Am I a Client or a Product?

Back in August I read a story about a student doing his MBA at Harvard Business School who got in an argument with a woman in the Career Services department. He argued that she should see it his way because he was the client. She fired back, "You're not the client, you're the product."


Which leads me to ask, am I a client or a product of IMD Business School? I'm paying a lot of money to get this education, which would give me the advantage of a client to choose how my money is spent. However, I have no control over the curriculum, and am not much more than a pawn that takes in the information that is sent my way. Likewise, a product is generally made from a pre-designed mold and the product itself has no control over what shape the machine will give it. By that logic I would have to say I'm a product.  But they've already told us that they don't make any profit on the MBA program, they make their money on the Executive MBA program.  So offering the MBA at all is more like a service, and we would be clients of the service.  But they're offering the service so that the "products" that are created during the service will go out into the world and recruit people for the Executive MBA.

Which leads to the next question - is being a product a good thing or a bad thing?

I posed the client or product question to my Economics professor, Ralf Boscheck, and his answer was, of course, that we're both. He mentioned that they're not trying to shape each one of us to be exactly the same, but also said he would be very nervous letting students choose the curriculum. I sort of see his point, but I actually think there should be more input from the students to choose topics and subjects because we're the ones who just came from business jobs and are heading straight back into business jobs. A professor who's been teaching for the last 15 years may not have as direct a connection to relevant topics as the students do.

Wake up. Shower. Class. Lunch. Class. Study. Home. Sleep. Repeat.

While the first week seemed to last a lifetime, the second week flew by, mostly because we were constantly going. (Dinner became an item I considered to be a luxury.) While it was busy and I was only averaging six hours of sleep a night, I was very surprised by how much pure FUN I was having. I guess I’d forgotten how enjoyable it is to learn when you’re surrounded by fantastic people who are your intellectual peers.

Monday morning it was back to work. We were put in new groups and started on a new project, the Industry Analysis, as part of our Economics class with Ralf Boscheck. My group was assigned to look at Disease Management in the Healthcare industry. After much (sometimes “intense”) discussion we decided to focus on the obesity problem in the United States, although we spent a lot of time hashing out the details to make sure it could be profitable.

That Wednesday morning we had our first Entrepreneurship class with Professor Benoit Leleux. Benoit has two master’s degrees from Catholic University in Belgium, an MBA from Virginia Tech, and his PhD from INSEAD, where he was also a professor before coming to IMD. He told us he picked INSEAD for his PhD because the brochure looked nice (and they promised to be close to Paris, ha!). He said that during his interview he went on about his excitement for entrepreneurship until one of the interviewers stopped him and told him that eventually he’d have to do something “serious” with his life, and that since he had been an engineer he should pick “Finance”, which is how he found himself with a doctorate in Corporate Finance.

That Wednesday afternoon we had our first Leadership class with Professor Jack Wood. Jack got his first degree in government, then followed it with a master’s in social psychology from Syracuse University, and an MA, MPhil, and PhD in organizational behavior from Yale. His classes focused on the interpersonal and group relationships that form in the workplace and aimed to make us recognize why we react in certain ways. He encouraged us to say whatever was on our mind, no matter how outlandish, and to challenge each other during class discussion, and his classes were for sure the most emotionally charged. During the second Leadership class, we broke off into our 8-person teams and debated through an hour-long group project while being videotaped. Then we had to review the videotape together within our groups to analyze our interactions and reactions during times of heated conversation. It was pretty uncomfortable to watch ourselves on video, but the conversation we had afterwards was fascinating, as we dissected minute changes in body language and what they might mean.

Case studies.

My new group.

Skiing in the Alps

For the first weekend of school the administrators took pity on us and didn't schedule much homework, which gave me a chance to go skiing.  I justified the early morning and the high expense by the fact that I figured it might be the only weekend this ski season that I'd be able to go.

