MBA en Vacances

As I said before, a small Insead MBA fleet gathered in the port of Saint Mandrier, in Toulon Bay, for the end of year Sailing Trip. Cruising with MBAs is not the same as cruising. Let me illustrate this point with carefully selected anecdotes that I am extirpating from blurred and fond memories of one of the best trips of the year. It summarizes well the core of the program.

MARKETING
I drove down with the other skipper and we stopped along the way to buy some rose wine for our much awaited typical provencal dinner, offered at the family beach house of one of the participants on the trip. Her grandmother cooked a fantastic Soupe au Pistou. The other skipper tried to convince the old lady who sold us the wine in a tiny village South of Lyon that he should be doing marketing for her. The label stated that the one was a Domaine de Tricastin. Tricastin also happens to be a nuclear power plant.

-“Madam, if you allow me to make one comment, this name on your label is a clear liability”
-“I don’t understand, we have been using this name for 8 generations, our wine is very good”
-“it could be radioactive now, if you intend to sell this through the main retail channel, they’ll give you a hard time, you could really boost up your sales by removing this Appellation”
-“we don’t sell through Carrefour, we want to remain very traditional, this wine is very good”
-“I am sure that it is good but still, this name is not going to help you sell much, actually, perhaps we could try some of your white, red and rose to verify quality levels”
-“ok, hold on, I need to get the credit card machine at home. I will leave you here with the bottles for a second. Don’t drink it all please”

Satanic wine did not turn our trip into Titanic II – the dinner was very good and the house lovely.

PROCESS AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
The first day was a bit hectic – I left the group temporarily as I had to fight the French administration and transform a procedure that normally takes 1.5 months into a 5 day job. I went through three different offices and spent my entire day waiting for the opening times of such offices.

- First lady at the city hall: “no, I can’t call the Prefecture, they don’t answer the phone if the Grand Public calls, they are not an information center but I don’t think that you can designate a proctor to pick up your stuff on Tuesday”
I thought that the “Grand Public” was actually paying for this information and service out of their taxes but I might have been mistaken, it is possible that the prefecture also earn revenues through clever overseas investments and need no taxes.

- At the prefecture: “Where is the so and so office?”
- “downstairs but they open at 12.30pm so you need to come back later”
When I come back and reach the so and so office a big sign on the door says: “We do not receive members of the public anymore, please file your request at the city hall”
- “how can I get to see these people, I have my file stamped by the city hall and they told me to bring it here because it was an urgent request”
- “well, I don’t know, I am not supposed to talk to you, I am not paid for this service”
- “can I speak to the “chef de service””?
- No, I am not paid to give you his number, you need to go back to the city hall
At the city hall: I don’t have the number of the chef de service, they consider us the Grand Public and all I have access to is an automatic voicemail – there is a 20 min walk between the two buildings
Back to the prefecture: “ok, I need to talk to this guy, I need this done by Tuesday”
“-oh, but it takes 1.5 months, we have a lot of work here, so it won’t be done by Tuesday”
-“I am filing an urgent request and I have all the papers that you need to justify the urgency of the request, so I need to deposit these papers and leave this place, someone will collect them later”
-“yes a proctor is fine but in 1.5 months”
-“I would like to talk to your superior”
-“Why?”
-“to get the number”
-“ok,…”
The superior got me the number in no time – the guy is sitting in that same building but was not supposed to be back before 2.30pm so I had to wait before I could give him a call”

“-hello, Mr so and so, chef de service”
-“Hi, my name is FM I left my paper work with your staff earlier today and they told me I needed to call you to find out when it could be ready”
-“Yes, I was reading your file just now, everything’s in order and you have indeed justified the urgency of the request. When do you need this by?”
-“ideally Tuesday”
-“no problem at all, it’ll be ready for pick up on Tuesday afternoon at the reception, I am glad to be of help to you and have a good day”



What a nightmare.

