The Career Casino

Tombstones

2007-07-23T15:38:00.000+01:00

I recently got told off by some readers for leaving the full sentence that has been this blog without a full stop. Or so to speak. Truth be told, I have been trying to write a final entry for a while now and it's been proving quite tricky. I guess there's so many loose ends to tie up, that getting it all done in one entry becomes an impossible task to strive for initially, and later on an excuse for not getting on with the job.

It seems 10 months of hardcore business studies has not knocked out my engineering analness, so I shall go for a simple 3 part structure.

The first part I guess has to be the dry logistics. After graduating jobless (not an experience I can recommend) I had a final round interview 3 days later which I clinched with an offer. So yes. I will be a venture capitalist. I have no idea what would have happened had I not got it - it would not be worth contemplating. And kids, although in the virtual world of the Career Casino putting all your chips on red and waiting for the wheel to stop worked out for this character, please do not try this at home. It causes sleeplessness and other stress related disorders which after a 3 weeks of steady rest are only just now starting to disappear.

The second part I guess would neatly explain an overview of the MBA. I don't really know how to go about this (which is the main reason this entry is so late). I think for me, the main thing to come out of the whole experience has been the results of the introspection one is afforded when they step off the career treadmill for a year. Things like gaining confidence in going with your feelings, learning to recognise what you like and don't like have actually been pretty big steps for me. Kicking it all away and going for an adventure in the forest also made me realise that I'm done with adventuring for now. Other useful snippets have been realising how poorly Casino owners cope with complete blank piece of paper uncertainty and potential implication for entrepreneurial career paths. But these are all quite personal things, and to be honest I think in a lot of ways stem from my fairly unique INSEAD experience. They may well seem obvious to others - but weren't to me. So I'm not sure how much wisdom I can bestow on others through this process. The studies, although on paper can be made to appear incredibly useful would for me always rank bottom of any list of things I got out of INSEAD. But hey. That's just me.

And the third part? Was it worth it? Who knows. I know for me it was one of the hardest years of my life. And yes, I did have fairly unique circumstances, so I don't want to put people off from applying to the Business School For the World. And right now, I feel that it has indeed been worth it - I have achieved a career transition which would simply have not been possible had I not been to INSEAD for my MBA. And there's a ton of other good things to come out of the whole experience. It's just that for me, I know the cost with which these things came, and if someone came to me now, wound the clock back and said "hit or stick" I really don't know what I would do. Thankfully this is not really on the cards, so that's one less decision to worry about.

So, onwards and upwards. I wish you all the best with your endeavors, wherever they may be or whatever they are. I am done playing and have cashed my chips out. A bientot, as they say in France.

CQW: When do you start?

Momentum

2007-06-23T14:21:00.000+01:00

When I was 12 I went on a train journey to Moscow. It took two and a half days, and during that time your life became adjusted to life slowly passing you by on both sides at a sedate 60kph. Most places you could look on the train would involve at least a slight sliver of change - a glimpse of a granny passing by on a bench, a parked car at a railway crossing. As the journey progresses, you become more and more used to this.

Once in Moscow, you realise the still vision of reality no longer matches your perception. As you sit in a chair you feel the walls are slightly moving - surprised you look up and realise they're not.

The MBA now feels exactly like having stepped of a train after two and a half days. All of a sudden you are exposed to a remarkable commodity - endless free time. Yet the 10 months of hard concentration have trained you to fill your time productively every chance you get - otherwise you'll fall behind. As soon as you sit down and ponder the amazing reality of a free afternoon you feel a jump inside and quickly check whether there really isn't something productive you need to be doing. Apart from some logistics, parties is the only thing left. The closer they get to graduation, the more nostalgia ridden they become.

Given that I'm still unemployed, I'm looking forward to the next part with a certain amount of trepidation. But, no matter what, I'll be glad to exit the INSEAD train and adjust to a life without moving walls. It's been a roller coaster, but now, reality awaits.

CQW: Are you going to the graduation trip?

Next steps

2007-06-11T20:45:00.000+01:00

We weave and tangle the web of our lives, but sooner or later you need to think about the next step. As you can tell, this was proving difficult for me, but just when you're down life hands you down a helping hand, which is always appreciated even more because of the circumstances.

As I was busy bemoaning the difficulties of my current predicament, an old friend wrote an e-mail explaining he would be moving out of London to do a year long secondment, and if anyone was interested they could have his flat for a pittance. A match made in heaven I thought and no sooner did I reply than I was walking around the flat and being handed the keys for it.

Amazing what a calming effect such a simple step of being able to picture where you will be sleeping for the unforeseeable future starting 3 weeks away had on me. But it did. So hats off to luck, and especially when you're feeling down.

Which of course brings me to next steps. As I wound (nay, flew) my way down to France from London yesterday on the Eurostar I felt that I am ready to leave the INSEAD bubble. Fitter, stronger and theoretically more knowledgeable, though definitely poorer too. So on we go with the last few weeks. But in a lot of ways the experience is over. Classes no longer feel the same and campus has that jaded, nostalgic feel about it already.

CQW: Have you been invited to the Endgame party? That's the one where each girl gets one invite and blokes can only turn up if they're invited. And the whole thing's anonymous for an extra touch of mystery. And no. I have not. Yet.

Work avoidance

2007-06-02T17:21:00.000+01:00

OK. OK. So maybe the abyss is a bit deeper than I thought, but still. It does have a bottom.

I'm having trouble working. Everything in my life seems to have saturated and reached the point where only a jarring change can get things back on track. The thought of reading another case makes my stomach churn. My ability to focus for an hour and a half in class is next to minimal. Text messages, doodles or plain simply staring outside is the weapon of work avoidance there.

In my spare time, I've got to prepare for another VC interview. You have no idea how much work this entails, and I won't start going into it here. But it does. Buckets and bucketloads of what must be as close to perfection as you can get it otherwise there is no point even trying. I'm really questioning my stamina to get me through this. Today was devoted to VC preparation. In between stopping for biccies, staring from the window, going for walks and Facebook I've maybe spent a couple of hours on it. This is stressful. You have the abyss on one side and an inability to focus on the other. Make it stop. Please.

CQW: Have you got a job yet?

The abyss is just a hole

2007-05-23T11:02:00.000+01:00

...and it's not even that deep. In fact, I think my head sticks out when I stand at the bottom.

Well, it seems one can rent a room in a scummy London flatshare for around UKP300 a month. At that burn rate I've got till Christmas. Which is ages. So that's not that bad.

And then there's all the tactical pots I could cook. It seems from interview feedback that I was a high beta stock - showed lots and lots of promise, but also very risky. Risky because I've moved around so much and might be bored. Risky cause I did make some mistakes in presentation. Risky because my numeracy score was far from top notch. So I'm now considering asking for an unpaid summer internship - what better way to mitigate risk for them than to sign up for a 2 month interview. And for me, well given there's not much else I could be doing for certain that would be an interesting option. It would also tell me whether I would like VC for sure.

Another pot is that I've finally got an idea for business that I think might be worth pursuing. About cocking time I say. For a 24 hour old idea it's constantly revolving around my head. The key driver is that if I'm going to be burning through savings, I'd much rather be doing it making a company than looking for a job. I do wonder whether that's a sign of my insanity though. It also seems I'm homeless as of 7th of July, which is ages. London flatshares are typically done a week ahead, so there's bags of time to find something.

CQW: Have you done your year book entry?

The Abyss

2007-05-21T20:56:00.000+01:00

So along we come to the Abyss. I kind of reached it over the weekend but was refusing to acknowledge it. But a little e-mail I got at lunchtime which started with "Thank you for coming to see us last week. We enjoyed.." actually nudged my head over the edge and showed me the gaping void that is there.

And oh my goodness, what a void. The optimist in me knows in years to come this will be a formative time. But right now I feel utterly lost. Where to begin? Homelessness or unemployment? Take your pick. When in doubt I go by alphabetical order.

Homelessness. My rent-free home is 8000 miles away and is not somewhere I would want to live. Implications? All my earthly possessions to show for 29 years are in my room in France from which I will get turfed out come the 15th of July. I can't really explain how unsettling this fact is. But it really is. The one thing that I've had stablish for the past 10 months will be kicked away, and right now I have no idea what will replace it.

Unemployment. My rent-free home is 8000 miles away and is not somewhere I would want to live. Implications? I will have to enter living hell if I do not find a job before I run out of money. Thankfully I have enough cash to last a while, but this is going to be the first time in my life when this could be an issue. I am dreading this.

Of course, all of this is irrational and illogical - broken down, these are all simple problems with simple answers. But I'm human after all. Yes, I know. I will find a job. And yes. There are storage places you could put your stuff into. And yes, I can find somewhere to live. I'll be OK. I know. It's just not that easy. One day at a time, one day at a time. And yes, the wiseguys say it's my fault for not applying to more jobs. But then dammit, I made a stand for what I wanted and it didn't work out. I'm glad I did that, despite the fact that the Abyss is here.

Ding Dong

2007-05-20T16:54:00.000+01:00

I have been dinged. And to add insult to injury, I have been stealth dinged. And to add pain to injury I've been stealth dinged for what was undeniably dream job. The logistics go something along the lines of: interview Wednesday, no news since then. What should have happened is interview Wednesday, call on Thursday to arrange interviews with the top 2 people in the firm on Monday. I know this because it did for someone else. But not for me. For me, no call, no e-mail no nada.

Alas, I'm now scratching head and looking with wonder at the calendar. Unemployment and homelessness in t-(less than 2 months).....

On the bright side, my stress levels seem to somehow be incompatible with that basic fact - something is bound to turn up. Which is nice.

CQW: Are you wearing a dinner jacket to the Ball?

Schoolboy Errors

2007-05-17T19:04:00.000+01:00

Interview came and went. Presentation was OK. But then I totally crashed and burned on the questions afterwards methinks. In a rare moment of detailed analysis I shall go into more info.

The company I was looking at was one that the VC fund had invested in last year. The information they had given me was from that time. In my presentation I said that it was a good investment at that point in time and that they should do it (of course - given that they did do the investment it would have taken a lot of balls and even more evidence (which wasn't there) to say something else). I then went on to look at what happened in the company and marketplace in the past 12 months. Overall, I said that they had done well, but not as well as they could have done. My words were 8/10. More worryingly, things in the market were moving in a way which I did not think beneficial to them. However, I stuck my neck out and said that they were still a good investment today, though my VC should not take 100% of the current funding round and look for some other investors in order to protect against the downside.

So far so good. But then the killer question. "Say someone's approached us with regards to buying the company today. What would you say is a good price?". And off I went. Making a favourite Belgian breakfast dish, rather than answering. Eventually I says, well, you've been in for 1 year, so anything above a 50% return is good. Which is wrong. Really quite wrong. Because if that was the case, the company would not be a good investment today. So there. Now you know. Oh and they sprung one of these numerical tests on me that involves lots of really simple but detailed calculations under time pressure where my error rate goes up to 99% and I end up punching random numbers into the calculator. So I don't expect to hear back from them in a positive way. Pity really as I really liked the people.

Anyways. It's looking like an unemployed summer in France, which frankly is rather nice. A bientot.

In other news, I am reading Katherine Campbell's excellent book on Venture Capital - "smarter ventures - a survivor's guide to venture capital through the new cycle". I can highly recommend it. To underscore that I was interviewed by a celebrity CEO yesterday, the book is peppered with quotes from them. Quite a weird feeling to be reading quotes from someone in a book on the train to your interview by them.

CQW: Are your parents coming to graduation.

Crap Listener

2007-05-15T10:14:00.000+01:00

Remember that post about my Psychological Issues in Management report? Well, I got it marked yesterday. And oh my. What a read the professor's comments were.

