Globetrotting

Just to give a quick overview of what I am learning inside the classroom, I will summarize what classes I took in P2 (academic period 2, which was in March and April). P2 was still all core classes, i.e., all classes where compulsory and there was no discretion as to what classes I took. In contrast to P1, which was pretty much centered around basic tools such as statistics, accounting, or microeconomics, P2 was much more “applied” in the sense that we worked almost exclusively with case studies in most classes (i.e., more or less the “business school way” of learning). Here is a quick wrapup of the classes and my opinion about them:

• Strategy – While the readings for this class can mostly be considered “classics” and some of them were really interesting and insightful, the class itself fell somewhat short of my expectations. This was probably mostly due to the fact that we had more of a (sometimes unstructured) classroom discussion of what happened (or was about to happen) in the case, and less of a discussion of the concepts and frameworks covered in the readings. I would have liked professor Neil Jones to stress this “re-usable” aspect of strategy frameworks and tools a bit more in order to make the class contents more applicable in real life business situations.
• Corporate Financial Policy (CFP) CFP is the second core finance class, after FMV in P1. While FMV focused more on valuation of projects and companies’ stocks and bonds, CFP dealt with valuation of options as well as with capital structure and recapitalizations. While all of this sounds very technical and rather dry, most of it is extremely important (especially in today’s heavily finance-skewed markets) and the two professors Pierre Hillion (who also taught FMV and is hands down one of my favorite profs at INSEAD for its ability of getting the message through and making sure that what he intends to cover in class is in fact thoroughly covered) and Theo Vermaelen (who with his very sarcastic and tongue-in-cheek way made classes very enjoyable despite the dry topic) made this a very good and useful course.
• Process and Operations Management (POM) POM is the core operations class, and revolves around (manufacturing and service) processes, what they are driven by, and how they can be optimized. Interestingly for me, some of the concepts (e.g., queuing theory) are closely related to stuff that I already studied in my Computer Science classes, only that they were related to how (web or application) servers process queries in networks. The class was taught by the very young professor Dana Popescu, and you could sometimes tell that she lacked some of the experience of the other profs in handling a large classroom with more than 60 students. However the covered content and the provided material was overall quite useful.
• Marketing Management Of course, no business program can live without the inevitable marketing class, which always runs the risk of being more about bullshitting and looking at pretty/funny advertisements than actual concepts and reusable tools. I learned that lesson the hard way in undergrad (in my business minor) in a very entertaining but also incredibly useless marketing class (necessary preparation for the final exam was learning 300 slides by heart). However, Professor Monica Wadhwa managed to give quite some structure to the course contents and provide useful tools, so I actually enjoyed what I learned (to the extent that a person with a more rational/structured as opposed to a creative approach like me can enjoy a marketing class). The only thing I missed to some extent was drawing more connections between marketing and strategy, since in my view these two are strongly interlinked (marketing can provide a competitive advantage, and on the other hand all marketing activities need to be closely aligned with the overall corporate strategy to be meaningful).
• Organisational Behaviour 2 The second part of the “soft skill” class focused less on the individual and more on organizations: Organizational design, politics in organizations, organizational culture, and lastly change management. Both in terms of the contents and concepts covered and in terms of the teaching style of professor Henrik Bresman, this was easily one of the best classes so far in my MBA. Interestingly, especially in terms of business ethics and what might delineate “right” from “wrong” business behavior, I think I have taken away more from this class than from the mandatory 4-session business ethics class.
• Managerial Accounting (MA) The second accounting class, which in contrast to Financial Accounting (FA) in P1 focuses more on the internal analysis, budgeting and control of a company. In contrast to FA, the discussion in MA revolved around case discussions, which very often highlighted problems in the control systems of a company and potential solutions, that we then in class tied to specific MA concepts and methods. Especially since I had seen some of the problems and approaches to solve them in practice before, I could relate to the usefulness of the course contents, and I think professor Jake Cohen also did a good job in highlighting the practical relevance. I only sometimes wished for a bit of a “bigger picture” of how the individual pieces of the puzzle that we covered fit together.