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.