Clearly, I knew I'd done a bad job. But you always hope, don't you.... That maybe, just maybe what you perceive as a whole load of rubbish listening is actually really good.

Well, never fear. I think the professor really went to town (and rightly so I should say). Comments to my responses, marked on the interview transcript went along the lines of:

What?
WHAT?????
What are you doing?
LISTEN!
What a silly question!
I hope she survived the interview…..

And to add make things really bad, just like a really good parent would by playing on your own guilt, he finished with his final comment - "It is dangerous to be a poor amateur psychologist. Sorry." What a guy!

So basically, I think I need to take listening off my list of skills. Pity really as I think it's quite important. His basic thesis is that I completely failed to listen to my client and instead I projected my own preconceptions on her. And I know he's right.

In other news, I'm down to the last 4 for the dream Venture Capital job. They have done a clever thing and have made me do a presentation on a company they are considering investing for the final round. The panel will include the CEO and who knows who else - though most likely the partner working on the investment. Which means that all my time has been spent in PowerPoint since last Thursday. I am bricking it to be honest - these people will know everything inside out and back inside again. Nearly there now though. Tomorrow's the big day.

CQW: Are you going on the graduation trip?

Gut Feel

2007-05-09T21:23:00.000+01:00

I could bore you with tedious details of how I spent the break. But I somehow feel that would betray the spirit of this blog (I stayed here for a bit and then I went to Barcelona). Instead, today I think I'll write about gut feel.

Specifically, seeing as it's the topic of the past six months, I'll write about gut feel and career moves. Or to really get into it, I'm going to write about that very special feeling when something feels so right it actually feels right as opposed to yourself convincing yourself it's really right because you think that's the right thing to do. I am sure I make myself clear as ever.

I'm a job hopper. 5 jobs in 6 years is a tough deal to sell (it can and has been done - trust me). But what's interesting is that every single time I've jumped job I've always had worries about the next step. For startups it was worries that they'd go bust (they did). For big companies it was worries that I would become a tiny cog in a great big machine (I was). For consulting it was worries that I never really knew exactly what they actually did day to day (I didn't). And so even though all the jumps made sense, the older I get the more I learn to listen to the little quiet voice at the back of my head that says "Yes, but!". That's probably the same little voice that was telling me that it was great that Google dinged me because of a whole bunch of reasons for which it would not have been right for me.

So imagine my surprise, when looking at the Venture Capital thing, I find that voice strangely absent. I spent the first half of the break relaxing. Or rather I relaxed while researching Venture Capital. Doing this off my own bat, it was almost like a hobby. An incredibly intoxicating and enriching one. There's so many things to research. Companies, people, track records, directions. Pages and pages of web to search.

And as you search you build a picture in your head. A picture of small VC funds comprised of oddball people fascinated by learning and keeping abreast of innovation. With an interest in money and business, but more focused on the buzz of making a technology happen than shouting to the world that their IRR has consistently exceeded 20% since the great depression. People that work with entrepreneurs day in and day out. People that can help with all aspects of running a small company. The more I read, the more I liked.

And the more I read, the more I noticed I didn't have that little voice in the back of my head that would always be there before the next career jump. I think I've found my vocation. Over emotional? Probably. But then, it's one thing finding it, another thing getting into it. So keep those fingers crossed. I'm down to the last 8 in one endeavour, and have another potential option that I need to start preparing for.

CQW: What did you do for the break?

Humorous Housemates

2007-04-28T11:31:00.000+01:00

My housemate wrote this - it put a smile on my face and also gives an insight into the ding dynamic.... Pardon the formatting, HTML not a forte.

JOB HUNTING: A PRACTICAL USER GUIDE

Interviews

Case interview Series of thought experiments in which you pretend calculators were never invented

P Equity interview Mythical event, rarely seen, bit like the Loch Ness Monster

McKinsey You are in the presence of God: bring gold, frankincense and myrrh

interview

Goldman interview As above (but forget the gifts, they don’t need the money)

Feedback In the unlikely event that they remember who you were, they are likely to question either your “fit” or “commitment”…best avoided

Assessment centre A sort of MBA Big Brother event. Never believe that any part of the program is “informal” – someone, somewhere will be observing you with a clip board.

Dings

The basic ding You will experience in many forms: checking your email or hearing your phone ring may inspire panic

The stealth ding You only find out you’ve been dinged when you find your best friend is off for the final round interview in London

Back stab ding You are dinged after the formal job offer: was common during the dotcom meltdown; American Express are only recent practitioners

Google Ding After a process that is a cross between one of those Japanese endurance game shows and a Guantanomo Bay style interrogation…you are dinged unceremoniously

Reverse ding Pay back time…you finally get to ding someone…provided you have more than one job offer

Miscellaneous

Internship They pretend to pay you; you pretend to work

Career Service An INSEAD division intent on making you into a management consultant and gathering statistics to help attract applicants to INSEAD, best avoided

Career counsellors Overflow psychotherapy service used when professional psychiatrists on campus are over-booked.

Application analytics (we are MBAs after all!)

Primary ding rate No. dings for 1^st round/Total number of applications.

A good quick and dirty indicator of your application situation

Secondary rate No. 2^nd round acceptances/No. 1^st round interviews.

Used in addition to primary rate by any professional analyst

Conversion Ratio % 1^st round interviews converted to job offers…

the free cash flow holy grail of application analytics…

Job Multiples As in “Dunnett is trading at 5 times”: 5 job offers, but only one body to carry them out.

End of term

2007-04-28T11:25:00.000+01:00

As ever, the end of term brings that inevitable feeling of "I must go somewhere else so that I can have a break". I'm convinced this is a feeling which is also a little bit of a crowd issue - as soon as term finishes, people scatter to the global winds quicker than one can say "It's the end of term". Myself, I had an interview scheduled in the middle of my break which I could only reschedule recently and hence I was left without an escape plan.

As the past week progressed I felt more and more the need to arrange something. Until the last minute yesterday the plan was to drive to Barcelona. And then I awoke this morning to 27C weather in a French village that is utterly picturesque with all the flowers in bloom. I asked myself what's wrong with a holiday here? And so Barcelona got postponed. Maybe by the middle of next week I would have had enough of idyllic French life, but for now the feeling of not having to go anywhere, do anything or any immediately looming deadlines is overwhelming.

I leave you with a poem - the grand finale of "Psychological Issues in Management". It's translated from Spanish, so please no critics.

Traveller,
There is no path,
You make the path as you walk
As you walk, you make the path.
And when you look back
You see the path
That you will never travel again
Traveller,
There is no path.
Only the wake of ships
Upon the Ocean.

CQW: Are you around for the break?

High Stakes and Dashed Hopes

2007-04-25T18:11:00.000+01:00

Some events in life generate such a mixed bad of complex emotions, it's hard to know where to start writing a blog entry about them. But never fear - at the Career Casino all tastes are catered for and we shall attempt even this challenging feat.

Having adopted the high risk strategy of only having two jobs that I had applied to that I was genuinely interested in, imagine the situation I was placed in when one of them dinged me on Monday. I could try and write reams about the how's and the why's of the ding, but to be honest, I'm kind of looking at it as a black box. The employer in question has a specific policy of not providing any feedback. Given that I thought all my interviews went something like last time - great but not stellar, I can only assume that the standard required cuts somewhere between here and the stars. Alas it seems I do not meet it, and so attention must turn to alternative options.

But before we do that, perhaps it it worthwhile noting the immediate reaction yours truly had on the train back to Paris. Although gutted, a little space in my heart felt a wave of relief. Relief that after 6 years of work in down and dirty High Tech engineering I will be forced to do something a bit more left field after INSEAD. Being asked to write code in interviews really made me question what the point of the past 10 months has been. The sense of de ja vu I got between walking around said employers' office on Monday and experiencing bus loads of bright young things being hired to fill a posh half filled office full of the shiniest technology money can buy reminded me of my first job ever at Cisco Systems back in 2000. I stayed there for 6 months, before decamping to a startup. And although the de ja vu is most likely my mechanism for coping with the rejection, I'm glad it's there. It makes that bottomless pit I find myself staring at at the moment that more manageable.

Just what is at the bottom of this pit? Well, when you have 2 and you lose 1, you're typically left with just 1. In my case this is a job with a VC fund I'm interviewing for in a couple of weeks time. Somehow that seems highly interesting the more I think about it. Funny how a reduction in options focuses the mind. I am now busily trying to somehow hedge my position. In an industry that employs around 500 people Europe wide this is not an easy game to play. But I try. I'm off to have my first power dinner with an external speaker at the school. Please sir, can I have a job?

CQW: Are you finished with classes yet?

Coursework Fatigue

2007-04-17T18:58:00.000+01:00

The MBA marketing brochure goes to great pains to stress how intense the INSEAD MBA program really is, and how even though it's only one year it actually covers 80% of the material covered on a two year program. Having done some Marketing courses I've learned to take it all with a pinch of salt - certainly I think the INSEAD positioning statement of "A year to change your life" leaves some important facts out such as that most (yes, OK. Not all) of the changes achieved involve consulting at one end or the other.

However, back to coursework. I'm fatigued. I've had enough of coursework. And I seem to have lost all ability to get the energy/stress levels necessary to do a remotely good job on any of it. Next week has a feeling not unlike the view from the window of a car broken down on a high speed train line. The tracks have started vibrating and you're debating whether the car might start or whether you're better off opening the door and running for your life. I think there's a minimum of 3 big pieces of work due. A big piece of work is something around 20 pages long. I don't even know what they are yet - and believe me, normally I'm the organised one. Interestingly, all of the people in my groups have similar approaches - someone is bound to blink first and start doing work at some point. Oh well. But for know, interview preparation is a higher priority. A certain employer plans to interview me for 10 hours on next Monday. I can't wait.

On a more refreshing note, I'm reading "Howards End" by EM Forster. It is one of the best books I have read in a long time. The writing zings and tingles with emotion that makes it quite exhausting to read. I am almost afraid to finish it - it is like an elixir. I leave you with a quote that I think is particularly apt for the job search period.

"Actual life is full of false clues and signposts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who is prepared and is never taken."

CQW: What will be the first thing you buy once you get your dream job offer?

The end of the tunnel

2007-04-16T20:39:00.000+01:00

Continuing the theme of the sunsetting MBA, things have moved another step closer to their natural conclusion. People have started getting job offers. And some are even getting offers for things they genuinely want to do. Imagine that. Not being one of the chosen few to have drunk from the fountain of the desirable job offer, I can only pontificate that the sense of relief must be immense. My flatmates are certainly showing it. Now they can really concentrate on the things you want to do rather than the things you have to do. Only do the studying you want rather than some wanton chase for class credits. Oh the life. A lethal cocktail I should imagine, when mixed with 3 parts perfect summer weather.....

Meanwhile those of us who remain jobless as yet are continuing unabashed with the Career counselling. Today we covered themes. By starting off on a blue sky walk around the things I've done recently and have enjoyed the counsellor distilled some themes. For me these are revolving around impacting people's lives with technology, learning and entrepreneurial control. I've now got to come up with a spectrum which represents each of these themes to various degrees. You may think this is easy, but each spectrum must consist of at least 10 points. Which is where it becomes complex. Do you create more impact by starting a venture or by growing it? These are the sorts of questions which keep circling around my head.

Meanwhile my New Business Ventures group seems to be disintegrating into chaos. Having been abysmally disappointed by the selection of ventures on offer at the start of the class, I decided I might as well pick one which would be fun. So I went for the crazy lemonade option - at least we'll have fun making lemonade. Sadly that's all we seem to have done - there's no business plan in sight. So I've just pulled my group out of the pitching session - we were scheduled to present to some investors in a days time, and frankly with the amount of work we have done we would have been laughed off the campus.

CQW: Do you know who got Bain London?

