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.