Instructions weren’t clear and my lot (I picked up 3 other people in Marseille airport) could not find the boats easily. It took us an extra hour to roam around the coast near Toulon to identify the berth. We had forgotten to buy French Sailing Association licenses to be covered in the event of an accident (I wasn’t sure that my US Sailing membership would be of much use in this country) – we ran late for shopping as I became the critical path, people wanted me to review the various ingredients to make sure that they were “boat-compatible”. I missed the boat inspection and had to delay mine by 12 hours…
We sucked at PoM and continued to do so during the week as we would regularly leave port much later than originally planned. We changed twice destinations due to changes in the wind, we ended up with twice as much food and drinks as we would need, we couldn’t get to a harbor one day because it was full and we were unable to reserve ahead of time and driving a couple of early return to a train station took one entire morning instead of the planned 45 minutes.
I must now turn to the other boat not to be accused of selfish chauvinism. Two crew members traveled with quite a few clothes but unfortunately did not have enough bags to store them. They used trash bags and stowed away everything. Highly efficient and diligent crew members saw an immediate need to clean and unload trash. They took these trash bags to the nearest container and transferred the ownership of the clothes from the crew members to the city utility services. When the two poor crew members returned they could not find half of their clothes and sadly had to write off their investment.

IT
Boating with bright MBAs…One can expect that a few of them will get fascinated by the GPS and navigation system and calculate your route 10 times over, when you can sail but just looking at the coast. The VHF was also the target of renewed interest. My boat was San Peyre, the other skipper’s boat was Jerkat.

“Jerkat, this is San Peyre, Jerkat, this is San Peyre, do you copy? Over”
“San Peyre, San Peyre, this is Jerkat, we copy loud and clear, over”
“Jerkat, Jerkat, this is San Peyre, do you have our rice? Over”
“San Peyre, this is Jerkat, let us check [pause], yes we do sorry, over and out”

We also intercepted on channel 16 some strange messages such as:

“Bateau situe au 43 degrees Nord et 6 degrees Est, svp, reportez-vous en canal 70 pour inspection. »

After multiple missed communication attempts, this message turned into English
“Will the boat located at 43 degrees North and 6 Degrees East switch NOW to channel 70. This is the French Navy and we would like to inspect your boat.”

However, most of the time our communication lines were broken on Channel 69. We would hear

“San ssshshshshshsh, thshsishssshsh Kat shshshshshsh, over”

Some of us made some mistake such as:
"ok so for a Mayday call, you just press this button here - he is pressing the button - and you say Mayday Mayday Mayday, you see, like this?
Immediate response was
-"hi, I just heard a Mayday call, where are you?"
- Oh shit, just called out for help, mmm, it was to demonstrate how quickly these calls are picked up

Cell phones became the emergency contact lines but it was difficult to hear them in the wind and difficult to recharge them at anchor. Clearly, we could improve our IT infrastructure, get some sort of satellite link up between the two boats instead of shouting from deck to deck and wake up everyone around us when entering port.

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ANALYSIS
That evening, we all gathered at a creperie for a typical Breton dinner. Various bits of the conversation took place in Mandarin, Dutch, German, French, English and Spanish as the composition of the crew was as follows

- Chinese
- Dutch
- Guatemala
- Australian/Malay
- Swiss
- French
- Bangladesh/British
- German
- Indian/American
- Austrian

Subjects of utmost importance such as the various strengths and weaknesses of the various European teams engaged in the UEFA cup were discussed. The person next to our table came to us and asked: “what kind of group are you? I hear all these different languages spoken…” We are the INSEAD Family.