Light relief

2007-04-12T21:43:00.000+01:00

If you're bored, have a listen to this. It is a song designed to inspire Shell (one of the on-campus recruiters) employees into delivering shareholder value. Yes. It really is for real.

My flatmate told me a Chinese proverb I like : "to consider someone a true friend, you must have eaten at least a kilo of salt together".

The conurbation of Fontainebleau and Avon (roughly 50-60,000 people) has precisely 18 taxis. They do not work on weekends, nor after 7PM on weekday evenings.

Overachievement

2007-04-12T21:32:00.000+01:00

Sometimes you find something in life that really inspires you. And you feel like it would be a great thing to learn and you that you would really like to excel at it. Like for example, doing the Rogerian report for Psychological Issues in Management.

So far this has most likely been the highlight of the academic experience offered at INSEAD. The Rogerian report is basically practicing the Rogerian technique for listening. You pick an unsuspecting soul, foist a tape recorder on them and spend 45 minutes practicing active listening whilst they talk about something they have feelings about. So far so good.

But then you have to write a report about it all. Having gotten really enthused about the whole thing, clearly I want to do a good report. And so I start. And I realise it's blooming difficult. And after I don't know how many hours (at least 16) on the report, I think I have finally come to the realisation that success at writing reports on Rogerian interviews is not something which will adorn my tombstone once I depart this life.

I must admit I feel a slight sense of frustration at this realisation, but there we are. The report is done, and it is sadly disappointing. I wish I could improve it, but I just don't know how to. Certainly, I think I am far beyond the point where diminishing marginal utility of time spent kicks in.

I guess part of me also feels like I'm letting the professor down with this - he's the kind of granddad professor you want to impress with good grades. Or at least I do. And I know my report is a stinking pile of poo. Never mind. In business you learn to try hard, but once you realise a bird ain't flying to cut your losses and run. So there we are. The report submit button is pressed. Let's hope there's a surprise blog entry in the future on the grade I receive, but honestly, you're better off putting your money on a three legged horse.

Industry and Competitive Analysis

2007-04-10T12:26:00.000+01:00

I sometimes wonder just how much in step I am with the whole campus opinion on various courses. Take for example Industry and Competitive Analysis. This is a course which professes to give you an idea of how to evaluate industries and find sources of competitive advantage. It is one of the P4 "blockbuster" courses. That's a course which gets above 4.5/5 on the professor evaluation. Once a course achieves this, people pick it just for the hell of it - the general opinion is that it is better to have a crap course taught by an excellent professor than vice versa.

So, diligently, I thought something that pulls a 4.93/5 would be worthwhile. What a stinker it has been. In a lot of ways it reeks of consulting to me. The readings are superbly academic. And yet they cover what are fundamentally fairly basic concepts. Like for example you need to know where exactly it is that your company adds value - e.g. production, marketing or distribution. And quite often people don't so they go off and invest in the wrong thing. Hardly rocket science. You'd think. Except this simple concept is couched in academic papers written in the 60s when the English was even more flowery than this blog.

And a lot of the class material, seems to me anyway, is of the sort where the 20/20 hindsight has added wonderful perspective to it. Time and time again things get explained along the lines of "This is the correct answer and is what the company should have done. Only a stupid person would do something else". Consultant speak once again.

Another gripe is the handouts. The professor has been doing this course since the beginning of time. And yet, the handouts have a feel that is very much "My first handout" feel to it. I am pretty certain that at some point in the handout generation process Clippy popped up and said "Looks like you're trying to write a handout. Would you like some help?". At which point the professor said "Do you know who I am????" and vanished old Clippy into a puff of smoke. With a shockingly bad handout being the direct result.

Moan over. It's my birthday. I am definitely older, but the question is, am I wiser?

CQW: What electives are you doing for P5?

Becalmed

2007-04-09T19:09:00.000+01:00

These past few days I feel becalmed. The eye of the storm that was first round interview passed last week. MBA students were scattered like straws through the forest of dings, rejections and 2nd round invitations. And then the sun struck. Not a "Maybe I'll show my face" strike, but a strongwilled, "I'm here to stay for 5 days and there will not be a single cloud in the sky" kind of strike.

And so you try and carry on as before. You try and get the willpower to do the latest Industry and Competitive Analysis reading (it's drier than a cheese cracker if you ask me, but I seem to be in a minority). You feel obliged to run on the MBA treadmill arranging group meetings and case studies and job applications. But you just can't as it is too nice outside. And so you pop out outside, just for 5 minutes of course. And you breathe in the fresh spring air and remember that there's a world outside the MBA. And for the first time you feel almost ready to leave the protective wrappings of the bubble and re-enter it. Fitter, stronger and ready for the next challenge. But just before we start that, maybe a few more minutes in the sun won't hurt.

It's the end of consulting inteview week

2007-04-05T15:41:00.000+01:00

Finally. It's over. The week of consulting interviews. The whole campus has been running around like a headless chicken trying to get jobs with consultancies. And people get dinged and people get depressed. And there's hundreds of uncomfortable conversations. They all go along the lines of

A: Have you heard from company X?
B: Yes. I'm interviewing next week.
A: Ah. I haven't heard.
B: (realises A's just been stealth dinged and gets uncomfortable. That's when they a company doesn't have the decency to tell you they've dinged you and instead stay quiet)
A: Oh well. Never mind. There will be another one.
B: Yeah. I'm sure.

And on and on. I must say I'm quite pleased to not have gone through the whole consulting melee. On my end I'm through to the final Google round. Which I think means I'm taking the foot off the madman application process. I'm pleased to have the confidence of knowing that a "Shell Downstream Process Manager" will not be something seen on a business card with my name on it at any point in the near future. There's just not much point applying for random things in the hope I get something. I seem to have two leads in the hand which are quite exciting. If something really exciting comes along then I'll apply for it, but for now I hope one of my leads goes somewhere. Which probably means I may even have to start thinking about things like hobbies to fill my time again - people are not readily accessible at the moment what with all the interview malarkey running about at the moment. Crikey. It's almost like I'll be a normal person again as opposed to an MBA student on steroids.

A Melange

2007-04-04T19:59:00.000+01:00

I keep meaning to try and have meaningful, well structured entries to this blog - most likely to satisfy one of the primary reasons I'm writing it - in order to learn how to write better.

But sometimes, I guess life doesn't come in useful bite size chunks that have a well structured beginning, middle and end. Sometimes the chunks are too small, and sometimes so vague you can't even be sure if they exist. So in order to meet the dear reader's insatiable appetite for content, they shall have to put up with a melange of an entry. This is where structure is abandoned for the sake of information.

The days are longer. You have no idea how much joy this brings to my life. I can now officially pull off a 12 hour day at school and still be home before dark. This allows me plenty of time to go for a walk and look at the ducks by the river - an important aspect to the sanity maintenance process necessary in P4.

I am writing my Rogerian report for Psychological issues in management. The process is mind numbingly difficult. I am supposed to describe the person I interviewed as they see themselves. So far so good. I am then supposed to describe them as I see them. I tried this and then I realised, the two are exactly the same. Which leads me to conclude that I've achieved absolutely nothing in terms of putting myself in their shoes - if I had I can't imagine there would be no difference between how I see them and how they really are. Oh well. Maybe listening skills is not my forte.

I went into an interview today. After 5 minutes, I said "Look, I'll be honest with you, and after the presentation I saw last night I feel there's very little chance I'm a good fit for you company's culture". The guy agreed and said I would most likely be bored there. So we parted in good company and spirits. When was the last time you were so honest?

I am invited back for 2nd round VC interview. Unfortunately they scheduled this right in the middle of the break. The dilemma of going to an interview for a position I really want, and having a holiday (I really, really need it) is a bit of a pain. I've asked to see if they can move the interview - a collective fingers crossed from the audience may not go amiss here.

Google is great, though my performance could have been better. Should know by Friday whether there is any progress there.

I have completed my Work and Life stars in my career counselling. My counsellor proudly informed me that I'm one of the lucky bunch who seem to have compatible demands from their Personal and Work lives. I inquired what happens to people who don't and she said "Well, they either are the sensible sort and sit down and decide which one is more important and focus on that, or if they're unlucky spend the rest of their life chasing an impossible balance". I gulped and thanked myself for having compatible desires.

CQW: What are you doing for the P4/P5 break?

Onwards and Upwards

2007-04-01T19:49:00.000+01:00

Some days I think INSEAD is like a video game. There's a kind of tempo to every week. After this long into the program, you become used to it. But every now and again, just like a video game, you progress up a level and all of a sudden the tune starts going that little bit quicker. The end of level boss draws nearer and nearer.

For me, things stepped up a notch on Friday, with the commencement of real interviews. Completely failing to realise the wonderful advice of "do some interviews you don't care about for practice", I somehow seem to have managed with the ones I want the most being the first in my schedule. The first one was with a UK VC fund that invests in high-tech early stage companies. It certainly sounds very exciting, and definitely something I'm interested in. Pity I only had about 18 hours notice to prepare for it. It went OK though nothing more. In reality I think that likely means failure - the fund itself has 15 investment partners (read: tiny) and they're interviewing about 30 people for positions. So I think anything less than "That was absolutely stellar" is probably not good enough. Never mind. Tomorrow is Google day.

I have done a lot of retrospection last week, and come to a certain conclusions. One of the major ones is that I've been giving myself an inordinately hard time over the past year. About not being sure I know what I want to do. About not really meeting the ridiculous expectations I had set myself for this year. About just how badly I cope with uncertainty in reality. It's almost like there's a part of me I've left out in the cold for the past year. So I opened the door last week and brought in the almost gangrening part of my personality in from the cold. It felt nice and warm, and I think I'm getting that tingling sensation when blood flows to bits that have been too cold for too long.

So for now, I shall float on the sea of possibilities that opens up and not stress about where it all ends. I am giving things the best shot I can, and at some point the dice will land with certain numbers on them. I hope tomorrow they land with sixes, but as we all know, anything can happen in the Career Casino, and that's why people come to play here!

CQW: You're looking sharp in your suit. Who is it for?

First Battle Shots

2007-03-26T19:03:00.000+01:00

I got the feeling I'm part of this army today. The INSEAD students vs. employers. We're all marching into battle, and the employers unleashed their first set of arrows - in the form of first round interview rejections. There's people being felled all over the place. And the war drum beats faster and faster. Next week could get messy!

Adaptibility & Comparitus

2007-03-25T16:38:00.000+01:00

One of the curses of being fairly adaptable is over sensitivity to your surroundings. I'm a firm believer that only through understanding one's surroundings can one really adapt to them. Great as that is in theory, I'm starting to realise some shortcomings to this approach. I guess this is one of the 'left field' advantages of taking a year out and not working - you get time for all sorts of curious thoughts to pop into your head.

But I hear you ask impatiently - shortcomings? Well yeah. I've coined the term 'comparitus' - OK, so it's not brilliant. It's the process of constantly comparing. And believe me, when you do an MBA, there's so many things to compare. What classes are you taking? What grade did you get in X? How long did your group take to do Y? How many interviews have you got? Are you busy with dinner tonight?

The things is, I'm coming to the conclusion that this is a pretty efficient way to get oneself depressed. You can never know everything about the 400 other people doing an MBA. And so you sample. And then extrapolate. And guess what - when you sample, there's selective sampling bias built in. So when you ask someone and they tell you that they have 3 interviews already, you feel like everyone else must have at least 5 and you having none is a sign from a higher power that you're really not that good. Or at least that's how it is if you're going through an insecure patch like myself.

Which brings me back to the whole adaptability thing. I had to write an essay on "Adapting to a truly foreign culture" for my favourite class of the year so far - "Psychological Issues in Management". My main point there was that there's a conflict between self and the interface between your surroundings. If you spend all your time adapting, your self kind of disappears under a layer of glue moulded to your surroundings. So I guess what I'm expressing in a fairly voluminous manner is that I've decided to try and adapt a bit less and be myself a bit more. I think that's quite a challenge - Psychology professor is adamant people never change, and he's someone I'm inclined to take seriously. But I like projects. At least interesting ones.

