INSEAD recently published in the London Sunday Times.

primefang

great article on
INSEAD recently published in the London Sunday Times.

August 11, 2002

Education: Where MBAs are a class apart

Albert Read spent a year at Insead, Europe's top
business school. Is it all it's cracked up to be? Yes,
he says, with a party life to match INSEAD is Europe's
most famous business school - but what is it famous
for? Do Insead graduates have the edge over mere
corporate mortals or is its MBA an elaborate con
trick, a costly exercise in management waffle? For
many, Insead - the Institut européen d'administration
des affaires, near Fountainebleau - is the single
transforming experience of their lives. It raises them
onto a higher career plane, it plugs them into a
global network of friends and contacts and it is a
wonderful, if expensive, year out of the office
(around £27,000 in fees plus living expenses,
total cost around £50,000).

My year at Insead was well spent. As it would say, I
achieved the goals I set myself. I arrived knowing
little about business, from a profession (journalism)
that took a certain pride in its ignorance of all
business matters. I had always felt slightly
inadequate in not fully understanding the implications
of an interest rate cut or a company flotation.

I have emerged a year later, if not as the next Bill
Gates, then at least with a much better understanding
of how the world works. I have definitely enhanced my
career prospects, and - lest one forget the truly
important things in life - I swapped a year of
commuting on the London Underground for 12 months
buzzing around the French countryside in a little
Peugeot convertible. I am a convert. Everyone should
do an MBA.

The MBA is an American invention that took off in the
late 1950s. In Britain, more than 100 institutions now
offer MBAs. Globally there are an estimated 50,000 MBA
courses of some description, with 9,000 new MBA
graduates each year.

The United States remains the spiritual home of the
MBA, with Harvard, Stanford and Wharton still
dominating the league tables. But according to reports
even the Americans are beginning to regard the
European MBA, with its more global outlook - and in
Insead's case its intensive one-year programme - as an
attractive alternative to the home-grown product.

Insead was founded in 1957, starting its life in the
Palace of Fontainebleau, 40 miles south of Paris. It
now takes more than 700 students a year, occupies a
smart modern campus, and has just opened a second
campus in Singapore and formed an alliance with
Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania. Insead
achieves MBA results on a par with IESE (in
Barcelona), IMD (in Lausanne) and the London Business
School, but it has acquired a prestige that far
outstrips that of its European rivals.

However, for the cynics, there remains a nagging
doubt. If Insead is so famous, why is it that nobody
famous ever went there - apart, that is, from William
Hague? Well, Insead is still a young organisation, and
it generally takes time for people to reach the top of
the ladder. More important, Insead graduates are not
in the business of being noticed by the wider world.
This doesn't mean they are not doing well. They're
mostly doing very nicely indeed, lurking in their
thousands at senior levels in consultancies, banks and
management across industries all over the world.

Take the media industry in Britain. A flick through
the Insead address book reveals a handful of
distinguished names: Peter Job, former chief executive
of Reuters; Helen Alexander, chief executive of the
Economist group; Will Hutton, former editor of The
Observer. Charlie Parsons from Planet 24 did an
executive programme. There are a dozen alumni at the
BBC, at Pearson and at Bertelsmann, and a handful of
executives at News International and at MTV.

Apart from its location, there is nothing French about
Insead. You have to speak three languages in order to
graduate but the only essential one is English - the
language in which all lessons are taught.

Everyone is very, very busy. Insead sets a punishing
work schedule at the beginning of the year - slightly
more than one can cope with. This is intentional: not
only is it attempting to offer a course which normally
takes two years, but (it claims) it wants to imitate
the pressures on our time in the real world.

With exams every eight weeks, students are expected to
master tricky subjects such as statistics and finance
very quickly. A string of low grades after the first
two periods can result in a letter from the dean and
the threat of expulsion.

As it turned out, nobody from my intake was expelled.
Some had to retake exams; one Chinese student, it was
rumoured, was going to have to repeat a period. But
once someone had got through the rigorous selection
process (consisting of self-promoting essays, aptitude
tests and interviews), they were extremely unlikely
not to get through the course.

