Course Selection and Bidding

The curriculum at Insead was restructured just after I left, but the elements are still the same.  After four months of core courses, you will have the opportunity to choose (and bid) for your electives.  Both aspects (choosing and bidding) are important to consider.

How should you choose electives?  Two schools of thought dominate.  One school recommends choosing your electives by what most interests you - in other words, let the content of the courses guide your selection.  The other school advises to choose courses based on the professors, on the theory that it's really the teacher from which the value of the course is derived.  Perhaps it's not surprising that the administration's official stance is to choose courses based on content, not on professors, because if you stop and think about it, "name" professors will be able to extract value from Insead, so it makes perfect sense that the school would take this position.

I lean towards the professor-based method.  In my experience, the students who had the most fundamental discoveries, the deepest learnings, and the most "A-ha!" moments, got them from the best professors at the school.  Yes, of course you will learn from everyone, but if you are after life-changing epiphanies, stick with the professor-based selections.

Of course, you should not choose exclusively in this fashion, else you will end up with a hodgepodge of electives with no common thread running through them.  Perhaps a good strategy is to decide what theme or leitmotif you wish to follow for half of your electives, and leave the other half for experimentation with other subjects.  Remember that part of the beauty of business school is that you can expose yourself to subject matter that you normally wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.  If you are an engineer, take some marketing courses.  If you are a finance professional, take some organizational behaviour courses.  You get the idea.

What electives are mandatory?  Precious few, and you will be a better judge than I.  That said, I urge you to take Negotiations Analysis.  This course allows you to hone your skills at negotiations in a structured setting, with simulations against your classmates.  This is what business school is made for: providing an environment for learning that simply cannot be duplicated outside of a campus setting.  Take this course, and you will use its concepts throughout the rest of your professional life.  And at the end of the programme, when you negotiate you job offer, you will realize how powerful and valuable the learning experience can be.

Who are the best professors?  A good place to start is the list of professors who have been nominated for "Best Core Course" and "Best Elective" awards, handed out at each promotion's graduation.  If you have been nominated for these awards, it is because you have seriously rocked some people's worlds.  But do ask around to the senior promotion, as there are other professors who are incredibly good but haven't broken into the (rather limited) group of professors who seem to get nominated year after year.

The following chart may help you, but remember that this is only my opinion, and your mileage will most certainly vary.  I've had personal experience with most of the names here, which is why it is not comprehensive; it's notably short on finance and marketing professors.  Use it as a guide and nothing more.

The Usual Suspects	Brilliant but Unrecognized
Michael Brimm	Jack Soll
Linda Brimm	Miguel Brendl
Antonio Fatás	José-Luis Alvarez
Harald Hau	Igor Vaysman
Karel Cool	Philippe Delquié
Ingemar Dierickx	Steve Monahan
Ron Adner
Subramanian Rangan
Mary O’Sullivan
Fernando Bartolomé
David Young
Anil Gaba

How much should you bid for courses?  As much as you think they are worth, and then add 20 or 30 points (out of the 200 you are allocated).  There is nothing worse than missing the bid cutoff by a couple points.  It's much better to overbid a couple times, getting exactly what you want and running out of bid capital, than to underbid a couple times, never getting what you want, and graduating with large amounts of bid capital.  The bid system for course allocation is, like democracy, the worst system but for all the others.  Think ahead, and try to keep points for those "must-have" courses, and then just spend them.  They're not worth anything when you leave, so try not to leave with any.