OK - I have only one more project to go and my contribution to Insead's Academics Standards will be over. One project and one day...I am SO late...

In fact, most of my work these days qualify as the most minimalist piece of work ever delivered in my entire existence as a cellular aggreggate with basic thinking abilities. There is just so many more things going on that I am finding very hard to concentrate on my studies. I think that this is a problem with the structure of the program. It is not possible to run a full-time job search activity and a full-time academic program with some patches spared for job interviews. Some people have started an argument to add one full period to the program and indicated a high willingness to pay for that. I second this idea.

On the France Telecom front, I have a few numbers I could call up for legal counsel. On the hot water front, the heating specialists are due to come next Monday. IF they solve the problem, we would have visited the gym showers or taken cold showers for two weeks. I have a dinner or a BBQ or a party every night until the beginning of the sailing trip.

Everything on my To Do list has reached the BBB letter status (BIG BLACK BOLD) meaing that everything now ranges from "urgent with top priority" item to "this really should have been done a month ago". If I had a magic wand today, I'd suspend time for everyone else for a short period of time so that I can deal with all of that. Maybe I'll fly myself to Brad Pitt's newest film setting too actually. After all, a magic wand isn't like a genius, you don't get to choose only one wish.

If you are to take this Realizing Entrepreneurship Potential course, think twice OR persuade INSEAD's administration to give you TWO credits for it. I liked the course - professor had great insights because of his past experience - but the value of the course comes from the actual search and analysis. In P4, all the other projects that you are late with get a higher priority and you end up pushing this one aside and leave it on the back burner for a short while. You are also starting to think about jobs and it starts to occupy a fair amount of your time. In P5, it has a high priority but you also have a project for all the other courses, and clear deadlines throughout the period. The P4 assignemts of the REP course were not related to the actual search project and diluted further our time.
As a result I am now late with this project. I see a solution to this: include deliverables related to the project in P4 (including things as simple as group formation, publishing search criteria, sources for deal flow, etc...) and add one more credit (so you can drop a course in P5). The drawback of this is that it might reduce the audience for the course as there would be an additional opportunity cost of not taking another course. I have no answer for that. Searching for a company to buy takes a long time and it is probably not realistic to consider this over one period only. Kind of fun to have to go into the real world, a bit like for our negotiation class. Anyway, just one of these random thoughts that cross the minds of MBA students late with their projects and that have so much time on their hands that they spend it typing them up.