Heard in class:
- "I can go there with you, but you don't want me to, or it will take a lot of beers". POM Professor

- "So if this Black-Scholes formula is pretty useless for the majority of the option valuation cases, why don't we even bother with it? We should just concentrate on the Binomial approach" - student asking
- "because it is Nobel Prize winning stuff" - professor answering
- "and what did Mr Binomial get then? - student asking
- "well, Mr Binomial got nothing but it came into existence thanks to Mr Black and Mr Scholes" - professor answering

In Strategy Class, we started talking about the music industry, then moved onto the PC Industry.
- "so, in this music business, if.." - student starting
-"well, we left the music business about 15 min ago, and we were now really concentrating on the operating system part of the value chain," - strategy professor.

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Equity Day
Yesterda'ys presentations of Equity Day delivered some mixed results. Some were awful: presenters came ill-prepared and had very little to bring beyond common sense. Some were excellent. An INSEAD alumni who set up a very successful company in the UK: activehotel , Andrew Phillips who talked about his experience, lessons learned. I'll share a couple
- What you don't learn at school and what's the biggest shock afterwards is people. Your MBA fellows are bright young achievers. People in the real world come with random attributes. It is much more difficult to deal with this uncertainty and ambiguity.
- Separate your potential investors. Otherwise, investor A and B around the table will say. "well, I like your concept but I worry about A" - "I also like your concept but I worry about B". So these people came in with one worry and leave the room with two.

I really like the Latam class. It forces me to take a country perspective on things, rather than a firm's perspective. We argued that a government must concentrate on creating an environment in which firms can grow, in accordance with national values and be supportive of its citizens, e.g. cooperative in spirit. If the job is done correctly and any "externality" can be corrected, companies can concentrate on being ruthless and 100% profit-driven. A country cannot be run by its bottom line. We also reflected upon the consequences of the decision of the Chilean goverment to refuse to extend tax breaks, or incentives for multinational to settle in Chile. Intel, for example, set up a plant in Costa Rica instead, rebuked by this attitude. The government argues that it is corruption free, that it will not bend. If it gives in today, it will be forced to give in even more tomorrow. Has this contributed to restrict Chile's portfolio of industry to commodities (it is #1 producer of copper in the world), thus making the country's economy extremely dependent on fluctuation in this competitive market prices? Countries build a comparative advantage (higher education lead to better trained workforce, highly differentiated, able to compete on value-added products) in which firms can build a competitive advantage.

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CEO Visits
Also two visits of CEO yesterday:
- Lincoln Electric's Tony Massaro: "There are two Lincoln Electric. The one pre-Tony Massaro, and the one post Tony Massaro. Pre Tony Massaro, they did some stupid thing, like borrowing money to pay out bonuses. Well, actually, perhaps I should say that there is a pre-IPO Lincoln Electric and a post-IPO Lincoln Electric as it would have been impossible to do this as a public company"

- Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay and Harvard MBA who delivered a very interesting speech on her personal experience. "CEOs of start up must really live with the firm, live the business. I literaly spent 10 days living at eBay, camping out in conference rooms, at a critical negotiating times with our suppliers. That way, the best salespeople from our suppliers came to eBay as they knew that they'd find me there"

Two different attitudes, two vastly different businesses, two great leaders. Strong opinions (even though not everyone will agree with them), clearly laid out, a strong presence, a big ego with a welcoming laid back behavior - and a great track record. Hats off to INSEAD for arranging such interactive and open sessions.