Learning at INSEAD

Each of us came here to INSEAD with different priorities. Some lucky guys have been sponsored by their company, and for them it is simply a to-do step for the next move in their carrer. Other came here just because they wanted to go to a particular job and knew that it would have been impossible for them to get there without an MBA.
Other people came here simply to take one year off. And I can assure you, there are a lot! Most of them used to work really a lot before... maybe they were uncertain about what to do in the future, they were not satisfied from their jobs.. and wanted to take their time to decide.
Some people came here just because it is cool, because their friends did it, or because they like the brand name of INSEAD.
Other came here to find fun, love.... or sex!
Finally there are the people who came here with the main objective to learn. Now, everybody wants to learn something, but for most of the people this is not their primary objective. For me instead it is. And after these first couple of months I have to say that there are fewer people in this category than I expected.
So, how much can INSEAD make us learn? Well, I am learning, but less than how much I expected. The school organizes you things in particular ways and it expects you to learn in that way. Most of the time the best learning happens in ways that you figure it out, from contacting a professor to speak with him about a business idea, in a conversation with alumni, in events organized by INSEAd clubs, at talks at lunch with current students, at the Entrepreneurship Speed-Dating, from the questions that you make during lesson.
Learning is really up to you. If it is your priority, I believe that you can end this year with really new things that you have learned. But if you do not care so much about it, do not expect that things will be implanted in your brain.
An entrepreneurship professor was speaking about INSEAD network: and it is really great. If you call an Alumnus to ask him about his start-up, chances are that he will provide you all the information that you need, will give a feedback on your ideas, and you will learn a lot from him.
But this is completely up to you. And I see here most people for who the priority is to not miss all the parties OR to do all the finance exercises because they are scared by the exames.
It is a matter of choice, I am not saying that this is good or bad. But if your primary objective is LEARNING, then you should ask yourself, at least once a day, if you are doing the right things for your personal growth. And if the answer is no, it is better for you to change something in your plans.

LPG Assignment

As a part of our Leading People & Groups course, we had to write an individual assignment about the "your feelings, thoughts and hypotheses about the development of your group, and the role you have taken in it".
Well, while for some people writing 2000 words on this argument was scary, for me was eventually an opportunity to write my TRUE opinion about this crazy model of group work, and I had sooo many things to say! (Just curious to see how will they grade me)
Here is the first paragraph of my paper:
"An INSEAD group is something very unlikely to experiment outside the MBA environment. Most of the INSEAD life is like living in a bubble. We are all in the middle of a forest, with almost no interaction outside our own community, living in a style of life to which nobody of us was used to.
In an INSEAD group you cannot choose your team members. In most of the real-world situations you have some freedom to choose. You choose your own friends, you choose you go in vacation with.
Nonetheless, there are also real-world situations in which you cannot choose your team members. This can happen in the work environment, for example. However, there is a big difference between the INSEAD group and the team interactions at job: in the working environment you always have a leader.
This has been one of the things that frustrated me more since the beginning. I had to meet with 4 people which I had not chosen, with no appointed leader, and we had to do something. When at job you disagree with something, you have always someone to escalate the issue to. Here you have not. You have to resolve the problem by yourself. Well, I am sure that this is the reason why INSEAD groups are structured in this way. The school objective is probably to make us growth with these interactions. But up to now, I have not really seen how this surreal interactions can actually teach something that can be applied in the outside world. [....] "

The pace at INSEAD

Before coming here, I spent a lot of time reading blogs of INSEAD students, just like probably you are doing now.
One of things that I read in all these blogs was the warning about the pace of INSEAD. I remember one blog commenting about the Welcome Week like "Welcome Week is nothing short of a blast".
Well, you now what? This is completely bullshit! Welcome Week is a complete vacation, and even after, at INSEAD, the pace is the one that you choose to follow!
The things that you HAVE TO do, occupy a limited part of your day, say 7 to 8 hours. All the rest is up to you.
I have read also come people claim: "here you have so many things to do, that you get lost... it is impossibile to follow everything". Come on, guys.... for sure that is is impossibile to follow everything, but who told you that you had to??
It is as though you would feel the need of following all the events of your own city. And then you start complaining about your city mayor because there are so many events every night, that you are not able to follow all of them. And you have to learn to prioritize!
For sure at INSEAD you need to prioritize, but no more here than in most other situations of your life.
Now, here there only 2 things that you have to do:
1) Class attendance, that will take you on average 4-5 hours a day
2) Group work, that varies much on the periods, but does not go more than 2-3 hours a day

That's all. Now you could say, and studying?
Yes, you also need to study, but believe me: for INSEAD gradind policy, studying is more for your own convenience that for passing the exams. You can choose what to study, which exams you like and you wanna focus on and you can dedicate much time on that. But if you do not like an exam, nobody force you to study, and even so, it is veeery unlikely that you will fail an exam.
I also read blogs speaking about "sleep deprivation". Actually, ever our Dean, in the welcome speech told us: "Here you will have so many things to do, that you would be better reducing yor hours of sleep to take full advantage of it". So should we be told by our Dean how many hours to sleep??
From what I see, here we can have the full possibility of taking full advantage of the opportunities that are here sleeping at least 8 hours a day. Again, if you feel confortable at sleeping 5 hours a night, let's do it! But if know that your body needs to rest and you want to follow your normal rithym, let's do it!

Welcome week at INSEAD

I am born in a city which you would usually call a cold city. When you go outside in places or restaurants, when you go to pubs or discos, it is not so common to meet new people if you are not introduced to.
Now you could object: "it's your approach, it is not the city". Well, you are partly right, I am a rather shy person, but it is not only matter of personality, I can assure, you can ask the same question to extremely extrovert people.
I have always liked the idea of complex systems. That is, systems in which the result is not simply the sum of the parts, but there is an "identity" of the system itself, to which you would give a name or adjectives. This is the case of a city, and this is the case of INSEAD.
What I saw yesterday was something amazing. I was in a big open space of a chateaux. There would have been about 500 people.
It was bout 1 a.m and I was already there from a couple of hours. I was already immersed in speaking with my friends (where the closest friends are the ones that I met 1 week ago!), eventually speaking with P3s (you not-inseader guys have to figure it out what it means), having some coktails, dancing a little bit, having fun.
But then for a moment I stopped, and started to observe what it was happening around me.
And what I saw was amazing: people were interacting with each other as though they knew them from years. Everybody seemed to be the closest friend of everybody else. And all that was incredibly spontaneous. That was real fun. It was a real party atmosphere. And all that was completely natural and straightforward. That was the normal way to act.
You could wonder how all that could happen. Why does this not happen in other situations?
Is a matter of people? Has INSEAD done a pre-selection of the most open and partying people of the world? I am sure that some of us would say yes, but I cannot really imagine these 500 people interacting in the same way in another context.
It was not about the people. Again, the system is more than the sum of its parts.
So, was it about the alcoholic level? On the other hand, the party was free and there was an open bar (thanks Bain!). But again, this was not the first open-bar party to which I went to. And there was no way that the atmosphere could be compared.
Ehy, I got it: It was about P3s. In reality INSEAD artificially created this partying atmosphere 30 years ago, and then it created these two overlapping intakes so that fresh students are "contaminated" by more senior ones.
But wait a moment... I went also to other dinners or parties in which there were only P1s, and the atmosphere was always the same.
So, how could all that happen? How it is possibile that hundreds of people, which had never met before, happen to behave in that amazing way?
And how can it happen each year, for every new intake?
And since I could not find an answer to these questions, I promtly returned to enjoying the INSEAD atmosphere.