Back to school - my first module with INSEAD

Going back to school is a great experience when you are in the mid phase of your career. Working in the US for the last 20yrs, I have had numerous interactions with the different customers and partners in the various roles that I have played in my engineering life cycle starting from a core application developer to an implementation specialist to a project manager and a product manager. Though I work with the teams at Germany, Bangalore and Shanghai on a regular basis - my interactions are mostly virtual or brief in-person interactions. In the past 3-4yrs, I have been involved in various customer workshops not only in the US but in Europe and Asia as well focused on Machine Learning and AI. This led me to the thinking of fine tuning my business skills and soft skills. While researching on the various education programs across the globe, I ventured into analyzing the different leadership and business management programs offered by the top 10 business schools around the globe. I finalized to pick a program from Wharton's or Harvard or INSEAD or ISB. Then I analyzed the programs on 2 different metrics such as the networking opportunities and class room sessions with the reputed professors. INSEAD is the only business school that global presence with campuses around the globe - France, Singapore and Abu Dhabi. They are now opening their 4th location in North America at San Francisco. Added to this, the INSEAD program had more in-class room sessions totaling to around 51days. These 2 aspects made my decision easier to focus my thoughts on picking INSEAD as the business school for my leadership and business management program. Now the next step is to get accepted into the program and hence I had to manage my recommendations and detailed work experiences, essays and a couple of interviews to finally get accepted into the program.

There are a total of 6 modules where you will need to be available for classroom sessions at the different locations of the INSEAD campuses across the globe. Each of the class room sessions are about 8 to 9 days long and count towards your completion of the 1yr course - due to completion in July 2020.

The first module happened at the campus in Singapore in the 3rd week of August, it was a refreshing experience going back to school and meeting with people from different backgrounds, work experiences across different industries and functions. The average work experience in the class is about 16 to 17yrs! I am pleasantly surprised with the warm reception at the INSEAD campus and the opening dinner outlined a detailed journey into our 1yr program by the professors Paddy Padmanabhan and Bala Vissa. We started the 1yr journey with a team outing getting to know others better and then took off into our regular sessions.

Leadership skills and overview - by Ian Woodward (Prof. at INSEAD and director of Advanced management programs)

The first session delivered by Prof. Ian Woodward around basic leadership skills and leadership journey for half a day opened up the program and gave us a sneak peak into what to expect in the course of the year. In the next few paras I will briefly discuss the key learnings during each of these sessions. Starting with the first session on Leadership skills.

Some of the key learnings included the different altitudes of leadership - the 50,000ft view (strategic thinking), 50ft view (building a strategy) and 5ft view (self awareness). The session opened up with an overview and discussion about the 3 key leadership gaps in our technologically disruptive era suchas:

• Strategic thinking and execution.

• Emotional Quotient and behaviors.

• Communication and Engagement.

Ofcourse it is always true that genuine strategic thinkers always connect better emotionally. Some of the key reasons for the leadership gaps at the senior level are due to digitization, algorithms and disruptive technology. It is true that while half of the discussion is happening in the unconscious brain, only the other half is happening in the conscious brain. Most of the times, the first 3-10 secs we make impressions when we meet a new person or encounter a new thing/activity. This is not fair! Outside shape of the faces make good impressions and we tend to make good connections with round and baby faces on the first impressions. Hence starting to constantly think about activities going on in your unconscious brain is really important. It is important for the unconscious mind to be brought to the conscious brain by constantly working on it which helps in the changing the bias for better outcomes. Intuition with Analysis always helps you to make better decisions at any time.

Context is the key during any of the interactions during your leadership journey and decision making. The VUCA way which is changed to VUCAD (Volatility, Uncertainity, Complexity, Ambiguity, Diversity) is now replaced with D-VUCAD by adding the "Disruption" at the beginning. It is always a balancing act between managing the strengths and talents. Connecting the 3 levels of the leadership from the 50,000ft level to the 50ft level to the 5ft level helps in making better decisions as a leader. It is always important on how you frame or start your conversations while convincing senior leaders on important discussions and tasks. 

Looking to open up the mind and for various other possibilities so that strategic thinking can start to happen. We ended the first session by creating a personal leadership agenda, a PLA document in the context of Leadership.  This PLA is a living document thru' the entire life of the 1yr course and needs to be updated before making the final submission after the last module at Fontainebleau INSEAD location in France.

With a very good opening and overview into the leadership journey kick-started by the esteemed professor Ian Woodward, we continued to the next sessions.

Art of story telling - with Neal Bearden (Associate Prof. of Decision Sciences at INSEAD).

The second session is delivered by Neal Bearden on the art of story telling and how to make a good first impression with your story. There have been detailed discussions on not only presenting one self but also identifying and portraying the fundamental objective behind one's key ideas etc. 

As part of the decision making process in the leadership journey - cuts, intents and stories form the crux of how you can get better. While "cuts" focus on the decisions, "intents" - focus on the purpose, desires and objectives, "stories" - identify how we make sense of the things.

As you all know there are different ways of presenting oneself, a couple of them reviewed in here:

You should always focus on the subset to get the spotlight. Most often we don't see the things as they are but we see things as we are! This creates misunderstandings etc., and hence using the tools to reduce or remove these misunderstandings is necessary. There is always a difference between the speaker's mind and the listener's mind - reducing the GAP raises the awareness. Instrumental rationality brings up the objective of what you want the most as your fundamental objective.
Identifying the fundamental objective and a brief supposed discussion between the Coach and the Client:

• Coach: What do you want?
• Client: I want to start a company.
• Coach: Why do you want that?
• Client: Because I want to work on my own.
• Coach: Why do you want that?