That rationale found me getting up early on Sunday morning, at 7:30am (after a very late night out) to meet three other students to go skiing at Verbier resort, about 1.5 hours from Lausanne.  Fabian, from Germany, was nice enough to take us in his car, and we spent the whole day on the mountain.  It was my first time skiing in the Alps, and it was beautiful, although it would have been better if it hadn’t been quite so cloudy and snowy most of the day.  We were surrounded by mountains but I hardly got to see any of them. 

I didn't go skiing last season at all, and hadn't been yet this season, so it was a bit frustrating because I had to spend most of the day just catching back up to the level I was at before.  By the end of the day I felt like I was almost back to where I last left off.

That evening I was asleep by 8pm, and didn’t get ahead on the readings like I had planned to (oops).

The First Weekend of School

The first weekend surpassed my expectations of life outside the MBA program. IMD’s reputation is very much of a no-nonsense, hard work program where people don’t get to have much of a life outside the school, but I was glad to see that this year’s students are not interested in perpetuating that rumor.

We had accounting class on Saturday morning from 8am – 12pm, and afterwards we split up to do individual tasks. Some people stayed at school to work on optional accounting exercises or to read ahead for classes this week, while others went to exercise or run errands around town. I went to the train station to investigate ticket prices for skiing on Sunday, because the train station offered a combined “train ticket and lift ticket” package for a reduced price.  In the end I decided to take up a fellow student’s offer and go by car instead.

On Saturday night I met up with six other students to try a sushi restaurant, Ichi Ban, that was next door to my apartment on Ave D’Ouchy, about ten minutes walk from school. One of them was a Japanese student, Hitoshi, so we had him do all the ordering for us, and his selections were fantastic. We had edamame, sashimi, sushi, rolls, tempura, roasted steak, miso soup, rice and lots of sake. The fish was really fresh and the steak cooked to perfection. After dinner we met up with other students at a club in the center of Lausanne for a “few” drinks.  The turnout literally must have been at least 50 of the 90 students, and we had an absolute blast.  We stayed until the club closed at 2am and then walked about 20 minutes home in a group.  It was one of the funnest nights out I've had in a long time.

The First Week of School

The end of the first week of school felt like the end off the first month.  Days were so long that I forgot what time it was and how many hours I spent working on schoolwork.  Class was scheduled from 8am-12pm, with a break from 12pm-1:30pm for lunch, then an afternoon session from 1:30pm-5:30pm.  We only had two classes per day, and each one was 4 hours long.  In the first week, including Saturday morning, we had 3 Accounting sessions, 2 Operations sessions, 2 Economics sessions, 1 Marketing Session, and 1 Organizational Behavior session.  Trying to focus on financial forecasting at 8am on a Saturday morning was the most challenging part of the week.

About half the cases we did were Harvard Business School cases, a slightly smaller percentage were IMD cases, and one was a London Business School case.  We did cases on Chemalite (glow sticks!), Swatch, Dell, Zara (retail clothing), and Toy World.  Most of the preparation work was not hard at all, it just took time.
Most evenings I had 3-4 hours of homework to do, split evenly between group work and individual readings of case studies and chapters from our textbooks.  Some evenings there were only 10 pages total to read, but other evenings there were 40 pages to read.  Most people liked to get started on the group work directly after class, and then I usually stayed after the group work to do my own readings, so most evenings I didn't eat dinner.  I left school sometime around 10pm, went home, had a snack, and then went to bed.  Two nights I stopped in at the White Horse with friends on the way home and had a drink and some food there.  The not eating dinner part was also inadvertantly a cost-saving strategy, and since lunch was so fancy (and FREE, or at least included in our tuition already) we chose to eat most of our calories at midday so we only needed a small amount of food in the evening.

Even considering how busy I was the workload the first week was actually pretty light compared to what I expected.  I was able to do all the readings before class and feel relatively prepared for each session. 

In one of our first classes one of the girls described a particular market as having "HUGE Potential" so from then on it became our default catchphrase - healthcare market? "HUGE potential" - online dating market? "HUGE potential" - ? finding a job after grad school "HUGE potential" (we hope).