CQW: Did you get BCG interview?

Arcade Fire

2007-03-24T23:33:00.000+01:00

Frequent readers may have noticed the shameful bid for publicity this blog has experienced in the past week. In a bid to play around with Google search rankings (at the moment a search on "career casino insead" goes nowhere near this blog) I have linked to some other student's blogs.

The next stage in the tarting this blog for the masses is a move into the audio/visual dimension. What better way to do this than to stick some piccies up of the Arcade Fire gig I went to in Paris.

You'll be spared my attempts at music reviewing cause I need to go to bed. The gig was good. Not amazing (they insisted on playing lots of songs from the new "Neon Bible" album, which is not that good). But when they played songs from the first album it was amazing.

It was so refreshing to be out there in the real world with real people enjoying some music and completely forgetting about the whole MBA/job thing.

The real surprise for me though was the support band. They were ace. You too could have a listen to their music here. Maybe you like it too.

Good night!

Marketing brochure

2007-03-22T18:38:00.000+01:00

Nobody marketed P4. If they did, they would have had a hard time. It involves the largest congregation of stressed people I have ever seen. I have yet to have a conversation this week that hasn't involved job search, career, cover letters or CVs to some extent. OK. I lie. I had one. It was about Iranian New Year and why it is that it's at 1:07AM.

On campus stress levels are currently running off the scale. In general, there's three types of stress:

Deer in headlights stress - clearly I start with my category first. This is goes something like "oh my god. I finish in 3 months and I have no clue what I want to do".

I will be rejected by consulting stress - this goes along the lines of "Consulting is my dream job. Everyone that's done it is really talented. I'm not sure I'm that talented"

Quietly Confident Stress - these are the people who have already got jobs. Most of them are consultants who have been sponsored and are now rapidly reaching payback time for their companies. The realisation that there's a world outside of consulting has slowly dawned on them over the past year and they are now having second thoughts as to whether they really want to go back. You can normally find them sitting sheepishly in the back row of recruitment presentations hoping their colleagues won't notice.

Much like the best and the worst things in life, stress involves a positive feedback loop. And you really feel it. Yesterday I woke up and finally started trying to shake myself out of my stress. While important, this whole job malarkey needs to be kept in perspective. If nothing good appears, then nothing good appears. Unemployment is not good, but also not the end of the world. And I do really have some idea of what it is that I want to do. I just need to focus on that and make the most of it. As one of my friends says - "baby steps, baby steps". So I've started e-mailing contacts trying to secure some opportunities outside of the what has so far been a fairly appalling set of choices provided by on-campus companies. Wish me luck!

CQW: What sector are you interested in?

Roger That

2007-03-18T13:17:00.000+01:00

One of the classes I'm taking this period is Psychological Issues in Management. Why did I take it? Well, it seemed to be so far out of left field that I thought it couldn't possibly make for a boring experience. And for once I seem to be about right.

It's taught by a Spanish professor who seems to know exactly how to rub pushy MBAs the wrong way. It's a pretty simple recipe actually. It involves:
1 part expletives
1 part tough questions
1 part picking on people (god forbid!)

Ironically, the people who struggle most with this cocktail are those who you'd think would be the best placed for it - the really hard, driven, ambitious types. You have no idea how much this course features on the campus conversation radar - by now every body's heard of it.m And people get really wound up by this.

So far what we've been covering something fascinating. How to listen to people. Specifically, the Rogerian method of client-centred therapy. This is a specific approach for listening to people where you try and reflect back their feelings to them, while being empathic, congruent (i.e. your outward appearance must match how you feel internally) and accepting of them. It's interesting to note just how unnatural such an approach is for most people is - one class exercise involves the professor reading client responses from a Rogerian interview and then prompting the class for a suitable interviewer response. It's almost impossible to get this right.

Interestingly though, I seem to be in the minority of the class which is more probably to be successful at listening to people - we did a questionnaire to try and assess whether one has Rogeeian attitudes. I seem to be quite a good match for it, though the proviso is that as with any self-administered questionnaire you may be getting who I want to be rather than who I am answering the questions.

CQW: Did you go to the McKinsey dinner?

Google is go

2007-03-14T18:40:00.000+01:00

The heart and the mind often do battle. The older I get, the more I realise the heart really does know what it's talking about and although one spends all their time pouring knowledge in their head, the result is quite often a reduction in wisdom.

Take for example the whole consulting business. I thought I wanted to do it. I worked like hell to get into it. I then worked in it and hated the living daylights of it. Two years later I bumble along into INSEAD. Along comes P4 and all of a sudden everybody you talk to wants a job in consulting. Why? Most of them don't really know. Because the consulting companies are on campus this week. Because the consultants look good. Because the consultants pay well. Because you can get an interesting job afterwards. But most importantly, because nothing else appears as good.

And like anyone else, I get swept along this consulting rush. It's like a river. You grab and snatch at passing grass as the weeks sweep by, but consulting inevitability seems like a waterfall you rapidly approach. My flatmate and I even developed the "Consulting Inevitability" framework to better leverage understanding of this process.

And then on Sunday something inside me snapped. Not a loud scary snap. Just a gentle prod from the heart to the head. Saying "Oi!". And then the head started to think about itself a little bit more and about what other people think a little bit less (that's always the good stuff). And it remembered. It remembered waking up at 5AM every Monday morning to fly to somewhere in Europe. It remembered clinical Hilton rooms with faceless receptionists. It remembered spending hours trying to decide whether a hamburger or a steak (the only 2 room service choices) is less fattening because that's the only nourishment available after 11PM, and your belt is out of spare holes. It remembered the woman at Heathrow passport control who recognises you by face after 2 months of building up your BA silver status. But most importantly, it remembered enough to ask the question "What the hell are you doing?"

So consulting is off the menu. I don't know what's on it, but consulting is definitely not it. The only thing that's definitely on it is Google. Hence the addition of the advertising links on this blog. I'm going through a rapid period of sampling the myriad of products they make. Please click on them. They make me money. Not bags of money, but some. Maybe enough to buy a beer after I end up unemployed in July.

CQW: Are you applying to BCG?

Deer in headlights

2007-03-09T21:12:00.000+01:00

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines. It's time for P4. The period where all your job hunting dreams come true. Or not. As the case may be. But to be able to determine this, you must first start by getting some dreams.

Right now, there is a certain deer in headlights feeling to the whole period. As of next Monday, there will be about 3 company presentations on campus for the next month. They're all for milk round jobs. Which means that most of them are management consultancies, some are for banks, and there's one or two companies that actually produce real things thrown in for good measure.

Following my not very happy end to the last period (where I basically got totally stressed out I still had no clue as to what I wanted to do), I did some reflection over the holiday. I even went so far as to map my stress out. Anyways. One of the main things which hit me is that I'd fallen for the "the MBA provides you with a blank sheet of paper" story which is pushed by business schools prior to joining. Yes it's true - career changes are possible. But you better be damn sure what you want to do anew, because anything you apply for will have 20 people who have done it for the rest of their lives applying for it, and convincing people they should hire you rather than them is a tricky proposition.

So the "white sheet of paper" theory is out. What's in is make some of the remotely interesting options real (there's really not that many you can get to this stage) and then decide amongst them. So that's what I'm doing. I'll start with Google on Monday. Wish me luck.

Campus Question of the week (from how on CQW): How was Singapore?

The ever accelerating run of weeks

2007-02-04T10:00:00.000+01:00

I guess I'd probably venture out to say that I'm almost back to being a normal person healthwise. After a dry run last Thursday (carrying my crutch with me as if it were the latest fashion accessory) I managed to go a full day at school without using my crutch on Friday.

Which puts me back into the position of being able to write about MBA things. This period has turned out to be the best so far by a mile. Primarily, this is because more than half of the intake decamped en masse to Singapore. What this meant was that the smaller number of people who remained here have gelled a lot more as a group and have been able to form some deeper relationship than can be afforded by the 30s MBA power chat (that's "Hi, how are you? Really? I've got a group meeting now, bye!").

Coursewise I'm doing Negotiation Dynamics, Market Driving Strategies and Business Law. Plus there's the core courses on IT (I have no idea why I didn't exempt this) and Macro Economics. With the exception of IT and Business Law all are eye wateringly good.

Automatic for the hoppa

2007-01-19T17:05:00.000+01:00

My road to recovery from the accident continues to snake it's way into the sunset horizon, however, I am pleased to report that the kilometres are ticking by at an ever increasing rate.

The physio work I am doing is giving tangible benefits. After every session I can feel a definite improvement in being able to stand on two feet and make progress towards the holy grail of unassisted walking.

Today however, was a huge step forward. I am now the owner of an automatic renault Clio. Which means that my independence is back. No more running around trying to arrange lifts from highly busy MBA students with rapidly changeable schedules. Although the help from people with this has been absolutely tremendous, not having to think about other people's schedules and how best to fit around them is a huge relief. I shall sleep like a puppy tonight - it's been a long hard slog this week.

School Bus

2007-01-09T21:15:00.000+01:00

This is probably the most bizarre experience an MBA student has ever had, but today I came home on the school bus. And I don't mean the school bus of the Business School of the World! I mean a proper all singing all dancing French school bus full of 12 year olds. It appears that there's one of these a day from school going straight to my house, so on the rare occasions that my schedule permits it I can make use of this.

Quite an interesting thing school buses. I reckon you could tell a lot about a country from them. Back in my day, the noise level was somewhere between a jet taking off and a pneumatic drill. Members of the public unfortunate enough to stumble onto my school bus would with write to school with alarming regularity to report tales of fighting, swearing and smoking. The school would chastise the students with absolutely no effect.

When I got on the bus today it all went quiet (I was the only adult there). Then a kid politely moved his bag out of the way while another directed me to the newly created empty seat. The conversation level never got to anything higher than what is necessary for people to communicate. And I did not hear a swear word once (though admittedly I may not have recognised it). Not a hooded top insight. Not even people listening to music at a volume that will guarantee they will be deaf before they are 16. In fact, that's probably the most polite bunch of kids that I can ever remember. I was utterly amazed. I look forward to my next journey.

X-ray Vision

2007-01-08T22:38:00.000+01:00

It's that time of term when you've just had the first day of lectures and are wondering what new things term can bring. But for me I've been focusing on leg healage, so shall put the MBA aside for one second.

I had my first hospital examination of my leg today. On the plus side everything is going well and there are no complications present. On the minus side, I saw an X-ray of my leg for the first time and I got depressed.

I think my problem was that I'd practically started walking with both legs over the course of the past week. Which in my engineeringly logical brain was equated to an expectation of an X-ray of an almost perfectly healed bone - give or take a few fractures here or there. So when I got to look at my X-ray, seeing quite distinctly that there were three different bits of bone which in no way could be described as being remotely together made me shudder. Apparently the bone has started to heal, but the whole process will take another 2.5 months to complete. And the funny thing is, I knew it would take this long to heal cause they told me this in the hospital before I left. But when you see yourself being able to take 3-4 steps in a row after having been bedridden for 6 weeks, the mind (or at least mine) goes in overoptimism mode.

Still. Everything is going as well as can be expected, so I am more than grateful. I think a little expectation management was probably well in order anyway. So for now it's crutches.

Going Native

2007-01-02T14:38:00.000+01:00

In today's high flying rapid information jet setting lifestyle I find it quite tricky to feel at home many places. Probably due to the fact I've moved about so much. So in some ways being forced to stay in a tiny French village for Christmas was quite a good thing to happen - it has not only given me time to pause and reflect but also get to know the locals a tiny bit.

