And so it ends...

So, it is early September. INSEAD has wrapped up, and, after 18 months on the side lines, I find myself staring at a very imminent return to the working world. Much as I am exited about a new job, new city and new life, I have to admit I am currently enduring a very extended and particularly intense dose of the Sunday night blues, lasting not just Sunday but for an entire fortnight before the real world kicks off again.

What better way to cling on to the last remnants of this amazing year and a half than to update the blog one last time. I’ve been putting off this final entry for over a month, because it seems like no written account that I can come up with could possibly do justice to such an experience. Summarizing 18 months that started with an emergency landing in El Salvador and finished with a top notch MBA and a new job on a new continent seems like a monumental task, even for someone who enjoys listening to his inner monologue as much as I do. And really, what is the point of a summary? If I ever manage to put all these scribblings into a book that I bore my grandchildren with, I hardly want to make life so easy for them that they can just skip to the summary.

So, remembering also that discretion is the better part of valour, I have decided to shirk the challenge of trying to put the whole year into one amazing, insightful and entertaining finale, and instead just try to get a few final reflections on the year down on paper, and get a few random highlights that I never managed to put in the blog along the way in as well.

INSEAD is nothing if not unique, and one of the things I’ve enjoyed most this year is a chance to do many things that I had never done before and will almost certainly not do again. Some of the new experiences were the sorts of things I never got round to doing at university, and honestly thought had passed me by. They included going on a sports tour, acting as a bartender and serving proper tapped beers, dabbling, ever so briefly in the politics of student government, and getting on stage in the INSEAD cabaret, once dressed once as a ballerina, and once not really dressed at all.

Others were things that that you just can’t do anywhere else. INSEAD parties have to top that list. We’ve all been to a house party, but an INSEAD party is like a house party on steroids. Firstly, there are the chateaus. Many students at INSEAD live in old converted chateaus. There may be twelve of them crammed into one small wing of the building, so its not quite the lifestyle of the rich and famous that the chateau name conjures, but they still make incredible venues for parties; even if most of the parties are actually in the garden or the barn or the stables. It won’t be until half my class are retired squillionaires that we’ll have so many friends living in castles again, and by then I am sure the parties will not be as good. And of course, there is the fact that you can host one of the parties on a Wednesday night, start it at 11pm, party through the night and know you will all share the same pain in class the next morning.

Just as enjoyable as the parties, for me, were some of the epic dinner parties. Some of the aforementioned chateaus have traditions whereby they host a dinner on one specific night. In particular the Monday night dinner at Le Vivier, able to draw on professional cooks from amongst the house’s residents, was always a memorable evening. Again, its an experience that you just can’t repeat when everyone lives in two bedroom shoeboxes in south west London.

INSEAD was also, for me anyway, a chance to do some things I never really considered in the past. One thing I particularly enjoyed about INSEAD is that you arrive completely unknown, unburdened by the preconceptions and expectations your friends and family at home may have of you. That is particularly useful if you have a history of expressing opinions loudly and forcefully, and don’t want to admit you may have changed some of those opinions. It gives you a chance to try things that are quite out of character, without anyone questioning why. For me, the biggest example of that was the Rugby Club.

Reading back over this blog recently, I was reminded that I once included the following words:
“being Australian, I've been unlucky enough to watch a lot of rugby, and quite frankly, it's a close call between rugby and accounting lectures”
That is actually the sort of opinion I’d been expressing for years, having found myself rather stuck in the tedious old debate that rages in Australia between soccer and rugby, and always siding with soccer. Joining a rugby club in Australia would have been quite a difficult thing for me to do, because it would have required me to admit to quite a few people that I might have been wrong about something. At INSEAD, no one had read the blog, so I was welcomed with open arms to the undefeated INSEAD Rugby Football Club when I decided to give it a go (though I fully expect to be harshly fined at any IRFC reunion if anyone reads it now). And that turned out to be the best decision I made at INSEAD. Not only did I discover a completely unexpected love of actually playing the game, I met many of the best friends I made at INSEAD, and went on two memorable tours, one to London, the other all the way Virginia, for the MBA rugby world championships. What goes on tour stays on tour, but I think I will have few prouder or fonder memories than running out on the fields of glory in Danville, Virginia, with my fellow warriors of the IRFC, and coming home with the undefeatedness of the club very much in tact.

There are too many other highlights to mention them all. Weekend trips to Budapest, Amsterdam, Burgundy and beyond, national weeks, playing word bingo in lectures, beers in the sunny courtyard, the magnificent cafeteria, finding 300 new facebook friends, road trips through Europe, a week in Provence, champagne power hours, every dinner at Bistro 9, Le Glasgow, the day Fonty was covered in a centimeter thick layer of ice, damaged cars with red number plates, music videos, breathtaking cabaret performances (by others, not me!) and, of course, so much wine and cheese. I will miss all of it. A particular standout was a weekend trip to the nearby Loire Valley. I can’t put my finger on it, but something about the sights, sounds, even tastes of that weekend will leave it in my mind forever. Probably something I will never be able to recapture, though I haven’t given up yet, it somehow marked the culmination of everything good about the year.

At the end of all these highlights, it is also time to reflect. An MBA is, after all, meant to be a learning experience, and it would be a poor investment if I didn’t give some serious thought to what lessons I have actually learned from the year.

