P1 Classes:

P1 has the main drawback to offer introductory classes which serve to bring everyone to a similar level. INSEAD offers exemption exams (I just exempted from a course, which means that I am able to take an elective instead in P2) for the poor Bond Trader who does not wish to sit again in a Introduction to Finance class, or a Microeconomics Major who can find better uses of his or her time than sitting in a Price and Market class.

- General Management: this is a short two-class course centered around a case study. It highlighted the fact, that despite the fact that most business schools teach every subject separately, everything is imbricated in the life of a general manager. It also showed that general managers really have to deal with all the crap that keep falling on their desk, and do not enjoy the same intellectual challenges as academia workers - is this an expression of professional frustration? ;-). The Arthur Keller case has become a legend at INSEAD, and is even quoted in the press!
I remember a key quote from our British teacher "you came to INSEAD so that you can learn about how general managers screw everything up in real life and feel comfortable about doing it yourself".

- Ethics, Values and Cultures: this was taught by a star teacher who splits up his time between counselling Asian governments and CEOs, teaching at Stanford Business School and at INSEAD. Unfortunately for students of the years to come, he is retiring. Luckily I heard that one of his replacements, a successful teachers at the univeristy of Barcelona and Rock Climbing World Champion is fantastic.
The current and soon to retire French teacher was basically the instigator of the creation of the Singaporean campus for INSEAD and is on a crusade to create awareness about ethics issues in a world sadly dominated by corruption stories. The course was only over a week, based on a case study and through the Ethics Day, which brought together CEOs of various companies and countries (Germany, Israel, France, etc..) and students in small workshops to discuss ethics issues. I attended the Enron Case workshop. The teacher's favorite quote was "companies outsource ethics to the government". Bottom line: ethics are not a relative thing: murder is murder and is bad. Ethics are everyone's responsibility and falling into the trap of doing the local thing is only feeding a sick system.

- Uncertainty, Data and Judgement: a class which focuses on dealing with reality and coming to terms with the fact that we cannot use a crystal ball to peek into the future. Most of it is maths but the class is taught very intuitively by a brilliant Romanian mind (who was elected our best dressed professor). Unfortunately, I found that the teacher, probably because of lack of experience, was not as convincing and open as the other teachers. Forced humor and artificial jokes fell flat most of the time.
Some of the questions that you are able to answer after the course: how can you model reality in order to forecast future trivial values, such as your sales level...How can you design a process, for instance to deal with overbooking at airlines, not to lose money, how can you decide how many physicians should be on duty in hospital based on the expected number of patients in an ER ward on any given day, how do you test various hypothesis on expected returns, based on samples of data, how confident are you about the acceptance of your product, about your expected profits, etc...
In fact, the teaching style was so bumpy that I cannot remember any key quote.

- Finance 1: the teacher was German. This says a lot about the course...which introduces the main financial tools in a very ideal world (the only imperfection that we talk about is corporate taxes, which actually has an influence on your capital structure choices, since interest payments are deducted from your taxable income). Time Value of Money (useful in pension liability valuation), Valuation of project (differences between IRR, Net Present Value, PayBack Method), company valuation (Discounted Cash Flow Method, Dividend Method, Multiple Method), the Pricing of Risk in Financial Market (based on the CAPM model, which is all about pizzas), Efficiency of financial markets, Capital Structure decision and portfolio theory. The Key Quote would be: "When you buy two stocks, their risks cancel out, exactly like matter and anti-matter: it goes Pooof".

- Prices and Markets: I have already talked about this. Although we dealt about the usual Supply and Demand, Cost optimization, Profit Optimization, Competitive Markets, Monopolies, the basics of Game Theories (which I enjoyed thorougly), our Greek teacher was truly excellent. Very cynical in his approach and very original in his presentation, he certainly quenched by thirst for entertainment and learning. Our OPEC Class Exercises (graded) was fantastic: every one cheated although everyone had the opportunity to increase his or her group's mark through colluding, since our mark was directly proportional to the profit generated. However, if we cheated and no one else did, our profit would have been humongous. Trouble is everyone reasoned identically and this left us all with a very small price and a tiny profit...

- Organizational Behavior: and why people matter ;-) I have already talked a lot about this course and about our teacher: Michael Brimm. Next time I need to lead a group, I'll certainly do a little Brimmstorming before I head into the first meeting.

- Financial Accounting: the teacher was Canadian and a visiting professor from an Austin university and I did find that the cases chosen during the class were way too US and Canada focused. The INSEAD course evaluation form dedicates an entire section about the international coverage of the class: well, I had to mark this course very low in that respect. I found the teacher, although very competent, a stereotype of the North American university teacher: a showman. Everything was dramatic: Worldcom, Enron, etc...Yes people mess up with the numbers and cook the book, but we can recognize this fact without overdoing it. Yes the value destruction on a global scale and the personal drama that followed these scandals was huge but putting an act to demonstrate that some people have strong incentive to position themselves on the edge of the law is qutie unecessary. Part of the course is very mechanical (you know, this debit/credit thing) although I actually found the content pretty relevant to business life: competitive studies, benchmarking start with a good understanding of what's behind the numbers.
One other comment that I have is that, we had to hand in a (graded) case at every class. The case was dealing with the next class' topic which meant that it would take us hours to figure out how to do things. There was no tutorial, no time left for review of the past class' concept and I found myself lost very quickly half way through. In fact, when I talked with other people in my section, this was the general feeling. Focusing too much on the cases
meant taking time away from other courses. Focusing too much on other courses meant getting lost even more in accounting.
All in all, I think that I have learned a lot but I certainly do not feel as comfortable with the subject as with the other topics taught in P1.