Globetrotting

In P3 (May/June), for the first time I had the chance to pick and choose elective classes. Two classes, namely International Political Analysis and Macroeconomics, were mandatory, but for the remaining classes I had quite some choice. The INSEAD curriculum comprises at least 23.5 credits, 13 of with are covered by mandatory core classes, and 10.5 of which are freely selectable from the broad range of electives, which come as either full-credit or half-credit classes. In P3, I selected a total of 4.0 credits in electives, and in retrospect I picked classes that meant quite a lot of work load, more than in P1 or P2. However, this was also due to the fact that I found most of my classes very interesting and engaging and thus liked to put in some extra effort – but it meant that I had very little spare time, especially after factoring in the social activities which are not really mandatory, but nevertheless an important part of the MBA.

Here is my short wrapup and opinion on the classes I had in P3:

• Macroeconomics in the Global Economy (MGE, core class) I never had a macroeconomics class before, but I still had often wondered how many of the figures that are ubiquitous in newspaper and other articles such as GDP, growth, interest rates, inflation etc. are related and what the mechanics behind those numbers are. Especially in today’s economy, with recession looming in many of the developed countries and the Eurozone crisis being fundamentally driven by many strongly macroeconomic factors and interdependencies, I found it really interesting to learn about the theories and what solutions to the current state of global economy they provide and more importantly, which they don’t. Professor Daniel Traca steered the course along a very structured approach and in a clear pyramid manner, distilling the most essential insights but providing more details for anyone interested – he only sometimes struggled to find the appropriate pace.
• International Political Analysis (IPA, core class) IPA focused both on general non-market strategies that firms need to employ to do business (i.e., the impact that the political environment has on companies and vice versa) as well as the international political and institutional system and its relevance for global trade and business (e.g., the World Trade Organization and bilateral Free Trade Agreements). Professor Vinod Aggarwal, visiting professor from Berkeley, might be one of the most controversial profs I have so far encountered. His classes were no doubt entertaining, but his deliberately politically incorrect ways, a very strong emphasis on his own viewpoints, and a focus on discussion more than structure made it difficult for some students to like him.
• Applied Corporate Finance (ACF, elective) ACF, taught by finance profs Pierre Hillion and Denis Gromb, takes the concepts taught theoretically in FMV (P1) and CFP (P2) and applies them to case studies. Workload-wise, this course was one of the heaviest I have taken so far, with six group case-writeups due over the course of the eight weeks, but it was very well worth the effort: It is quite different to learn about things like the cost of capital, the valuation of projects, or optimal capital structures in theory, and to find a practical answer to the questions posed by a real business situation, where even the most basic parameters are questionable. Both profs did an excellent job at both steering the classroom discussion, highlighting the most important insights, and providing evidence for the practical relevance of the often technical concepts of finance.
• Negotiations (elective) Negotiations, taught by professor Horatio Falcao, is one of the most famous and desired classes on the INSEAD Singapore campus, one of the few which actually require bidding a substantial amount of bidding points to secure a class. It is based heavily on out-of-classroom negotiation case studies, in which two or four students get together (after a hopefully thorough preparation on each side) to negotiate, and then reflect on the process individually and in the classroom. While I think that the class content is very relevant for day-to-day management work, and that some of the concepts can certainly be valuable, the value of the negotiation exercises was sometimes a bit diminished by the fact that all participating students had learned the same concepts in class and the negotiations therefore went down a bit more smoothly than you would expect in a real-life situation – especially when there might be tensions and reservations pre-existing between the negoation parties, and not a sense of friendship and comradery as between INSEAD students. One out-of-class negotiation that was conducted with actors instead of fellow students, I therefore found particularly valuable, but also challenging to the point of frustration.
• New Business Ventures (NBV, elective) NBV was, unfortunately, the most disappointing of my classes. It is intended as a class giving the most important guidelines for founding and growing new companies. However, in terms of what I actually took away from the class, I found it to be not very rewarding, which might partly be due to the fact that I already had multiple entrepreneurship classes in my Master’s as part of my minor. In addition, in my view professor Hongwei Xu was not fully able to convey all of the passion for entrepreneurship he has into the classroom, and so many of the discussions lacked in energy. In addition, the class had a very heavy workload, with a 20-page group report plus venture presentation, an entrepreneurship interview, a simulation assignment and multiple individual case questions. The most rewarding part of the class was the group project, but if my sole intention of taking the class had been working on a potential business idea with other students, I might as well have taken Entrepreneurial Field Studies (EFS) instead, without 16 full class sessions. On the plus side, the many guest speakers we had over the course of the class were mostly very intersting and insightful.
• Market Driving Strategies (MDS, elective) The MDS class is a very compact class, revolving around a full weekend running the simulation program Markstrat, which was developed by two INSEAD professors and is used at business schools across the world. Markstrat is a game-like simulation (but based on theoretic principles) in which teams of 4-5 students run a manufacturing company over the course of 9 simulated years, making decisions as to which products to produce and how to advertise and sell them. 5 teams of students competed against each other, which meant that each team not only had to keep a close eye on the customers and its own performance, but also anticipate actions of competitors and act accordingly. The class was a very interesting and fruitful experience, and professor Ziv Carmon did a very good job at both introducting the simulation and providing valuable tips during the course of the simulation without distorting the actual outcomes.

Looking back at my experience in P3, I have learned a few things for how I will pick my electives for P4 and P5: Firstly, I will attend more classes than I actually want to attend for the first few sessions in order to get a feeling for whether I like the class or not. Secondly, I will pay closer attention to the previous promotions’ evaluations of the classes. Lastly, I will read the syllabus carefully before making my final choice to understand how much work is involved in each of the classes – while I expected the high workload of some of the classes (like ACF) I was taken more by surprise by some of the others.

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.