Academically, there is no doubt a recovering lawyer cum junior consultant has plenty to learn about business where an MBA can provide a start. From deconstructing a perfume marketing campaign to assessing the role of innovation at Mercedes-Benz to discussing the future of the Euro, at one point with Paul Volcker, INSEAD has taught me plenty of new concepts in business. A good teacher makes a tremendous difference, and for me that teacher was in the finance department. Having previously never had an interest in nor an aptitude for finance, finding a professor that was able to make corporate financial policy both engaging and clear was certainly a true ‘value add’ of the program (more so than endless discussions about the meaning of ‘value add’).

INSEAD prides itself on diversity. “Why INSEAD? Because of the diversity.” It is the ironically homogenous response to the most commonly asked questions of aspiring students and other outsiders. And there is plenty of diversity. Only at INSEAD is the question ‘where are you from?’ usually met with a response of: ‘well… have you got a few minutes…’

It has taken me a year at INSEAD to figure out what the real benefit of all this diversity is. One of the first things you realize at INSEAD is that measuring diversity by passports is an incomplete measure at best. There may be 70 or more nationalities at INSEAD, but is a Bain consultant from Mexico really that different to a McKinsey consultant from Germany? They do, surely, have more in common with each other than with many people from different educational and socio-economic backgrounds in their own countries. However, and this may seem obvious in hindsight, at INSEAD I came to appreciate that each person carries several identities – they may have a professional and educational identity in common with many other MBAs, but each carries a unique family, cultural and social background as well, and to understand people, you have to try and understand all those identities.

The benefits of studying with people from such a diverse set of backgrounds has been two-fold. Firstly, it highlighted to me that there is a real challenge is communicating with people from different cultures which goes beyond language. Learning to get my meaning across to a study group that included French, Japanese, German, Nigerian and Uruguayan members without offending or confusing anyone was not straightforward, regardless of the fact they all spoke very good English. Whether I got any better at it is something I’ll leave to the judgment of others, but I certainly came to a better appreciation of the challenge. Secondly, it has been immense fun. From National Weeks on campus to holidays visiting students in their home countries, it has simply been an eye opening, enriching experience to learn so much about so many people and places in one year.

There is a tinge of sadness associated with the diversity factor right now too though. Once INSEAD finishes, the inevitable result of all that diversity is that your formerly tightly knit peer group is suddenly dispersed all over the world. While its great to think that I have a couch to stay on in every major city in the world, I also find it sad to think how many truly wonderful people I might never see again, sprinkled as they are everywhere from New York to Hong Kong to Sao Paulo to Dubai to Cape Town to Berlin and beyond.

Maybe the most important lesson I took from INSEAD came from having a chance to assess my career and life goals, and the paths most likely to lead me to those goals. Being full of ex-consultants, bankers, lawyers and other busy professionals, INSEAD has its share of students who come from so called ‘work hard, play hard’ cultures. These have been, in my experience, the same people who speak the most about wanting to find the elusive ‘work life balance’, and many, including me, came to INSEAD with the express aim of improving that balance.

INSEAD is also a place that people describe as ‘work-hard play-hard’, but it has turned out to be a very different culture to the corporate world. It is not about working hard at a job you hate all day and then trying to forget about it by consuming copious amounts of alcohol in overpriced and pretentious bars at night, as I found it to be in Sydney’s corporate world. Rather, it is about finding the energy, day in, day out, to do everything, from studying to traveling to sports to parties to job-hunting, with full commitment. Study may be work to some, but given the range of elective choices, to others it is very much play, representing a chance to develop your own business idea for the future or change your entire style of communication and leadership. Travel at INSEAD frequently combines job hunting, networking and tourism. Even the parties that are all too much play for some inevitably represent the culmination of weeks of work by others. Everything at INSEAD is done with a high level of intensity - it has to be to fit into a ten month MBA - and the line between work and play is impossible to define. Sleep falls by the wayside, not because of work deadlines and stress, but because it just seems a waste to be sleeping when there is so much else on offer. For the same reason, I basically haven’t watched television for a year (a big change for me). Everyone wants to make the most out of every day, because everyone is aware that their time at INSEAD is so limited. It is a lesson in living life to the fullest, and despite the sometimes exhausting nature of the experience, I found it not just fun, but deeply satisfying.

While it is not possible to extend the INSEAD experience, it is, hopefully, possible to find a similar level of engagement and satisfaction in a future life. It is thus one of the key learnings that I will take from INSEAD that finding a satisfying career and work life balance will not come from changing the balance between work and play, but by finding work that blurs the boundary between the two. That may sound like an ironic realisation from someone going back to management consulting, and whether my next step, to Bain in London, can provide that, remains to be seen. I am quietly optimistic, otherwise I would not have accepted the offer, but even if it does not, at least now I know what I’m looking for.

Before I wrap up this blog, I have to say a very important ‘Thank you’ to my parents, without whom this entire year would have been impossible. It is not just financial support, though that too was important. I would never have made it to INSEAD, or to our amazing road trip in the US before that, if not for the values and education my parents instilled in me, and all the support and guidance that they have given me throughout my entire life. So, Mum, Dad, (who are also probably the only people still reading at this point), THANK YOU.

When I started this blog I came up with the title ‘The Great Escape’ because I had just seen a repeat of the classic movie by the same name. I gave no thought to the fact that the famous escape actually ended in failure. I couldn’t call anything about the last 18 months a failure, but the title gave away what I knew deep down: that there was only one place where this adventure could end, firmly back in the real world. And that is where I now return.


P.S. I hope some people have enjoyed reading this blog somewhere near as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. Please, if you’ve read this far, and followed the blog this year, let me know, either by leaving a comment below or dropping me an email.