Spiralling Inside INSEAD with a helicopter view !

The 40 Hours of Lack of Classes

In the next 40 hours I don't have classes. I have NO CLASSES ! Thats going to be the longest 40 hours without classes in a year (outside of period breaks and weekend of course). I do have a couple of company presentations and a couple of class meetings and a couple of cover letters to take care of. It still is a lot of time so I thought I will visit all you nice folks out here. Not bad eh? Meanwhile I thought I will give you a quick sneakpreview of some of the classes I do and some personal assessments.

First Class I do: Realizing Entrepreneurial Potential
Easily my favorite course this period, the cases feel incredibly close to heart (of mostly non-MBAs) going out there and doing buy-outs. The professor is not really a professor. He is an Alum who does buying companies for a job and I can see he is goddamn good at what he does. He brings in his experience a ton in classes and his style is not very different from the style of Patrick Turner from our class. Surprisingly enough, the MBAs in the class are quite stressed out with the job search and are not as participative with the case discussions. The content is very rich though. There is some valuation that we do in the class, we talk about the debt levels that one should take and all the real useful stuff when you go out there and buy things up. My rating is a 4 on a scale of 5. The project on this course is extremely demanding. We are expected to propose a company to buy and this includes a resonable level of 2 way communication. Oops, maybe my prof. wouldn't be too happy I say such things here. But what the hell, this is an anonymous blog right?

Second Class I do: Negotiation Analysis
If you are in business school please take every class on negotiations !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ....atleast to improve your grades. If things go the way they are now, I might end up with the highest grade during my INSEAD year in this class. Love it. Its so simple, there are so many things you are told in class and atleast the two negotiators I dealt with so far haven't really followed most of what is told in class :-). I never thought negotiation skills can be picked up in class. I now do and I do recommend classes !

Third Class I do: Market Driving Strategies
This is a game class. We play a game with a team. If you are all A Types its a mess. Luckily for us there is only one AA type the rest of us are between A and Z. Its fun. Interestingly the whole team has people from the same section in P1 and we have known each other from P1. Most people still hang out with the same guys they met on the first few days on campus. Its kind of nice to know that smaller communities are formed within INSEAD and we get along quite well. It took me a game registration to figure that out duuh !

Fourth and Final Class I am in: Industry and Competitive Analysis
Karel Cool is super cool ! He is quite interesting. For the tone in which he started class one, I thought this was going to be less exciting than any other 28 bid point course. Within 90 minutes, I changed my mind and figured out this perhaps will end up being the most spectacular class in my INSEAD life. I know when I spoke to an Alumni a few days back (he graduated in 1998) he spoke about the "bath tub"I was to see in ICA. It is amazing to still see the bathtub. I was surprised some courses just stay the same. It is amazing how much there is to learn even with some old analogies. So when you go to INSEAD in 2010, watch out for the bathtub in ICA.


Now to the industry I am going into. I don't like to go into small companies because you need to put in more than the 50 hours and I am not willing to take that commitment atleast until I figure out my entrepreneurial career is not headed anywhere. So I am looking at the big guys ! Any big guy is good for me. Any recommendations anyone?