These are some of the things I learnt at Insead: how
to value a company; the difference between the IMF and
the World Bank; how to analyse an annual report; how
to price an option; what an investment banker really
does all day; the pros and cons of joining the euro;
why stock options can be a poisoned chalice; whether
to use debt or equity to fund a start-up.

With an approximate 30/70 split between women and men,
Insead Woman was a comparative rarity. But as the year
progressed I began to form a very clear impression of
Insead Man.

He will be in his late twenties or early thirties - a
former consultant, banker or engineer. He will be
extremely polite. He works hard, crunches numbers
beautifully and can give an elegant PowerPoint
presentation with a few humorous flourishes. He'll
drink a few beers in the evenings, play squash at the
weekends, and he'll end up driving a turbo diesel and
married to his childhood sweetheart. Above all, he's a
"team player".

After Insead he hopes to go and work somewhere with a
good quality of life - maybe Barcelona. He would like
to work, at least until recently, in telecoms or
venture capital, but he'll settle for consulting.

This stereotype could be applied to 80-90% of the men
in my promotion. There were a handful of oddities. In
the main there was not much evidence of this
stereotype changing. Why should it? Insead's
reputation depends on the jobs people get after they
leave, and the companies that feed off it - the
consultancies and the banks want a certain type of
person.

In my year, some students were sponsored by their
firms, a few got scholarships, and some were prepared
to take on a large debt - but in the main the students
were from relatively well off families or had made
money for themselves already.

A friend once described Insead as Europe's most
high-powered finishing school, and when I encountered
the Insead "fast set" - perhaps forming 10-20% of the
intake - I saw what he meant. One of the first people
I met was a Dutch prince. Every morning I would leave
my little Peugeot in the car park beside a line of
BMWs, Porsches and Audi TTs.

The social life was dominated by the Dutch. They were
taller than everybody else and always very pleased to
see you. They were forever organising nights out in
Paris, and "crazy" cross-dressing parties that took
place in the dark rooms of a famous nearby chateau
where everyone danced furiously to Abba's Dancing
Queen.

An Insead MBA will make you richer - that was the
clear, resounding message from day one. Assuming you
follow the two well-worn post-MBA paths of consultancy
or banking, you can expect to start on a salary of
£60,000-£80,000 with a sign-on bonus of
£10,000 to £20,000, and these salaries
will go up rapidly.

The time came towards the end of the year for the milk
round, and suddenly the students snapped back into
corporate mode. The employers wanted to cast their
nets as widely as possible and stuffed our pigeonholes
with little gifts - chocolates, and pens emblazoned
with their logos - to tempt us to come for an
interview.

In preparation, we were given seminars on how to
negotiate a higher salary. We were taught how to
prepare ourselves for the case interview, the
traditional method by which a consultancy firm will
assess a candidate's brain power. We were given
examples of the questions we might be asked - how many
ping-pong balls can you fit in a jumbo jet? - designed
to assess your ability to reason and work through a
problem in a logical manner.

Everyone was anxious: to have several job offers from
the right firms was to have kudos; to have none was
stressful and debilitating. But the stress was
generally uncalled for. These people were, after all,
highly employable. Nearly all of them would find jobs
- perhaps not the ideal job in the ideal location, but
ones which justified doing the MBA and the huge outlay
of funds. In the final weeks, as they considered and
then accepted one of their job offers, the students
breathed a collective sigh of relief. They had
achieved the goals they had set themselves.

A few were not so lucky. A week before the end, one
Japanese classmate seemed to have had no luck in
finding a job and was being pursued by the dean after
a particularly long string of low grades. At one of
the farewell parties, I found myself talking to him in
a side room, and suddenly months of repressed anxiety,
it seemed, came pouring out. "My wife doesn't
understand," he confided to me in his faltering
English, his voice close to tears. "She thought I was
clever. In Japan I was clever."

Meanwhile, Abba's Dancing Queen was playing again in
the next room, and the tall Dutch people partied on