This kind of questioning leads to the value constraints and finally maps out the key objectives. The questioning would be WIMTBGF (Will it make the boat go faster?). There's big psychology behind the real vs imagined constraints. "Preferences are hypothesis"!

As part of the discussion dealing with spotlight and networking to address the fundamental objectives and the reasoning behind reaching the goal, it is always important to ask "What do you want?" and keep asking "why" until you identify the minimum achievable delta (MAD). It could be organized into 4 categories:

• Career
• Health/fitness
• Relationship/family
• Personal

What actions would make me reach my MAD (minimum achievable delta).

There have been a lot of group exercises in making us understand how to build and expand the social,networking skills and identify some key fundamental objectives.

At the end of the second day, we were introduced with another professor Gouli Chen who spent time with us for the next couple of days on Strategy and Value creation.

Strategy and Value Creation - by Gouli Chen (Associate Professor of Strategy at INSEAD).

We had a smooth transition from story telling into "Strategy and Value Creation" which is very important on how to identify the best strategy and value creation around the products. The initial discussion and overview started with how to the create the demand, then grow the demand, once the maturity stage is reached, how to you re-position and compete in the market. 

There are a few examples like the Kodak etc., who ignored the lead they had in the current market and resisted to innovate. When the competition gets fierce, it is termed as a "red" ocean, this is when firms try need to re-innovate and create these new "blue" oceans which are newer markets that even the core customers are not aware of! A beautiful example would be the iPhone creation which is a new requirement and a "blue" ocean is created out of it.

Leveraging the 6 path framework would help creating a better strategy:

• Look at different industries.
• Look across strategic groups.
• Look across chain of buyers.
• Look across offerings that are complementary.
• Look across emotional functional appeal.
• Look across time trend.

The typical triangle would be the Users <-> Purchasers <-> Influencers.

Generally core customers would want to have more for less - this is when the strategy would be to move to the non-customers with the help of the ERRC (Eliminate, Reduce, Raise, Create) strategy leveraging market competing vs market creating strategy. Using the ERRC model would really help create better strategies since you could easily identify eliminating the unwanted features, reduce the unnecessary costs, raise importance on the topic of interest, Create newer features that would be more helpful. A fine example would be the movement of iPhone to iPad. There was no real need for iPad but Apple has beautifully done this. 

The most important aspect is how to identify the segment of new non-customers that could be brought-in but at the same time leveraging the ERRC model and making sure the core customers would still want to stay on with the product.

Finally after a day and half intense discussions and group exercises with case studies on the topic of Strategy and value creation, it was time to move on to the last session of the module 1 on "Networking in Leadership around Sales and Marketing".

Networking in Leadership - with Bala Vissa (Professor of Entrepreneurship at INSEAD).

While we are getting into the final session of the module 1 on the topics of "Networking in Leadership", there was a lot of excitement on the topic since Bala is also known for driving the key Entrepreneurship related programs at INSEAD as well as he is the director of the current Program along with Paddy Padmanabhan. Hence we as a team were more excited about the final 2 days of the module 1.

While the Performance management is focused on "Know-how", "Know-what", the Social capital dwells with "Know-who" and taking this further, Change dynamics/Political Capital deals with "Know-when". All these 3 different categories are equally important.
Handling inefficiency, argumentative and poor interpersonal skills is very important which helps to analyze and reorganize the situation rather than run into a panic mode and go tangential to the current situation. 
There is one very important thing that is very visible - focus on what is not being said becomes very subtler as you grower higher in the ranks in an organization. A few key attributes which are very important to quickly learn as you grow into the leadership roles:

• Knowledge.
• New skills/ effective communicator.
• Attitudes.
• Ambition.
• Values.
• Networks.

These attributes again would typically come from the following:

• Work experience / future work experience.
• Formal education.
• Mentor / Coach / Support network.
• Family / upbringing.
• Personality.

Networking is a connection with relationships in doing the right things and not doing illegal or unethical things but focusing on trust and drawing up expertise to access where it is needed the most and makes the other people reach out mutually. Different types of networks exist as we all know, it not always advisable to have just dense networks but it is always good to have extensions to additional sparse networks too which would be mutually helpful. 

Change dynamics / political capital is another important aspect since personality is very much dependent on the trustworthiness, persistence and approach towards task management. A general strategy process should tested for the business models employed in it - an intended strategy could be top-down but there could be an emergent strategy with a bottom-up approach for better results. 

Brief discussion around Corporate entrepreneurship with the examples of 3M, Google, Amazon, IBM, BP, SAP was very helpful since the learnings explained the core strategy:

• Respect for individual.
• Make a little/ sell a little. 
• Accept a "well intention failure".
• Share/leverage resources.
• High standards with stretch objectives.

Some of these company examples restored corporate cultures while encouraging corporate entrepreneurship by institutionalizing corporate entrepreneurship. This takes us to another topic of the Innovators DNA - why are some people more creative than others, how do you nurture talent vs natural talent etc. Another innovative way of learning would be - Question, observe, experiment, network!

While discussing on the topic of change management, a few important points to be noted - how to use influence and persuasion, how to handle decision making vs implementation and the 3 important things to be taken care such as change in reality, change in attitudes, and how to implement change. Managing change is a big process while reviewing the strategy and understanding the S-curve dynamics.

Political mindfulness and political capital go hand-in-hand with looking honest and being honest since politics with networking are to be used for the rightful reasons by imposing rightful checks and balances on one's own power!

If there is one thing that could be said - human being is a social animal who is dependent on networking from cradle to grave, if leveraged properly can create wonders and give back greatly to the community.

We ended Bala's session with a lot of group exercises and intense discussions on the case studies presented.

The module 2 of the INSEAD leadership program is scheduled to happen in September 2019 with focus on soft skills such as decision making, team building, being situational and negotiation tactics.