Promises Promises

So I was going to finish my overview of P1, but then I went off and had lots of time to think about things and put things in perspective. And for those that know me that can only mean lots of pontification which is probably not that exciting for the busy bite-size-entertainment seeking audience this blog works so hard to maintain.

So instead I'll talk about my first lecture of P2 - "Strategy", which happened this morning shortly after I wrote down my new 80 point to do list. Amazing how much crud piles up when you go away for 3 nights.

As someone who specifically left strategy consulting cause it wasn't my cup of tea, I knew I was in trouble the second the professor asked an open question "What is strategy?" to the class. I managed to hold out for a good two minutes while the usual answers about winning wars and blah blah unfurled. And then I could stand it no more and went in with "...a carefully laid plan to convince the masses there is a semblance of order in what is ultimately complete chaos". Which the sharp tongued Russian professor summarises as "You think it is Bullshit".

Now I don't like to be put on the spot as much as the next man, but when a man is standing in front of me and nicely saying the point I was trying to make but couldn't out of politeness I kind of have to agree. But then this is the first impression I make to someone who will present me with 20% of the grade of the course based purely on class participation. "I think your course is about Bullshit" is probably not the best first move one could make in this situation, at least from a strategic perspective (boom boom). Mental note to self: Must learn to control that mouth.

In hindsight though, this is not going to be a course I like. We then spent the entire session steadily convincing me that my views on the whole matter of topics being discussed varied so largely from the commonly held view that there was very little I could add to the whole discussion other than just appearing to be contrary for the sake of it.

For example, we spent a huge amount of time defining Ikea's strategy. Apparently, this involves selling low cost furniture while getting the customers to do the assembly themselves. Selling a whole range of furnishings in one store is a key differentiator. And on and on. At one point, it was even mentioned that they sell Swedish meatballs in their stores, which differentiates them from the rest.

Well, after 45 minutes in this direction, still, not a single person made the comment that IKEA is IKEA maybe because, just maybe, they are able to make furniture people actually like at a price they're willing to pay. And that they are willing to do this despite the pain in the arse it is to drive for 2 hours and then have to wind your way through a swedish furniture rat tunnel, congested with bargain hungry shoppers to the point of insanity. I was flabbergasted. By this point I was so pissed off I was not really able to make a coherent contribution. So so far, the way the wind's blowing I think I'm going to be writing off this course. Oh well. There's 5 more to go though, so I'm sure there'll be something good in there. Right now, my hopes are riding high on Corporate Finance II - The Return of the Bond Trader....

PS. Here's photie I took in Copenhagen that I'm rather pleased with

20%

So that's it. 20% of this MBA thing is done. What a whirlwind. Has it been good? Well, I don't know. It's had good bits. It's had bad bits. Overall, it has certainly not been as good as I thought it would be. But then I knew my expectations were built up to heaven, back and there again. So something had to give. What did?

The academic side. It's really not been that interesting so far. I've been most genuinely surprised at this. Of the 5 modules I've done this term, one (statistics) taught me minimal amounts whilst having to do lots of tedious work just to remind myself how exactly one derives the chance of something happening when it is normally distributed.

In economics, new stuff was learned, but you feel it is so far away removed from real life that it's relevance is strained at best. And once again you go and plug away at tedious little problems that ultimately become an exercise in just learning how to get tedious little problems solved.

The one course where things could genuinely be learned, Accounting, was taught so so so shamefully poorly as to be embarrassing on a daily basis. Leaving you with a sense of knowing even less than when you first started.

Next time I'll write about the non-academic side of things. But for now, I have to go and pack for Denmark.

Balance

I'm usually not the first person to complain about things (and believe me this is so true relative to everyone else on this course), but some of the teaching here leaves something to be desired. The accounting professor's teaching ability would leave a pyromaniac seriously questioning their ability to light a match. Just about the only thing I've been able to learn on this course is that a balance sheet, by definition must always balance. Yes. Yes. Very good. I'm not going to say how much that little gem has cost me.....