My highlight of the past week has to be with the owner of the Le Balto restaurant which is straight across the road from my house and one of the few things within crutch walking distance of my bed. It's the sort of low down dirty hangout which would not look out of place in a town west of Tombstone AZ two hundred years ago. The bar seems to be permanently occupied by labourers smoking filterless Gitanes while getting drunk on cheap bear. In one corner there is a TV permanently showing horse racing fixtures while in another there's a full blown betting stand where punters can inject their poison. An entrance to the establishment is always greeted by a complete cessation of all conversations followed by a slow head turning movement towards the door. Had it not been prohibited by health and safety regulations I have no doubt the floor would have been covered in sawdust.

Upon my first visit there while convalescing (I love the sound of that word) the owner came to take our order. He's a big jolly (if you can believe that) French man of about 60. He came, put his hand on my shoulder gently and paused while looking me straight in the eye. After what seemed like an eternity he said "Ca va?". I was touched. I knew I had become a member of a new club.....

Crash

2006-12-15T19:24:00.000+01:00

Regular readers will no doubt have by now noticed the prolonged absence of The Apprentice. This has been caused by my recent car crash. Unfortunately, for various reasons I don't feel very comfortable writing about it in a public forum, so you'll have to make do with a bullet point precis about my state:

- I had a serious car crash on the 24th of November
- I have a badly broken left leg and a broken left collar bone
- I had emergency surgery for 4 hours after the accident and spent 10 days in hospital recovering
- I am now moving around on crutches
- I expect to be well enough to walk sometime in mid January to end January
- Between my leg and my collar bone I have enough metal in my body to make air travel to the US a challenging task at best

I hope to be able to return to this blog with more light hearted comments, repartie and analysis sometime during the Christmas break or in January, but for now I'm just focusing on recovering.

Disney's coming to town

2006-11-23T18:46:00.000+01:00

More specifically, the bit of Disney that plans to build theme parks in China. For some schoolboy reason I'm getting quite excited about their recruitment presentation - a bit of me thinks it would be quite cool to be involved in getting a theme park going. At least when you're done you can point at it and say: "look. Here's what I've been doing for the past x years".

Identity

2006-11-22T13:54:00.000+01:00

A funny thing happened to me on the phone to the bank the other day. I got a mini identity crisis. Having left my home country at the tender age of 12 and lived in the UK practically ever since, it was the closest thing I had to home.

On Monday I rang up my bank in order to order a Switch card as I had lost mine. After being on hold for 40 minutes I was told that this was not possible - I suspect because my account has not had a salary going into it for the past 2 months. In the grand scheme of things this is by no means a big deal - it's just one of the little inconveniences that you just have to live with.

But it was at that point that it really struck me home - I felt like the country which had de facto become my home was turning its back on me. And all because of a silly Switch card. And then I felt a little homeless. I mean France is nice and all, but it's not really home - it's just somewhere I'm stopping by on my big life adventure. Oh how the quirky ways of the little things in life focus your mind on the bigger picture....

Flip Flop

2006-11-22T13:44:00.000+01:00

I've never been good with decisions about myself, especially ones which have some impact on my future. I tend to end up in a nasty cycle of analysing all the options to death while distinctly avoiding making a choice and standing by it. This wonderful cycle is also interspersed with period of ostrich impersonations where things appear more sandy than they really are for a while.

And so I have been living the past week. To Singapore or not to Singapore, that has indeed been the question. To those not involved in the mad MBA process making such a decision should be a fairly simple process. To someone who's a bit stressed because of short term questions like what to do about a disintegrating group, and who always has the "CAREER CAREER" red light constantly blinking at the back of their head, it has proven to be anything but.

Is it worth all the extra money? Will I actually have time to travel around whilst I'm there? How will the socialising work? How do I go about finding somewhere to live. In the end I got fed up with it and just went with my heart. Pouring such an enormous sum of money into what will likely end up a couple of weekends in Bali is likely not the best use of my resources. And in terms of getting to know people, the fact that 75% of my year is en-mass decamping to Singapore means that in reality it will be pretty much the same as it has been here. Actually, I think that the 25% which stay here will likely gel a lot more as a group - just because there will be a lot fewer people here.

And so with a stroke I've removed a big part of my recent stress. Gone are the worries about accommodation. Gone are the worries about planning traveling itineraries. All I have to do now is buy an ice scraper for my car in preparation for the depths of winter.....

Ground Zero

2006-11-16T10:17:00.000+01:00

My group just blew up. Two minutes ago. Amazing. We were all plodding along and then Kaboom! It all just went mental.

You did this. Well I don't like it when you do that. Oh yeah? Well sometimes you fart too much? Right. Well I hate working with you. And then the group exam result came into it. And then the different working styles. And then I had a headache.

Notionally, I'm group leader for this task. So it means it's kind of my problem to separate the group issues from getting the results done for this project. I went in hard and proposed we just split the group in two for this project and then had a group meeting to air things out once the deadline was over. People went for it but then changed their mind and decided we all loved each other really.

My foresight in predicting this is utterly uncanny. I have no idea what I'm going to do now. Maybe it will mean less time spent working in the group. Overall that would be a good thing - cause you work about 10 times quicker on your own....

2006-11-15T23:10:00.000+01:00

The CV is done. Or rather, I've stopped laughing and decided to go with what I have....

Autumn

2006-11-15T18:06:00.000+01:00

When it all gets just a little too much, the weather delivers an unexpected bright spark. This morning on my drive into work the sun was shining. The forest is absolutely stunning. The explosion or reds, yellows and oranges is so intense and overwhelming it can make all the other things in life seem a little less relevant.

Not that other things have gone away. We spent a good one and a half hours with my group this morning trying desperately to do the marketing case. I insisted on not letting everyone move on until we'd agreed to a semblance for a plan for the entire project - otherwise we risk being cast adrift in a sea of data with each of us making random unconnected points. I think I managed to do it. But I haven't got many written results to show for it. Hopefully the dividends will come tomorrow when we actually sit down and do the work.

In other news my super organised housemates seem to be sniffing out Singapore accommodation. I feel like I'm somewhat free riding on this one, but I basically decided yesterday that I didn't have enough bandwidth to deal with Singapore accommodation at the moment so my approach would be to hop on a shared flat if one comes along and pull out of Singapore next week if one doesn't. Do I feel guilty for free riding? Sure. But life's too short.

The CV is still laughable. But at least it's starting to resemble a CV.

Which means thankfully focus is shifting onto another question. Which Paris museum to go to this weekend? I've heard Rodin is supposed to be quite something.....

Today was a stress day

2006-11-14T23:11:00.000+01:00

Doing the MBA thing you're always juggling one hundred things in the air. Sometimes you blink and before you know it ten of them have hit the ground. Today I had a stress death spiral - I've had a couple before but hadn't really written about them.

What's a stress death spiral? Well, it's when you're stressed you've got too many things to do and then you realise you're stressed so you become less efficient at doing the things you need to do and then it feeds back on itself. You probably want to know where the death bit comes from - but for that you need to have done Accounting this term - it's a term the professor keeps banging on about.

What's causing stress so far? In no particular order:
1. Singapore. I'm having second thoughts. Is at least 3000EUR and more logistical hassle than deploying a UN peacekeeping force worth it for being able to say I "lived" in Singapore for 7 weeks? Somedays I think yes. Other days I think actually, that's a pretty superficial thing. You won't really get to see what it's like to live there. And that the primary reason for going is cause every one else is. I can still pull out. But they sent an e-mail today asking you to apply for visas, student passes and all the rest of it. Deadlines next week, so really have to finally bite that bullet. The deadlines make it all the more urgent to engage arse into gear.

2. Job. I still have no clue at all as to what to do with my life job wise. Deadline for submitting CV to the CV book is next Tuesday. Kinda hard to write a CV if you don't know what it is you're shooting for. But sitting down to write CV for the first time kinda made that one seem a lot more real and urgent.

3. Group. This term we have a lot more groupwork assignments. A lot of these are on the softer skill courses. The Marketing assignment we are doing is going to destroy the group. I know it. Why? Because sticking an engineer, a pilot, an introverted american engineer and a non-English fluent Chinese together and asking them to do something creative that involves English is a pretty high bar.

In other news, I passed my French test. Which means I don't have to worry about having to take French lessons. So at least that's one less thing to worry about. This is the beginning of a spiral reversal. I hope anyway.

Quote of The Day

2006-11-12T18:19:00.000+01:00

A GMAT is a GMAT, but they call it Le GMAT.

Hitchiking is off - we would have to average 400km a day for 3 weeks in a row without fail, which seems somewhat over optimistic.

It's French week, or as they call it French Ouik this week. For once the run-up campaigns have actually been quite funny. Late on Friday they sent an e-mail out saying it had been cancelled due to strike action....

Hitchike

2006-11-11T19:18:00.000+01:00

An interesting idea popped in my pretty little head at 2am near the end of a wine driven evening by the fire last night. Why not hitchike from here to Singapore in between the P2-P3 break? If I leave as soon as the last exam is finished I have 3 weeks before classes start. I reckon it's about 4000 miles. Is this realistic? Opinions anyone?

Waterlillies

2006-11-11T18:56:00.001+01:00

My new found wisdom for P2 is to get out of the MBA bubble as much as possible. This is in a bid to derive some external, non-MBA related, stimuli in a desperate attempt to gain some conversation material that doesn't involve the latest joke told in class.

So far I can declare this operation a reasonable success. Paris is remarkably easy to get to - especially given that I am 3 minutes walk away from the train station. And the number of museums this golden city has that I have not yet visited is vast. The train journey is really pretty and gives oneself an opportunity how amazingly lucky they are to live in the surroundings that they do.

Today it was the Orangerie's turn. For the unitiated it's practically a single exhibit museum - Monet's waterlillies. A series of Impressionist paintings done around the turn of the century, the waterlillies are stunningly beautiful. The Orangerie comprises of two rooms where 10 paintings are exhibited. Their size is breathtaking. And the explosion of color and emotion is amazing. I spent an hour staring at them and was left exhausted.

But enough about art - I think my art writing could be improved somewhat. Back to the MBA. There's another party tonight. And guess what! It's a fancy dress party! Really???? There hasn't been one of those for the past two hours! The INSEAD obsession with fancy dress is simply mind blowing. I think there may have been 2 parties since the start of September that have not been fancy dress (and they were both held in my house). I find this depressing on several grounds. Firstly and foremost I think it's a sad statement that people need to be dressed sillily to have a good time. Secondly, we live in a village with one fancy dress shop. So guess what happens when you e-mail 400 people telling them your theme? They go to the tabac? No. Try again. They actually end up in the fancy dress shop. Which by some amazing coincidence will have a box on the front desk with about 10 items to choose from which will match exactly the party of the week's theme. And then what? Well, you do the maths - 400 people, 10 items, 1 party, once a week, every week..... Am I boring for finding this depressing? Who knows. But I do.

Celebrity Accounting

2006-11-10T14:21:00.000+01:00

In a bid to rebalance the somewhat negative bias of the last few entires, I'm going to write a bit about the course content. This term, it's excellent. Most (not all) courses are really engaging and taught really pretty well.

Interestingly, the widely recognised star performer is the Managerial Accounting professor. He's got an uncanny ability of commanding attention through a combination of fast paced humour (he has one of these brains that ticks over 10,000 times a second) and fascinating content. The primary point of the course is that measuring cost in a business is actually quite a difficult thing, and that when it comes to figuring out how much a particular unit costs you to make you can get into all sorts of trouble.

I'm off to Singapore

2006-11-10T14:13:00.000+01:00

So it's official. My bid to go to Singapore has been accepted and I shall be departing for sunnier climes come later this year. I am overwhelmed by the amount of logsitics this thing will entail. As far as I can tell, sorting out accomodation in Singapore is more difficult than finding a parking space on Oxford Street. As I'll be decamping with practically every member of my class, campus has become this seething mass of accomodation related questions. "Have you found somewhere to live yet?", "Do you know whether you can get a short term lease?" etc. etc.