ACCOUNTING
The first full day of sailing. We introduced an Activity-Based system as we were facing a Force 7. Since most of the crew was inexperienced, we decided to go out with only one boat and all the experienced sailors and to offer the rest of the space on board to everyone else. This was activity A. Activity B consisted of shopping, negotiating with the charter company and buying shower token at the harbormaster. Activity C, after some research on the dress code on French Beaches (Speedo vs Boxer) resulted in lazy hours tanning in the sun. The expenses for shopping were logged into a carefully crafted Excel model (remember, we are all MBAs) on a mini portable computer. All expenses were discounted and brought back to the first day of the cruise so as to not to penalize early payers. The boat lease figured as an operating lease but we capitalized our assets: the two skippers and the accountant and amortized them over the duration of the trip.
It is important to be thrifty on a boat as there is limited supply of everything. Using peanuts as baits to attract preys and to increase supply levels of food and various other required sources of energy is an important part of the survival kit. Perfect Body (a special crew member) demonstrated this as he started to throw peanuts to feed fish when we were at anchor in PortCros. Fish responded well and a seagull camped on the boat for a few minutes to eat the pasta salad out of his plate. When you throw things in the water, anything comes up to you, even MBA participants from a neighboring boat. Before we knew it, we were throwing peanuts at K. and S. both of them trying to come aboard our yacht to replenish their personal inventories. Clearly our boat had a much more functioning managerial accounting system as our food levels were never down and our ability to dedicate resources to create value out of this base material in the form of meals of superior quality commanded respect.

MACRO-ECONOMICS
Finally, we exported our talent to the island of Porquerolles, under sail. One of my crew members, a Dutch football fan, was about to blow in the sails to make sure we would reach our destination in time for the match. We tried to calm him down by serving him beer after beer, thus increasing our investment levels in welfare by instantly reducing our drinks savings on board, we could hardly hold him in place. He walked to the bow – or front of the boat – perhaps hoping to reduce the distance between him and Holland playing. His ability to watch the match was seriously hampered when we realized that the harbor could not accept us. We anchored in a tiny bay close to the harbor. This same Dutch football fan precipitately inflated the dinghy and paddled ashore to get a lift into town to a local bar. Rafting for Holland…The rest of us cooked a lovely dinner to balance the capital account as we just suffered a precious crew loss, opened a couple of bottles of French wine and felt captured by the beauty of the sunset, unveiling the quiet beauty of the sea and the rapacious silence of the night.

MICROECONOMICS
In the morning, we got up fairly early for a long navigation day to Saint Tropez. As I was preparing coffee for the rest of the crew, mostly asleep, I hear the German representative on my crew shout:
-“I need change for the pains au chocolat, hurry up on deck”
I obviously thought he was joking. We were at anchor in a bay with many other sailboats. Our dinghy was back, still inflated but its outboard motor had run out of gas, so he was not going to go to a bakery anytime soon.
“Hurry up please, the guy’s waiting!!!!”
The guy’s waiting? What guy? Well – only in France will you find a floating bakery, mounted on a zodiac, going from boat to boat to sell fresh bread, fresh croissants and fresh pains au chocolat. There was a clear moving demand on part of clueless boating tourists like us for succulent breakfast material and the supply curve, embodied by this little zodiac, skillfully maneuvered to intercept it. We had a fantastic breakfast on that day.

STATISTICS
The following day was excellent and very quiet as winds picked up only fairly late. Whenever we needed to trim the sail, or tack, we disturbed a chess game on the starboard side as people had to find other ways to amuse themselves. You might wonder what all this has to do with statistics. Well, let us examine the situation with the lens of a statistics professor: The chess game box claims that it contains 16 white figures and 16 black figures and does not even give a tolerance interval. It is only normal that we should test this claim to find out whether we have overpaid of underpaid for the game. we observed that winds in the past few days started to pick up around noon to painfully die around 6pm. If this pattern remained, we could start running a regression model, if we could identify the thermal and other meteorological parameters affecting the wind and predict what the conditions would be the day after. I could see two fish through the deep blue waters around the boat. How easy would it be to count the fish in the waters off Hyeres harbor by just fishing and cooking out a small sample of the population – and assuming that this population is normally distributed, despite the fact that Fish in French is Poisson, one must not fall into the trap of using a Poisson Distribution. This could help reduce our shopping bill quite significantly – assuming our Guatemala Fishing Expert can transform his claim into results. If we identify a strong depletion in the marine population around our boat, it could even provide an excuse for his being unable to feed everyone on board on that evening: if there is one fish every 47 cube meter of water, the likelihood of his 2-inch long hook to catch one is low.
Lastly, it really is clearly in our interest to calculate the probability of bumping into Elton John while in Saint Tropez, depending on what time of the day we choose to visit the city.

