50% down, or is it 90% down?

As you all know, and as all of my INSEAD friends can't help thinking about, our journey together is getting closer and closer to an end. Two weeks of P5 are already down. To me, that means that half of my P5 classes are down as well.

In two weeks, I took two classes summing up to 1.5 credits: Value Creation in Luxury & Fashion, and Your First Hundred Days (YFCD).

Value Creation in Luxury & Fashion aimed at providing us with a better understanding of those two sectors - Luxury and Fashion -, while putting us in contact with one or two relevant players. In fact, this class's big event was an afternoon field trip to the headquarters of Hermès. Our professors gave us one day and a half to prepare, in groups, a presentation on cuteness to be presented to a few managers at Hermès. We had to answer one of three questions:

1. Can one be cute without being girly?
2. Is cute universal?
3. Is cute a product or an experience?

The assignment felt a bit too fluffy and short but, in the end, the field trip was interesting and, somehow, we managed to bring some value to the Hermès leadership team. We got to see two of their  (very manual) production lines, and received a free perfume in the end. Other than that, the course was a bit disappointing in the sense that the topics were a bit vague and I didn't feel I learnt much. On the bright side, it showed me that neither luxury or fashion seem to have the right fit for me. They are mainly intuition driven, are too subjective and too little efficiency driven. Not really my thing... 

YFCD, in turn, was a really cool class. There's not much I can share with the world about it, as all of us had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. If I share too much, future INSEAD classes will not enjoy this course as much as I did. All in all, it is a week-long class in which teams of five manage the first hundred days of a firm after its acquisition. The team of five is composed by a CEO, a CFO, an Operations Manager, a Marketing & Sales Manager and a HR Manager. My team of five was a true bomb - me as the CEO, Zé Viana Baptista as CFO, Tony Feghali as Ops Manager, Helena Mateu as Commercial Manager, and Sid Ram as HR. Hell, we had fun! We had some eventful days as a team, with problems ranging from strikes to accidents in the factory, clients copying our products to suppliers not interested in make business with us anymore, union leaders annoying us to having to manage the relationship with political entities, phone calls in the middle of the night, and more. Our version of YFCD was even more eventful than what it usually is as we had a short version of it (3 days instead of 8), with the INSEAD ball in between. Three of my team members were totally smashed on the last day. We did not win the competition but I would dare to say we had fun and did a reasonably good job.

With this, I finished two classes in two weeks and managed to come home for 10 days, where I have been organising our wedding, recruiting, and enjoying my family and friends.