girl guest who's been hanging out here since we moved in).
All this means that I've started my year at INSEAD. I was
fortunate enough to get into this excellent program, and equally
fortunate that they took me back in after I deferred my acceptance for
one year to pursue my entrepreneurial aspirations in Shenzhen and
Shanghai.
INSEAD has two campuse. One is here in France, the other is in
Singapore. Students decide whether they want to spend the whole year
in one place or the other, or split the year between the two. There
are two intakes of students, one every January, and one every august.
The January intakes enjoy the opportunity and challenge to find a
summer internship with an investment bank, consulting firm, or in
industry. Those choices are similar to the career choices students
must make upon graduating, along with one more, which is
entrepreneurship.
I remain keen on entrepreneurship, and that is my main reason for
intending to transfer to Singapore later in the year because it is
known to have stronger entrepreneurship electives. However, under the
burden of a student loan, the odds are stacked against my pursuing
that for several years.
With each post I am posting at least one photo, and due to that I
must formally issue an IOU to the reader who I hope will understand as
I have typed this entire post on the torture device known as the
iPhone, and can not send photo attachments for emailed posts. Expect
the next weekly post to have a second replacement photo plus an
additional one due to interest. My early MBA skills calculate this to
be an interest rate of 5200%.