Imagine the class' surprise then, when the balance sheet presented as question 2 in today's accounting exam had one slight issue with it - I'll leave it as an exercise to the educated reader to guess which one.

The only pity is that this fact completely escaped yours truly. Oh dear.

Exams

So. That's it for P1. Well, almost. The small matter of exams is what separates me from being able to knock P1 on the head. The past 3 days have been a daze of revision in a midst of stressed successful people. Which isn't actually that nice. Being in the bubble that is INSEAD it means that there's really not that much sensory stimulation going about that isn't work related. It doesn't help that the library's decided to grace us all with a "happy hour" - extra opening time over the weekend. The fun never ends in the forest wonderland.....

The irony is that the harder everyone works, the more they have to work - the scores INSEAD uses are based entirely on your relative grade to everyone else. And you only fail a course if the distribution of grades is really spread out around the mean and you're really far from it. So as long as everyone does about the same, you're home and dry.

I was going to use this as a retrospective of P1, but to be honest I'm a bit fed up with it all at the moment, so I'll probably wait until the start of P2 to do it cause otherwise this will come out overly negative. I think I just need to get out a bit and escape this MBA bubble - the sense of cabin fever is quite overwhelming.

For the generous 4 day break before P2 lectures start I'm going to Copenhagen with a whole bunch of people I haven't met. Let's hope they're not psychos!

This week, I have been mostly counting planes

Things are starting to slowly wind down before the end of the first period. By wind down I mean lecture content is decreasing while work outside of lectures is increasing exponentially.

Past week was spent writing my "Leading People and Groups" paper - that's the class where I wasn't sure whether it was all hot air or genius. To be frank, after staring at the paper brief all week, I'm coming round to the point of view that the abbreviation of the course title warmed up tells the whole story.....

But enough about gas. The other big project this week has been the Boeing 777 case. This is a finance trasure trove - and completely underlines my issue with this whole finance thing. Given reams and reams of tables of data you're supposed to say whether or not it's worth investing one billion squillion gazillion dollars in the whole thing.

So of you go, levering and unlevering companies, plugging leftovers and betas into the Capital Asset Pricing model and then having conversations with Clippy when it all starts looking a bit too surreal. And in the end you come up with an aswer that says "Well, maybe. You'd have to look into other factors of course". And because you've spent hours getting to that point, the fact that you got there from a spreadsheet that has projections of number of aircraft sold for 20 years into the future somehow doesn't seem that important. But then you stop and think - but wait a minute! This is just one great big giant monumental guess. Except it's dressed up to be this great piece of fairly complex looking analysis......

Junk calls

The house phone rang today. I picked it up - surprised as nobody ought to have the number. It was a woman trying to sell something or tother. In French. I said no, of course, and put the phone down.

Something kept bothering me about the call though, and after one hour it suddenly hit me. When she started she prononced my surname with perfect pronounciation. No pause. No hesitation. No contortion beyond belief. Just perfection. Seems the French spelling of my surname actually makes sense!

Childius Internus

Remember A-Levels at school? Not the study bits. The Career Service bits. Questionnaires, interviews advice, that sort of thing. Seems a long time ago now. As someone who has next to zero clue as to what to do after this all-expensive year out, sooner or later I will have to confront this biggie. So you can imagine the sense of assurance I got from the "Sales Pitch" lecture the Career Service guys give at the beginning of term. They went on and on about how they help you figure out what you want. And how most people don't know but figure it out. And how it was all OK etc. etc.

Being an optimistic sort of chap I always want to believe. So I did - until last week that is. That's when I had my first one to one career counselling session. Expectations were set high - here I am at the business school of the world, in a situation which fits the template quite well - surely the process would be designed with yours truly in mind.