The Right Decision

On Friday afternoon of the second day of school, for the first time in the last eight months I finally felt that I made the right decision to come to IMD.  As I got to know the other participants during the two days of opening sessions, and sat through the orientation about what will happen this year I finally felt excited and happy and positive, all the feelings I thought I should have felt weeks ago.  It was such a relief that things finally felt real, and that I finally felt ready to start.

On Friday evening the school held a cocktail hour for the MBAs and their partners, which was a nice touch.  A couple of us decided to transition the cocktail hour into another drink at The White Horse (the unofficial IMD pub) and before we knew it we had 20 people there.  The owner of the bar is accustomed to IMD students and surprised us with two free bottles of champagne as his welcome gift.

On Saturday morning we had to be back at school at 9am for "activities", which turned out to be 2 hours of a scavenger hunt through town center Lausanne in groups of 8, and then a cheesy team-building activity where had to build a wooden arch to go in front of a doorway.  They gave us wood, hammers, nails, nail guns, power drills, saws, canvas, paper, markers, glue, paint, paintbrushes, scissors, string, and staplers, and said we had 90 minutes to build it, decorate it, and clean up (90 people, 90 minutes, aha).  We had to organize ourselves into groups of engineers, architects, carpenters, designers, painters, and cleaners to build the 10ft wide by 12 ft high structure.

After the arch building they rewarded us by handing us a group case study that was due at 8am on Monday morning.  They got a real kick out of assigning hours more work each day that we thought we'd have a chance to catch up.  We all ate lunch (provided by IMD thank god) and my group got right to it, spending six hours Saturday afternoon reading, discussing, and creating our powerpoint presentation.  Saturday night eight of us met at the White Horse for drinks and good conversation.

On Sunday I slept in as late as I wanted, then started in on more work.  In the afternoon I hunted down IMD's gym and had a much needed two hour workout that felt fantastic.  I was really happy that the director Martha promoted exercise so much, and I noticed that exercise classes were included on our class schedule in the evenings.

First task was to take a picture with a real Swiss person.

Another task was to take a picture in front of the clock with the moving glockenspiel parts.

Third task was to find at least three dogs of different sizes.

Fourth task was to find the chepeast item possible in the market.  I bought one walnut for 10c.

This is the arch we built.

My job was to paint flags.

We took pictures of all the MBAs with a favorite quote of their choice.

Mine was to live with no regrets.

My study group working on our case for the first real day of class.

This cat lives in a house nearby, I think, because he lets himself into the school and wanders around at will.

Saturday night at The White Horse.

Feeling happy, finally!

First Day of School

The first day of school was really just more administrative tasks, welcoming us to school, going over housing and insurance instructions, and getting us our access cards for the school.  The opening session in the auditorium was for both MBA students AND their partners AND their children, so the presenters often had to shout over the wails, cries, and squeals of toddlers trying to sit still and be quiet.  It's amazing how many of the students are married and already have children.  I don't envy their struggle this coming year.

Lunch at IMD is catered, all-you-can-eat, and free.  The food is outstanding and there's a huge selection to choose from, and apparently it's common for students to gain weight from being stressed out and indulging too much.  (I need to watch out!)The part I was most excited about was the free coffee and espresso located near the library. 

I was chosen to be one of three bloggers for IMD during 2010, and my posts will be visible on the school's main public site.  I found out that I will be expected to write 2 blog posts per week, which is quite a bit more than I had anticipated.  Luckily they do understand that the some of the posts may consist solely of "Too much work.  Too little sleep."

We were done with admin for the day by mid afternoon, and had the rest of the day to ourselves.  We discovered that IMD has its own gym (!) so I planned to check it out with Vamshi later that night.

Philip Martini, his wife Margarita Martini (no joke), and their son.  Vamshi is on the left.

Some of the babies didn't make it all the way through.

This was pretty much the way the whole day looked, with strollers everywhere.

And children running left and right.

Lunch on Day 1.

Main course selection.

Dessert table.

The most exciting part - all the free coffee you can drink!

The printers are named "Rhino", "Brasilia", and "Cancun".