The Blogger Learns to Accept the French Aversion to Free Plastic Bags

 

 

Trivia question: “What commodity do the French value above all else?” If you guessed baguette or price-controlled AOC wine, you deserve an honourable mention– but the real answer is plastic bags. I thought I had arrived at INSEAD with everything I could possibly need for the year… 2 financial calculators, an athletic-cut business suit, shorts for the warm weather, and gloves for the winter. I even brought a year’s worth of dental floss and razor blades figuring that drugstores here would charge an arm and a leg for ‘em.

In hindsight I should have thought to fill my suitcase with plastic bags. For someone like me who grew up in a country where supermarket cashiers smiled, bagged your groceries for you, and commenced each conversation with, “Paper or Plastic?”, France can be a bitter pill to swallow. Here you are expected to bag your own groceries under the watchful eye of cashiers who hiss at you if you take too long. Forget about free grocery bags. The supermarkets charge you for plastic bags if you can convince the cashier to sell you them. I am starting to think that cashiers in France are penalized by having the cost of plastic bags deducted from their hourly wage.

There is of course an environmental rationale behind the anti-plastic bag campaign, but the trade-off is that it requires consumers to carefully plan their shopping trips in advance. Because INSEAD participants lead busy lives, grocery shopping tends to be a spontaneously impulse event. I keep forgetting to show up at the grocery store with my own bags and thus I am forced to endure the same tortured ritual each time… the cashier scowls me with a disapproving look and reluctantly sells me some of her cherished plastic bags. On several occasions, they have even gone so far as to lecture me on the new legislation that will completely forbid all forms of plastic bags.

I just nod my head and smile… and dream of living in my version of Atlantis, where bags are free and plentiful, where the cashier does all the work, and I am free to peruse the latest celebrity gossip in the tabloids by checkout counter.

P.S. I found the caption photo by typing “Groceries” in Google Image. It pays to turn off your “Safe Search”!

The Blogger Hits the Books

The welcome parties are all over and the first semester at INSEAD is in full swing. I had heard varied opinions on the difficulty of the MBA program, but now I am qualified to express my own opinion on the subject. The first semester is crammed into 2 months and includes a lot of quantitative material. Nothing especially complicated, but if you’re like me and have never taken microeconomics and are not 100% comfortable solving linear equations with time constraints, then the workload is tough.

Most of us are used to mastering concepts and subjects, either in school or on the job… but the INSEAD program doesn’t give you enough time to feel entirely comfortable with any one topic. Each lecture moves quickly onto a new subject, and participants are forced to prioritize and extract the main points. You are only expected to perform in the middle of the pack, but of course here you are running with the wolves so the standards are high. I am retaining the key concepts, but I need to spend more time brushing up on my technical skills in order to pass the exams.

The Wall Street Journal MBA Recruiter’s Top Picks Rankings were just released, with ESADE on top of the international rankings. I am preparing a blog posting on the methodology and utility of the survey, but I’m finding it difficult to collect accurate data on ESADE’s recruiting stats. So far the most recent numbers I’ve been able to find, show that in 2004, McKinsey and Company hired only 2 ESADE MBA students, Citigroup another 2, and BCG 1. These numbers significantly trail INSEAD, where last year as you will recall, McKinsey, Bain, and BCG together hired 150+MBAs! I have e-mailed the Career Services office at ESADE, asking for a copy of their recruiting numbers, and I hope to share them with you in the near future.

Today I met my fellow blogger Res Ipsa for the first time. I had hoped to speak to her longer and swap stories about our past lives and discuss INSEAD blogging, but I had to leave for class.

P.S. That’s not my picture above… I look far more stressed out

The Blogger Reflects on his Blog Statistics and “McKinsey & Company” as a Key Driver of Traffic

I generally prefer not to bore my readers with arcane details about my blog statistics, but for those of you who are interested, the following search terms led readers to my blog, this week:

million dollar swimming pools

earning a mba in finance at age 50

renaissance club fontainebleau

Sex capital of the world

But by far, the two searches that I see most common are “thinkpad disable client security setup” and “getting hired mckinsey”. Lenovo, if you’re reading this, you need to make your laptops more user-friendly… As for McKinsey & Company, it appears that internet surfers just can’t get enough about “The Firm”. My all time most popular posting was my analysis of the 2006 INSEAD Careers Decision Report. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I could significantly increase my traffic and page rank if every post I wrote on this blog was about McKinsey & Company and INSEAD.

For the uninitiated, INSEAD is one of the top 3 feeder schools to McKinsey & Company. A significantly percentage of company sponsored students at INSEAD are former McKinsey business analysts and McKinsey remains the single largest employer of INSEAD MBA graduates. Last year McKinsey hired 75 INSEAD MBAs (including returning students) and percentage-wise, a greater proportion of INSEAD MBAs are hired each year by McKinsey than from Harvard Business School. There are several reasons for this, but most significant is the unmatched geographic demographic of the INSEAD class. Simply put, INSEAD draws the best students from around the world, and after graduation they disperse around the globe. As the world’s most prestigious international consulting firm, McKinsey values INSEAD MBA graduates and continues to hire them at an impressive rate.

The Blogger Posts His Suggestion for the Official INSEAD Theme Song

This song should definitely trigger positive memories of jaunts to Paris for those of us at INSEAD in Fontainebleau… or maybe just bad memories of Kraftwerk and electronic music.

The Blogger Explores Fitness Options in Fontainebleau

The picture above is presented not merely for your titillation, or to appeal to the prurient interest of my loyal readers. It is intended for illustrative purposes, to show the compulsory swim attire for men at the Stade Nautique de la Faisanderie, the swimming pool adjacent to INSEAD. For reasons that non-Europeans will never fully understand, men are obligated to wear homoerotic bathing suits. I know this, because I dropped by the pool to pick up a brochure and I was politely explained the “rules”. The attendant at the counter provided me with some irrational explanation that the pool fears men will run around and sweat in the Fontainebleau National Forest, and then wear their sweaty shorts in their pristine swimming pool. The solution is to require you to wear a skimpy swimsuit that you would never be caught dead wearing or using anywhere else! (Hint to European men: Don’t wear Speedos when vacationing in America unless you have abs like a Calvin Klein underwear model.) In addition to the “no-bermuda” shorts rule, everyone must wear bathing caps. Go figure a country which is obsessed with the hygiene of swimming pools, but turns a blind eye to dog owners who gleefully fill the streets and sidewalks with merde.

My fitness options now appear to be: 1) jogging or biking in the Forest; or 2) Working out with weights in the INSEAD gym. My inside sources tell me that the dated INSEAD gym is going to be completely renovated in January 2008, thanks to a generous gift from the INSEAD Renaissance Club.