The way the numbers work, there's about 150 people from Fontainebleau moving to Singapore for Jan/Feb, and about 50 people doing the reverse. You do the room swapping maths. I've got a headache.

On the plus side, flights to Bali once you get there are meant to be painfully cheap.

French Shopping

2006-11-10T01:58:00.000+01:00

Amazing how many differences there are between different cultures. Take for example wine.

When I go to do the house shopping in Champion (that's French for supermarket), I have a functional shopping list in my head. One of the things on this shopping list this afternoon was white wine. You'd think that's an easy thing to get - after all, it's easy to separate from the non wine products in the shop, and it also easy to separate from the non-red products in the shop. In one phrase, I'm looking for white wine.

Alas no. we're in France. Where complexity is cherished, but never openly expressed. I come home with my 2 bottles of (what I thought were) white wine, only to discover that they were actually dessert wine. How did I discover this? Well, I opened them and tasted them. And here's the shocker. It's not like I read the label for the second time and spotted the "this is dessert wine" sign that I had not seen in the shop. It's not like there was a subtle footnote on the back of the label saying "this is dessert wine". Oh no. This is France. Where a combination and subtlety and obtuseness is worshipped for its sake alone.

It seems the answer lay on the 5th line of the back label - according to my French Swiss housemate. 10 point font of course. If a wine is suitable for serving with Foie Gras (as was stated on the 5th line of the back label), then that means it is a desert wine..... I mean for fuck' sake.....

Things are looking up

2006-11-02T15:57:00.000+01:00

At least on the academic side. I've now had 5 of the 6 courses for P2, and already I'm getting a warm fuzzy feeling. For a start, the professors are actually quite good. Highlight so far seems to be the Management Accounting guy, who could quite easily do stand up comedy and be quite successful at it. He manages to make the whole experience really quite fun and interesting. And as a bonus, he's taken to playing us music before each lecture. So far the music I've heard has been stuff I've wanted to download immediately.

Corporate Finance II - The Return of the Bond Trader is also looking good. The professor seems to have photographic memory. He remembered (I didn't) that a question I asked in today's lecture was similar to the one I asked in Tuesday's class. Given that he's teaching 300 odd people, that's pretty impressive. We'll be doing options pricing, and I'll finally get to know what Black-Scholes actually is. I'm sure you think this is riveting....

It's the Montmellian Ball this Saturday. That's a party at a chateau. I should probably explain the whole chateau/accommodation/coolness hierarchy to the unitiated. Basically, pretty much as in high school and university, there's various echelons of coolness on the social scene. The peak of this pyramid tends to be occupied by the chaps and chapesses living in Chateaus. They tend to have a cool clickie feel. Of this, Montmellian is the creme-de-la-creme. At least this year. They seem to have gotten all the artsy type MBA students - bar me of course. So they've been busy organising a ball in the style of a 1920's speakeasy. This has involved making a movie with a gangster shootout (one of them drives a Citroen DS - which although not 20s, still looks pretty good in black and white photos), and sending newspaper articles to the whole year with the developing plotline. This seems to involve the mob muscling in on some Don's territory, but to be honest I haven't been following it that well.

Winter's on its way

2006-11-02T00:22:00.000+01:00

The car now takes a good 10 minutes to demist completely before allowing a safe driving experience. And we've switched the heating on. Which seems to have a 4 year old's attitude to work - some days it's good, some days it doesn't really feel like it.

On the plus side, you can go for a walk at night and see more stars than you can ever imagine - now here's one thing you can do in a village with a population of 9 rather than a town with a population of 9m.

Promises Promises

2006-10-30T13:23:00.000+01:00

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%

2006-10-25T15:21:00.000+01:00

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

2006-10-24T18:14:00.000+01:00

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

2006-10-22T18:00:00.000+01:00

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

2006-10-15T11:14:00.000+01:00

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

2006-10-09T15:33:00.000+01:00

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

2006-10-08T18:59:00.000+01:00

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

2006-10-05T18:59:00.000+01:00

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

2006-10-05T18:56:00.000+01:00

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

2006-10-03T08:18:00.000+01:00

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!

2006-10-03T08:01:00.000+01:00

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.

More academics

2006-09-28T08:31:00.000+01:00

The next class we shall cover in the "MBA Under The Microscope" series is "Financial Markets and Valuations". This particular specimen is taught by a German. At the risk of promoting exceptionally poor stereotypes, the similarity between him and a certain character in the bastion of political correctness that is "'Allo 'Allo" is uncanny.

He has a tendency to add a "hmm" or a "yes" or a "good" to every other sentence. For example:

"So we can calculate the NPV which gives us the IRR rate. Hmm. Using this we can reach a company valuation, yes? Good."

The course itself seems to resolve firmly around the principle of Net Present Value. Or in other words how much I have to give you tomorrow to get you to give me some money today. It seems to be an amazingly flexible thing this simple concept. We've used it to find out all manner of things from how bonds get valued to what's a fair price you should pay for a company. In fact only now do I start to feel like I know what all those important banker M&A types actually do at 3AM. In the process I've chalked up yet another reason why I don't want to be a banker.

The morally objectionable bit is that so far every time we've done a case on valuing a company the answer which invariably turns out to have the highest NPV is buying the company and then immediately shutting it down and selling all the assets off. I keep thinking about all these people made unemployed cause a spreadsheet in Excel said so. Clippy has a lot to answer for.

Academic Overview

2006-09-26T14:22:00.000+01:00

I think it's high time I devoted some attention to describing the actual courses one encounters on an MBA. I'll try and do this course by course otherwise this aura of intense buzyness I've been diligently cultivating over the past few weeks will disappear in a puff of smoke, which just won't do.

Today, I shall focus on Leading People and Groups. This, in MBA speak, is an Organisational Behaviour Course. It's kind of a one of a kind course when compared to the other ones I'm taking this term. After 4 weeks of it, I still have no idea what to make of it. Every week I start the lecture in two minds. One of them is saying "This is complete and utter bullshit", the other "This is utter genius". And every week I resolve to finally make my mind up once and for all, and every week I seem to fail miserably.

What does the course teach? Well, this is kind of a tough one. We have a session devoted to different aspects of group behaviour. We started by examining self and the different kinds of people you can get in a group. We then went on to look at leaders and different leadership styles. For example, it seems that most people have an instinctive preference to work for a really free wheeling, innovative thinking boss who gives them all the freedom in the world and trusts them to do tasks of earth saving magnitude well. But when it comes to choosing who they would like to have work for them, they'd be much happier having something between an ant and a robot that mindlessly goes and carries out whatever simple task you've assigned to them without asking any questions.

Today we looked at influence, and ways of exercising it. This involved a viewing of "12 Angry Men", which not being one I'd seen before was immensely enjoyable. We ended up going through all of the techniques Henry Fonda uses to influence the jury. Like for example making friends before tackling the strongest opponents, and accepting a gift from someone in order to make them feel like being part of his side.

My problem with it all is most likely related to my background. Every week I find my head swirls in amazement during the course of the lecture, but once I come out of it, I really can't quite pin point whether I've actually learned anything or not. I diligently try and take notes in class, but when it comes back to reading them they seem to make very little sense. So who knows. Hopefully next week I will finally crack the genius or bullshit question....

Wallet

2006-09-22T15:18:00.000+01:00

When doing the Myers Briggs lecture last week, the behavioural psychology lecturer conducted a survey of how many people in the lecture theatre had never lost their wallet. I should have known I was onto a loser as soon as my hand went up........

Having spent almost 2 full days looking for it, I finally threw the towel in on Wednesday and declared it properly lost. I am still convinced it is somewhere in the house, but I only have so many hours in the day. I then proceeded to go into the bank in order to declare my misfortune.

The process was so incredibly simple. The guy clicked three buttons on the computer and then made me sign two sheets of paper. No questions asked. Rather worryingly, I then asked to get some cash to tide me over while the new card arrives. This he did without any questions, or even worse any id of any sort being displayed... To contrast, HSBC kept me on the phone for 15 minutes while asking me minute details when I was born accurate to the second and my mothers eye colour preference. I am more and more convinced that the French way of doing things is actually quite good. When you have a job to do, just do it without pissing around. And then go on a 7 week summer holiday. And if anyone has seen my wallet - drop me a line....

Shopping

2006-09-22T15:13:00.000+01:00

France is a strange old place. Think of getting anything done on a Monday, and you better forget it. Although the parking in town is free, all of the shops are closed. The same between 12 and 2 on any of the other (few) remaining weekdays.

To make up for this lack of working time though, the zeal with which people work, on the rare occasions that they do, is legendary. Take for example the checkout women at the supermarket. I have never seen anyone perform the task of picking an item with their right hand, passing it through the scanner and then discarding it with their left done so quickly. The bar code beeper makes one single continuous beep for 30s while you're struggling to get the first plastic bag open. Once the beep stops, you have one pile of food waiting to be bagged and one french woman looking at you in that "oh for fuck' sake" kind of way that I always feel I'm looked at when my lack of nativeness is spotted.

Statistics

2006-09-22T11:28:00.000+01:00

I somehow appear to have landed in a statistics course. As someone with a degree in Electrical Engineering, the learning value being imparted is minimal. So much so, I'm half regretting not taking the exemption exam. But then it's good to have an easy course as a buffer for when the work kicks in in all the other courses. And anyway, had I exempted the only thing I could have done instead was a course on Business Ethics, which in my mind is simply a box ticking exercise for the school, lest one of us glorious MBAs pulls an Enron at some stage in their career.

The Statistics professor, however, is a an absollute joy to watch. He's one of these passionately passionate Italians with a thick Italian accent and makes use of large voice amplitude variations to command your attention 100% of the time. I am informed by a large proportion of the female audience that he is simply to die for.

Today we watched the most delightful little clip about sampling. It was one of these 1970s cheesy education clips done in America. It starts with a boardroom meeting of a corporation thinking whether or not to launch the X5000 razor (which ironically is a 5 bladed razor). And all of a sudden this dashingly handsome statistician dives in and convinces everyone it would be a folly to do so, but only after getting his bit in about the Central Limit theorem and customer surveys. The last scene involves him quietly walking out and driving away in his yellow Ferrari, while everyone in the boardroom is left saying "Wow. Who was that guy" and staring longingly into the distance. Just great.

Examus Maximus

2006-09-20T08:51:00.000+01:00

Like an unwelcome mouse in a larder full of cheese the first performance measurement of the MBA is upon us. And what a palaver that was. The recipe for exam stress goes something like this.

300 Parts uber achieving MBA students
1 part microeconomics "quiz"
Allowance for one A4 cheat sheet

It's a simple and potent mix. Being the first assessment of any sort in the year, everybody is super keen to impress. And when I mean super keen, I am being polite. People start seeking all possible means of competitive advantage. One housemate stayed up till 3 (although admittedly he hadn't been to any microeconomics lectures yet, so perhaps that was wise). The talk of the campus turned to cheat sheets. How good is your cheat sheet? Mine was a handwritten affair with 5 formulas. Others, however, seemed to have discovered new techniques of microprinting and managed to squeeze the whole of Microeconomics theory discovered to date on a single side of A4. It's not clear whether those things are readable, but the feeling of efficient use of the cheat sheet space must be overwhelming. Never mind that we've only had about 5 lectures so far, so there just isn't that much things one can be tested on.

The professor's protestations that the quiz was really an exercise to see whether you're awake went completely unheard. In the event it was 7 questions that were so straighforward I didn't even use my cheat sheet. The likelihood of anyone scoring less than 100% is almightily slim. The important lesson for me - don't get sucked into the herd effect. Or else you'll have one almighty headache on your hands.