It's rare for me to have moments of pause and reflection which end up with the realisation that 30 minutes of my life have passed away devoted to a waste of time of monumental proportions. Well, the interview was one of them. After rambling for 5 minutes about how I had no clue I sat back in my chair expecting order to arise from the chaos like a beutiful phoenix, and spread it's fire through the rest of my career. Well, alas, that did not happen. I had a rather convoluted response which I can honestly (and I do try very hard to be positive) was along the lines of "I dunno. You figure it out somehow, I guess". The two concrete take aways (I spent the last 5 minutes trying to think what they were) were that I should listen to my inner child more (his words, not mine) and that I should read "What colour is your parachute". I'll do the latter, but to be honest I'm not that hopeful.

On the plus side, with a bit of reflection, it's quite useful to have such a graphic realisation of the fact that it really is my own problem and than nobody is going to swoop on down from up high and breath clarity into the chaos. So it's time to roll up those sleeves and do some hard thinking.....

Help Wanted

My room came with an interesting implement attached on the wall above the desk. I've spent the past month wondering what it is, and I have finally given up trying to figure this one out. Please help me. It looks like a spine, in 5 10 inch sections. The sections are pin jointed and can rotate about the pin. They look like this:



and this:



The spines are curved in such a way that I don't think you could hang anything off them.

Answers on a postcard....

Finance Goes Interesting

It had to happen at some point. Just as I was starting to get worried that I'd spent 45k to pay for courses where I won't learn anything essentially new (which has been largely true for the last 4 weeks), the finance professor managed to pull the rabbit out of the hat.

The Capital Asset Pricing Model. Nobel prize genius which you can cover in a simple bite sized 1.5 hour session. Amazing. You just sit there with your jaw dropped as you head gets filled with a glimpse of just how the +/- columns in the FT actually get filled in. And how, there is some sort of sense to it all.

A moment to cherish indeed.

Rest assured, the leaders of tomorrow have a mental age of 4

To minimise the risk of appearing like I've got an Enrico fetish (I don't by the way), I was going to wait till I publish this one a bit later so it's not like two buses coming along at once. But if I don't do it now, I'll need to revise for my Economics, and that's not nice, so I won't.

Anyways, yesterday was Italy day in my section. Which means that all our lecturers were Italian. So the left third of the class came in wearing green, the middle white, and myself and my right compatriots came in red. Which was jolly nice.

Enrico didn't twig it until two minutes in. And then he paused, and he said "Very nice. Very nice". I think you had to be there really.....

I'm famous, I'm famous!

Most of you already know this cause I've been ranting about it for the past few days. But for those that don't, I submitted a picture I took while doing the van adventure to Private Eye and it has been published in this week's issue. So go out and buy it.

And before I get massacred, yes, I didn't really spot the picture but just happened to have a camera. I was told I should submit it, though I feel slightly cheap for taking credit where it is not due.

In other news, things have started hotting up on the too much work front. We're doing imperfect competition economics games with Wharton this week. Sounds awfully glamorous. Problem is you're supposed to do it with your group. And because it involves game theory, it means you end up in a group discussion which goes along the lines of "Well, we should do this. But if we did this then they would do that, so this would not turn out so well. Well, but if we knew they would do that we should do the other. But if they knew we are doing the other they would do this". And on, and on and Ariston. I'm half considering cutting my losses and ejecting myself from the group on this one. I scored a minor victory when I convinced our group of 4 to split into 2 groups of 2 each of which tackles two games. I guess the next step would be to assign a game per person. Hmm. Might not be such a bad idea.

In other news yet, we had another massive party on Saturday night. I'm starting to feel almost cool. There was dancing and drinking and a headache in the morning and hundreds of little bottles of beer (most of which were just less than half gone, interestingly). The highlight was that Enrico turned up. You probably can't really appreciate this, but when your life revolves around spending 12 hours at school a day and then living in a little village, Enrico has almost cult status. He's the mad Statistics professor. He looks something not unlike this:



To put it simply, this is a little bit like Brad Pitt just casually turning up to your party. We were the talk of the school, I tell you.