FINANCE
We clearly must not forget our financial skills. We used the CAPM model (Captains Agility in Ports and Moorings) to select the various crew members and keep an even balance of skills on boats. The risk profile (beta) of each boat clearly influenced our relationship with funds. It is logical to think that, for example, the consumption of alcohol would increase the risk to bankrupt the boat against rocks. Well, the amount of alcohol on board evidently increased our cost of capital. Both our boats were highly leveraged as most people financed the trip for the duration of the week, lending funds to the most disorganized among us, who did not find the ATM in Saint Mandrier Harbor and who were too afraid of potential hidden fees in Saint Tropez to withdraw any cash until the last day. Unfortunately, we did not turn in a profit, so there will be no tax implication. We always managed to create options so that people could choose to invest their time one way or the other, taking a view on the availability of chicks in Saint Tropez Piano Bars, on the increase of wind speed and on the presence of a Perfect Body on San Peyre. Sailing at night forced some of us to be awake and on call, while we put to sleep the people whose resting time had been most ravaged by the strip club in Saint Tropez below deck. When anchored, butterfly-style swimming could only be attempted by Perfect Body as no one straddled to try to imitate him. In order not to make anyone jealous with his abnormal and superior returns with babes, he would often isolate himself when in port, at the local beach.

LEADING PEOPLE AND GROUPS
The following days we spent the day visiting the old and narrow streets of Saint Tropez and one of my friends joined us aboard. I had described him as having a perfect body. The fleet now referred to him as PB. Saint Tropez harbor is full of extremely expensive and inelegant boats, populated by white shirt crew members, who like to show off on deck, pretending they are the ultimate masters on board. There is a lot of respect on the part of local for these people. The other skipper was walking around town when he was harpooned by a guide selling some sort of touristic tour. The skipper was wearing a Singapore Yacht Club shirt. The guide noticed and apologized profusely. This piece of trivia needn’t take our attention away from the point of this paragraph. Perfect Body was very good at leading people and groups. Typically, female eyes were quite attracted by his quiet and happy demeanor and they would quite naturally gather in small groups around him. He is also a nature lover and would rapt their attention with beautiful melodramatic stories about why the butterfly could fly so fast as to catch up with the boat, how unromantic microorganisms would turn the sea into a stroboscope at night or why secattas stopped singing when the temperature drops below 30 degrees C.

STRATEGY
The end of this day was a mini-race in light wind as we headed toward the port of Cavalaire. Our strategy was very clear and three-fold

- Use Perfect Body to distract the other boat’s female crew
- Use our Guatemala General to boost our morale
- Drink up the rest of the wine to lighten the boat and increase our speed

It worked wonders. We had such a boat specific advantage (in the person of Perfect Body/Human Pole), superior drinking capabilities and fantastic entertainment value that we won.

We improvised a Latin American party after dinner topped off by a Rum based fruit salad, dancing on deck to Salsa and Merengue rhythms. Everyone finished off with romantic dances, wrapped around their other half or the mast, disappearing off in the moonlight…

LEADING ORGANIZATIONS
The last day allowed us to enjoy some sailing, wine, bread and saucisson during the trip before a celebratory dinner in Porquerolles. One of the crew members made a comment to me and compared our boats to two different organizations, both functioning and operating well but with very different cultures.

One was very organized, always on time, with not one thing out of place in the main cabin, everyone gathering for cooked meals and sharing tasks spontaneously.
The other one was perhaps less organized and formal, more spontaneous and funky, always late, with people sometimes deciding individually when would be a good time for an improvised sandwich and with a mess level below deck above average.

Both boats had a fantastic time!

The feedback that has reached my ear is all positive and seem to echo my general impression that this was one of the best trip of the year. So good that we all decided to turn it into a tradition and we are welcoming ideas for next year already.