The Night Google Came to Town

2006-09-18T06:37:00.000+01:00

Last Friday was the Google recruitment presentation. For the uninitiated this is a company that is almost mythical in the eyes of those in the Technology industry. For me it was a breath of fresh air after getting a bit worried that by cutting out Consulting and Banking as post-MBA career paths I wasn't leaving myself with much open.

Sadly, the guy doing the presentation was mind blowingly uninspiring. Although for me it was quite refreshing. It made you realise that Google is just another company rather than this godly creation. And in fact the little people that actually do the kind of work I'd end up doing there post MBA were all pretty good - of the razor sharp brain variety. So there is some light at the end of the career corridor peeping in.

In other news I've decided to leverage the MBA faculty as much as possible and have started pursuing a lunch with one of the entrepreneurship members of faculty. First attempt was not as successful as hoped - I was referred to the "Entrepreneur-In-Residence". However, I am sure I shall be able to seduce him with my charms.

Mailing Lists

2006-09-18T06:28:00.000+01:00

Most of my readers have probably worked at some large company or another at some point in their lives. Which means that they should be more than aware of the ease with which the upper echelons of management are apt to use the "Reply All" button.

Now stop for a moment, and spare a thought for those of us who are at school with the next generation of the upper echelons of management. A school which very kindly integrates lots and lots of distributions lists under Outlook's address book. You might think high GMAT scores and general levels of high intelligence would mean people know how to use these things. Sadly not. Not a day goes by without some idiotic mail exchange involving who knows how many people e-mailing everybody and their brother about something utterly irrelevant.

My pet hate last week was a saga of about 20 e-mails emailed to the entire class by some guy getting together a group buy of business cards for people, and thus saving the princely sum of 5EUR. Sadly, it looked like it would be too much work to combine all the e-mails of the minority who consider this a worthwhile use of time, and so the distribution list was used. Yesterday's flurry involved a protracted vote where people e-mailed the entire school their Instant Messenger application preference. Woe betide the e-mail servers of the businesses that end up hiring the leaders of tomorrow.

Nice things Scary things

2006-09-12T21:29:00.000+01:00

Nice things
when you do lots of psychometric testing and are constantly coming up with results that tell you that you really need to go and be an entrepreneur otherwise you'll never be happy.

Scary things
(i) Observing 100 MBA alpha males in dark business suits lined up in a perfect line 2 by 2 queuing to enter the BCG recruitment presentation. Reminded me of the Daleks.

(ii) Going to an investment banking presentation and being told that 8-9PM are really easy hours (which strictly speaking they are compared with 8-3AM).

It's started

2006-09-11T21:50:00.000+01:00

And by that I don't mean the course - that was last weeks' news. Keep up. I mean the endless Cambridge-like cycle of work, work, some more work, guilt following 5 minutes of slacking off, following by more work. The amount of pre-reading, problems, group work and all the rest of it you have to do is quite obscene. And being the second week, everyone's really keen.

Went to an Investment Banking presentation today. Reminded me that that's one thing I won't be doing. I just can't see myself in the alpha-male-telling-100-people-it's-great-to work 9-3AM including weekends for your first year category. Important to keep doing these things though, just so you know where you are.

The career thing kicked off in style last Friday. My highlight was when in class of 200 the advisor started by asking people to raise their hand if they've changed jobs already. Mine went up like a rocket. Then she said to keep it up if you've changed jobs twice. By 4 I was the only one up, though going a bit limp. I think strictly speaking it should have gone down at 5. I got one of these quiet-but-knowing looks from the rest of the class I didn't quite know what to make of.

Did a Myers-Briggs type thingie today. Apparently I'm an ENFP. Which is nice.

Highlights of warm weather - top down motoring through the forest. Enjoy it while it lasts.

The fun begins

2006-09-05T11:47:00.000+01:00

It's now the first week of proper lectures. Which is a bit of a relief after the complete and utter waste of time that Outward Bound was last week. Given the aim of "getting to know your group" and a budget of who knows how much, I can't help but feel the exercise was a complete and utter failure. Getting tennis balls out of rope circles, while fun, is not my idea of a grand day out. How much better it would have been to just go out for a meal together and spend an afternoon talking.

Academically, last week consisted of an introduction to general management, which was given by an old professor of the type that everyone wishes they had as their grandfather - full of charisma and wisdom in a charming old man kind of way. For myself that combination is lethal - I spent the entire 5 hour session with a jaw dropped in amazement at just how good he was at making points of life changing importance while keeping you entertained with a finely interspersed repartee of jokes. The end result of it all is that I'm now not so sure I'm cut out to be a general manager. Which in some way is good - it's one less thing to think about when I finally start the process of narrowing down what it is I actually want to do yet.

Today the courses got rolling with full steam. For some reason MBA course names seem to have a penchant for being completely misleading. As an example "Prices Markets and Markets" means Microeconomics, "Uncerntainty, Data & Judgement" means Statistics. "Financial Markets and Valuation" seems to mean applying the NPV rule to anything that moves (for now at least).

And for anyone who has any doubts that an MBA is anything but capitalism in its purest and unadulterated sense, the pre-reading for the first day was set to Hayek and Friedman. In fact, the Finance professor's response to "What about externalities?" was "Well, they exist sometimes, but you can usually just ignore them". I'm sure Mr. Smith is very proud.

Mushrooms

2006-09-05T11:46:00.000+01:00

Stick 6 strangers in a new house in a new location and I'll bet my top dollar it will take them a while to settle into a routine. Supply chain problems (I am doing an MBA after all) in the food domain are particularly apt to appear in the first week. Combine this with the French aptitude for generally not working whenever possible, and the odds of the house being out of food on the first Sunday become almost certain.

And so it was - on the first Sunday there was no food. Having got up mid afternoon with a mundo hangover following a 5:30AM party effort, it was too late to purchase food. So one of my compatriots suggests - why don't we go to the forest and pick mushrooms. Then we can cook them and eat. I thought, why not indeed? And so off we went.

Now the thing about forests, and particularly forests of the "2nd largest in Europe" type is that they are well, large. Not just large, but uniformly large. Not a good combination with two intrepid mushroom picking explorers. After just 30 minutes we were what an MBA might describe as "without a positional strategy". I however, have not yet got one of these important bits of paper, so shall just refer to it as bloody lost.

And we remained lost for the best part of the remainder of the day - or almost 3 hours. By some stroke of luck we managed to stumble on a road that looked like it might go somewhere which has been inhabited in the past millennium and managed to exit the wooded nightmare about 3 km down the road from where we started.

At least we had enough mushrooms for dinner - it was much needed.

China, CEOs and Toilets

2006-08-30T09:07:00.000+01:00

Well, much like the Millenium Falcon going off into hyperspace, the past few weeks have turned into a nicely smoothed blur of China, logistics, sleep deprivation and jetlag.

I've spent a few days thinking about how to approach the description of such a multitude of experiences, and to be honest, I don't think I can. And if I was to try it would be another 3 weeks before anything gets published, so you'll have to make do with some bullet points.

- China's taking over the world.
- I now have a chairman Mao watch. He ticks twice a second.
- Despite paying an astronomical amount of money for MBA, photocopying is 10c a side.
- If you have a flat tyre in France it's best to keep driving. Otherwise new tyres will set you back a small african country's GDP.
- My housemates are absolutely amazing.
- We are having a party tonight.
- I never thought I would see this, but I have finally found a urinal-less male toilet. It is in the main INSEAD building. Personally, I think denying the fact that the sexes are blessed with different plumbing accessories is a step too far for sexual equality.
- France Telecom take 8 working days to connect Internet (still trying to determine whether Monday is a working day in France). So until then this will be sparse.

Highlight so far today has been doing a CareerLeader test. This is one of these things where you click innumerable boxes to be told how best you should seek out your fortune. Apparently I have a very strong match for being a CEO. No pressure there then....

PS. Blogger seems to be smart enough to know that I am in France, however, not smart enough to now that I don't understand half the menu options when they are presented in French. So until I figure out how to convince it I need English please excuse the typos. Or tell me the french word for spell check....

Rent-a-Banger

2006-07-25T22:35:00.000+01:00

One of the advantages of reaching old age is being allowed certain privileges. Smoking and sex being the obvious ones, and of course the right to exercise an immaterial say in who may have some input into running the country.

One of the less obvious advantages of old age is being allowed to hire cars and other general grown up things like buying car insurance for less money than exists in the universe. Being 28 I was under the impression that I was done having to convince the world of my sensibility, and was past most testosterone driven age discrimination barriers.

The UK van rental industry seems to disagree. It appears one needs to be over 30 to be allowed to take a rental van out of the country. I suspect this is a Daily Mail plot against closer European integration, however, the upshot of this is that the only company I could find (and believe me, I tried) which would entrust me with a van with which I could move my stuff to Fontainebleau was .

At first I was excited at the thought of this adventure. The excitement quickly turned to panic upon receiving the keys to the aforementioned banger. It really was a banger. Graced with 15 years of age, and an odometer that is unlikely to have been clocked at 250k miles, the banger was also host to an exhaust which was winner of the 2004 "Fishnet of the year" award. This beast was capable of a solid 55mph assuming the pedal was firmly held to the floor. Top speed was measured at a downhill wind assisted 71mph.

Other features of interest included a battery warning light which was permanently on (I only realised this after I had driven away the van, and there was a moment of sheer panic when I had to wonder whether this really did mean it had a dodgy alternator), and a stereo that didn't work. An immobiliser that would sometimes decide that the security of this 15 year old luxury cruiser was paramount and would therefore refuse to let you switch the engine on until you had gone away and thought about having a cup of tea topped off the list of extras I could have done without. Imagine going on the channel tunnel with 100 cars behind you and this feature, and you soon get an idea of one stressed pre-MBA student.

Thankfully, and amazingly, the trip went off without any major hitches (apart from bringing the age at which I will be totally deaf forward a few years). At 55mph, it took around 9 hours to get to Fontainebleau and 9 hours to come back. I couldn't have done it without the help of my trusty companions, whose map reading and box moving skills were simply legendary. Thanks guys!

Which means that the to do list is almost ticked out of existence, and that the MBA is about to begin. Now all I've got to do is explore China for 3 weeks! Not bad.

Insurance, Car and Money

2006-07-17T16:40:00.000+01:00

The urge to start quoting excerps from my to do list is growing daily. It is a hard battle, though I shall remain in the winning position for at least one more entry. Needless to say, I am now in a mad dash to the finish line tidiying up 1001 logistics.

I have managed to secure a quote from a French car insurance company for a British Registered car! I cannot explain how much of an achievement this is - I realise in years gone when archaeologists sift through early 2nd millennia artifacts this will not amaze them significantly, but rest assured, it is an achievement. And to top it all off, it's not actually a bad quote - about 380 quid for third party fire and theft.

Perhaps even more importantly, I've bought a car. It's one of these "buy it with your heart rather than your head" kind of cars that I'm sure I'll look at one day and just think "what was I thinking", but for now the heart is certainly very happy.

Actually, it seems this entry is written back to front. Even more importantly, I was awarded a scholarship following my interview with the amazing people. So financial worries are now completely over for the next 12 months - which is a good result indeed.

the whole anonymity thing is starting to be a bit of pain in the arse - I think I might have to start revealing some more facts by which I can be identified, otherwise a dullness not unlike dish water may set into this blog.

Oh My Word

2006-07-02T20:50:00.000+01:00

I never cease to astound myself. My scholarship interview exit (an attempt to discover whether I fit in the cupboard next to the door) seems to have done the trick, and I have been given an eye watering sum of money to help me along on my studies. Such an eye watering sum of money that the whole MBA thing needs to be replanned from scratch just about.

And god dammit, I may well have to change the title of this blog, cause now I'll be very unlikely to blow all my money on an MBA.

Thoughts immediately sprung to mind as to how to spend my new found wealth. A nice camera is on the list - after all I'll want to record this amazing year.

And my highly logical brain has spent a whole weekend convincing me of the inescapeable logic that buying an Italian convertible sports car is the most logical and sound investment one can make. It seems prices for my particular weapon of choice are around 50% higher in France than in the UK. And being a left hand drive car I won't have to faff being on the wrong side of the road, as well as providing me with a much easier route to getting the car registered in France and thus possibly netting me the 50% price differential at the end of my studies. It could be my first stand alone business venture - used car price arbitration. Oh and did I mention it is convertible? Possibly with red leather seats.

Kindly remind me of this posting when come January I'm broken down in the rain on some French country road with water streaming everywhere.....

Rejecting Driven People

2006-06-26T17:41:00.000+01:00

As you may imagine, the intake of your average leading international business school comprises of some fairly driven people. The kind that have bitten the whole career thing so hard, and are so absorbed in shaking the living daylights out if in a bid to reach SUCCESS that some people like myself just find them a little bit too overwhelming. Which is brilliant. That's half the reason for going there. But then I don't think I would like to live with people like that. It would all be just a little too much. Splitting the whole work and play thing is important, after all.

Filling a house full of interesting people in such case becomes quite a difficult balancing act. On the one hand you need to make enough noise and make yourself appeal enough to the more laid back group of people. On the other hand, in the rush to secure accomodation the numbers are such that you will get a huge amount of interest from the Driven contingent. You end up playing a tip toe game with people. Personally, I find it very hard to say "No. I don't want to live with you". And I think my housemates also have the same difficulty. So you end up coming with excuses.

But anyways. I digress. I am pleased to announce that we have what a poker player would be delighted with - a Full House. And by golly I think we've done well - they all sound like pretty fab people.

All that leaves is everything else to do logistics wise, which is still a mind blowing amount.

In other news, I got ranted at in French on the phone by some random woman when trying to find out more about car insurance. Annoyingly she refused point blank to keep her rant wording constant when repeating it, thus scuppering any chance of me putting my listening comprehension skills through the repetition machine. I have no idea wha she was saying. Still, it seems one can buy short term car insurance to go over to France, so I can insure a car and buy myself a week to go and get ranted at in person come August. I'm sure once I start waving my arms around the French will suddenly become crystal clear.

Blue Money

2006-06-26T17:08:00.000+01:00

Clearly anybody considering splashing out an eye watering sum of money for an MBA owes it as a mark of respect to their savings, prior to obliterating them with a speed which puts Concorde to shame, to at least put some effort in finding some other source of money. Enter the world of scholarships. Where one must write concise essays of why they are possibly better than the rest of all the world, and definitely better than all the other applicants.

I'm not someone who has this philosophy drummed in them outright - and a small part of me is a little bit repulsed by it - I tend to think of it as a little arrogant. But then put some eye watering amounts of money on the table, and small parts of you tend to get ignored quite rapidly.

I hate writing essays like that though - it's not something I do easily, and I find myself spending inordinately excessive amounts of time doing miniscule revisions which in the end probably amount to a practically non existent improvement in quality. Still, for a few EURk, a small amount of effort has to be put in.

I started the whole escapade by deciding I was going to spend a week and not a day more writing essays. Otherwise it just would have taken too long. I picked my 4 scholarships from the A-la-Carte menu INSEAD provides (there's all sorts) and did my best.

I expounded the virtues of wanting to help my home country by starting a business there. I tried to convince people how their scholarship money will play an instrumental role in this. Is it all true? Well, it's a grey truth. Funny how free money changes your perception. I certainly haven't lied. But begging for cash is a tricky task when one has next to no clue what direction their crazy life will judder down in 12 months time. I'm smart enough to know that putting that down in an essay will not make you look like you're the best of the world, or indeed better than all the other applicants.

Imagine my indifference then, when I got turned down by 2 of my 4 applications outright. I was not at all bothered. I don't actually _need_ the money, although I will be left with absolutely nothing at the end of the MBA. Does that count as need? Who knows.

But then one of the scholarships invited me for an interview. All that was revealed to me were the names of the people on the panel. And then Google transformed this list of names into a "Who's Who" of British Aristocracy. People who have achieved tremendous amounts. People who made me feel so small and insignificant to even question my sanity sending the application form in the first place. It was to be a true Blue Blood interview.

The interview itself was incredible, despite lasting a mere 20 minutes. I have always had a certain sense of admiration for aristocracy. Their ability to put someone completely at ease no matter what the circumstance is is incredible. The way they listen when you talk and seem so completely absorbed in what you are saying (even though they can't possibly be as they must have heard the same thing over 10 times already) is captivating. And the intelligent questions they ask in this well thought out manner, and the topics they cover was simply fascinating.

So did I get the scholarship? Well, I don't know yet. But I had a tremendous time in the 20 minute interview. And given that I have no expectations, it will just be a nice bonus which may mean I am under slightly less pressure to find an enormously well paid job come 12 months time. I should know within the week. Fingers crossed.

A Diversification Strategy

2006-05-29T19:10:00.000+01:00

It seems starting a blog about an event that will start 3 months from now may have been slightly premature. Although I can write great lengths about to do lists, these are currently not that exciting. So I'm going to widen it up a bit.

Today I've been thinking about the cheap nasty T-shirts one sees sold on Oxford Street booths. Like "Adihash Gives you Speed" and "Just Did It" with a spermy Nike logo. I wonder who comes up with these. Perhaps it is retired Sun Headline writers - it's one liner heaven. And more worryingly, there must clearly be a market for these damned things. Who on Earth buys them? I've never seen anyone wear them. It seems so counter intuitive that you can create a market for a product that lots of people buy but are then too embarrassed to wear them - it shows that they must know it's a really crap T-shirt, and yet seem to ignore that fact when making the purchasing decision. There must be a case study in this somewhere.

My car dilemmas

2006-05-24T13:49:00.000+01:00

I would start this entry with a tedious to do list, but I've been writing so many of them in my spare time that I'm sick of the sight of a huge list of things, each of which cannot be done at this point in time for one reason or another. Needless to say it is huge, and shrinking very slowly, if at all.

Instead, I'm going to brain dump my current car dilemma. Having accepted a space in what's turning out to be a house full of rather quality people (not by accident of course), I've destined myself to becoming a car owner for the first time in my life. So my dilemma is how to buy a car abroad.

I don't particularly fancy going all the way to France to look at cars - especially since that would completely destroy my achievement of securing a house space on the information superhighway. Not only that, but it seems INSEAD students have a somewhat distorted (to me anyway) of the second hand value of old clapped out cars. From what I've seen, similar cars in the UK cost around 50% less. But then is that discount worth it so you don't have to trounce around with a wrong hand drive car for a year? And it's still not completely clear whether you can have a car in France on English plates. Some people have suggested that the legal limit is 6 months, but nobody ever checks. I, on the other hand, picture trying to explain this using my practically non-existent French to a befuddled gendarme, and then start thinking about whether I really ought to reconsider my reluctance to go on a car buying trip.

Decisions, decisions....

French Bank Accounts

2006-05-19T11:34:00.000+01:00

Reading the available information online reveals some people have got it in for the general administration of things in France. It seems getting bank accounts, phones, mobiles and all the rest of the rigmarole needed to uproot to another country requires a level of stamina worthy of a marathon runner.

For my part, I'd like to do my bit and fly that French flag that little bit higher. I e-mailed a lady at BNP Paribas (in French no less), and she replied immediately (in French - I was touched), telling me that all I needed to do was to send her 3 documents by fax. Not only that, but she actually complimented me on my French. 24 hours after doing so, my account was all set up. All I need to do is swing by the branch at some point and pick up my card.

In fact, the cynic in me can't resist pointing out that it takes less time to open a bank account in the socialist dreamland that is the Republique than it does to move money between two bank accounts within what has to remain a nameless fringe member of the EU.

Pre-reading

2006-05-18T13:42:00.000+01:00

A certain clever clogs has started their MBA pre-reading exercise with
Finance For Executives. Imagine my surprise at discovering it is written by an INSEAD professor. Either I shall have the benefit of being taught by some of the leading academics in the field of finance, or someone is reaping abnormal profits from punting sub-standard books of finance on unsuspecting keen-to-impress pre-MBA students. Thankfully, from page 20, it looks more like a case of the former.

The whole experience is not unlike lifting the bonnet of a car and explaining what all the bits of it do to someone whose experience of cars has extended to sitting behind the wheel and pushing pedals.

My experience to date of companies has been as entities that make things people buy. Popping the bonnet of a balance sheet open and pointing at all the bits and saying "Look - this bit is the leverage. This bit is the profit. This bit is return on equity". It's all fascinating stuff, however, seems sadly devoid of interesting things one can quote in a blog. Alas, I'm only on page 20 though.

Game Theory and Accomodation

2006-05-17T06:55:00.000+01:00

One of the first challenges a budding INSEADer must face is securing themselves a roof over their head while they study. This involves a thought process which goes somewhat along the following lines:

1. I want to live somewhere nice
2. I want to live with some interesting people
3. I don't know where is nice
4. I don't know who the interesting people are

The result? I decided that seeing as the whole MBA thing is a bit of a gamble anyway, and hence choosing my prospective accomodation and housemates through the medium of the Internet does not significantly increase my overall risk exposure. Rather than spend precious time and money vising bazillions of houses in Fontainebleu, I thought I would just like the look of something on NetVestibule (INSEADs online community) and go for it.

With that decision taken, a waiting game ensues. You wait for interesting looking people to post interesting looking houses. But then you have a clock ticking. Leave it too late, and come August you may be on the street. The philosophical question of knowing when something is good enough (which seems to be a recurring theme for me) pops up here.

In choosing my house, I adopted Dirk Gently's (one of Douglas Adams' characters after he wrote the infamous Hitchiker's Guide) philosophy as to what to do when you are lost. His view is "When lost, follow someone who looks like they know where they are going. You most likely won't get to wherever it was you were trying to get to, but instead you're likely to end up somewhere you needed to be".

I patiently bid my time until a house came up on NetVestibule. A driven person who certainly seemed to give the impression of knowing where they are going described to me the stringent selection criteria which have been applied to the house, as well as its prospective cohabitants. It all sounded very driven, and quite reassuring, so I said "Heck, why not" on the spot.

With the house down, all that's left to do now is get a car, and then the rollercoaster is almost set up.

Blog is go

2006-05-16T22:41:00.000+01:00

As part of my preparation for embarking on my MBA at INSEAD this August, I found myself spending an inordinate amount today reading the blogs of INSEAD alumni. Not being someone who follows others, I thought why not break with tradition and write my own blog. So here it is.

Being somewhat new to this whole blogging thing, I am filled with a sense of trepidation as to what exactly it is one does with these things. I am hoping to be able to deliver tales of parties, exciting lectures and people so interesting merely trying to describe them with text distorts the space time continuum. However, judging by the achievements of others, these will be laudable goals. More likely it will end up as a tale of hectic schedules on steroids and long winded descriptions of the basic fact that there are only 24 hours in any given Earth day. So don't say I didn't warn you.

So far, my biggest challenge has been naming this blog. I think Career Casino sums up my outlook quite well. Having gotten to a certain late-twenties point in my career, I can't say I know exactly what it is I'm after career wise. But it probably has something to do with business, and it will most likely require gaining some more knowledge. So I'm hoping that stepping into the Career Casino that is INSEAD and plonking an eye-watering sum down on the table should not only provide for a fun year, but hopefully end up with a net gain in the career bank. Let's just hope that unlike casinos, leading business schools do not play a zero sum game with their customers. Otherwise this could have been one humongous mistake.