The day started with amazing and creative presentations to counsellors and parents, of all the work the teams had done in restructuring the company that they acquired, while handling extreme hiccups and challenges. The teams also presented their plans for future expansion and allocation of profits for redevelopment of their newly acquired company.

The graduation ceremony was quite emotional but awe inspiring. Incredible speeches were made by some of the students, all of which were received by the audience with standing ovations. Young minds are indeed the most pure and creative and that really showed throughout the programme, with brilliant ideas and creative thought processes.

The winner was announced after an exhilarating collective drumroll and celebrations followed, not just for the winners, but for all participants who completed this amazing programme with success, countless lessons and take-aways but also lifelong friendships and unforgettable memories.

Professor Ron Adner gave an inspiring lecture about ecosystem disruption, including invaluable lessons about what leadership essentially means and how to becoming a good leader involves evolving with ever changing ecosystems. He said; “the leader’s job is to give others the reason to decline contending for the lead”.

The teams then passionately worked until late, on the last touches of their presentations for Friday morning. They used very limited materials like coloured paper and whiteboards to present and explain their progress from the beginning of their simulation, to the end of their first hundred days of running Maywood Cycles.

Visiting Station F in Paris today has been truly inspiring for everyone. We learned about how start-up incubators function and INSEAD alumni currently at Station F walked us through their own start-ups, from carbon credit evolution, to apps that enhance productivity and focus. An important take-away was that, in a world that increasingly appreciates creativity and innovation, it is entirely possible to start from zero and create something amazing.

After lunch at Station F, we also visited the Google office in Paris, where we also discovered the Google arts and culture department. They are currently using AI and machine learning to digitize works of art that are currently in museums, for educational and cultural purposes. Observation of paintings and all kinds of works of art becomes an experience even better than looking at exploring such artifacts in real life.

Miguel Lobo had the floor today, with lectures and social experiments regarding anchoring and decision making. He talked about cognitive biases and intuition errors that can be easily avoided with regard to statistical analyses.

Through a social experiment assessing overconfidence, Professor Lobo concluded that the group is “spectacularly ignorant about how ignorant they are”. In the context of universal biases this is largely common; we expanded on how these natural biases that lead to errors can be limited, and how overconfidence can be reduced by acknowledging how little we know as individuals, as Socrates described: “all I know is that I know nothing”.

After a nice mindfulness session break, airline Captain Alex Kuhlman spoke about the pertinence of communication, decision making and leadership from the fascinating perspective of the cockpit of an airplane. Shocking videos and simulations of conversations between pilot and co-pilot during famous airplane crashes in history really showcased how easy it is to overlook the importance of communication and collaboration in extremely high-pressure circumstances. The lecture ended on the hopeful note that feedback is key in evolving the style and channels of communication, that in turn ensure effective management and leadership inside and outside of the cockpit.

Monday morning kicked off with the students negotiating the acquisition of Maywood cycles with their counsellor’s who were roleplaying as Emily or Sebastian Maywood. The creative accounting practices that some of the students used to justify their valuations of the company were very interesting, especially to those of us who have taken finance courses. They were given two 15 minute sessions to formulate a deal and sign an agreement.

After an hour of work on their restructuring of the company, the students were greeted by a banker (played by the counsellors) who challenged them about their short term cash flow troubles. The aim was to catch the students off guard and assess how well they could think on their feet in order to satisfy a concerned counterpart. A lot of them learned a good lesson from their performance and gained a lot of understanding about cash management in a company.

Next the students were subjected to a meeting with an angry customer who had almost been delivered 100 poisonous bikes. The counsellors had to be calmed down by the teams and the focus of the interaction lied on problem solving under pressure. The students really enjoyed the challenge, some of them were able to fully restore the customers faith in the company.

As a final meeting, the students had to navigate a PR disaster. Immediately after one of their workers had been injured in their factory, they were interviewed by a BBC journalist who knew about the accident. The questions were written to test the students in their confidence and perceptiveness in their positions as CEO, CFO, etc…

In between their meetings/interviews the students used their time to work on the restructuring of the company, essentially simulating the first 50 days of their ownership and management of Maywood cycles. There was a lot of discussion, brainstorming, emailing and endless fun.

Sunday mornings are for sleeping in of course; and we did that right! We visited the Fontainebleau Château and learned a bit about the Napoleonic era in the late morning.

We then had a nice afternoon full of activities. We went into the forest and split into groups that either did zipline or played paintball in crazy fields. It was really interesting to observe the application of teamwork and leadership skills in a context like paintball where everything happens so fast and coordination is difficult but key.

In the evening, the group spent two hours working on YFCD, with the pressure building up for Monday’s negotiations for the acquisition of Maywood Cycles.

For the first day of the weekend, we paradoxically woke up earlier than we would for class. But it was for a much more exciting purpose; going to Paris. Three tours were going on in the morning, where the whole of summer@INSEAD was walking around Paris, whether it was Montmartre, Le Marais, or the Historical tour.

The evening was full with preparations for the talent show, organising all the acts and picking the judges. The turnout was amazing, a really heartwarming atmosphere prevailed, despite the presence of the judges. There were people playing the spoons, reading out their original poetry, dancing, and singing. Our winner Kalista said it was “everyone’s energy that made the talent show so beautiful”.

. 

Today’s lecturer, Guillaume Roels, took the students on a journey through operational excellence and how to achieve it. Most of them were listening attentively and were eager to find out how they could use this knowledge in their simulation of the Maywood cycles acquisition. A highlight of the session was the VR tour of a french tractor factory which gave the students detailed insight into what efficiency looks like in action.

Furthermore, a detailed digital simulation of Benihana restaurants allowed the students to compete against each other to maximise the profit of the restaurant. They were able to change a variety of aspects of how the restaurant operates like opening times, Bar seating availability and even whether or not there was a happy hour. The winning teams were quite close and Guillaume praised how they were able to balance utilisation and profit to create the best possible model.

After a break. the students were greeted on zoom by professor Ziv Carmon, a behavioural economist who introduced Nudge theory and how it could be applied to improve our lives and make the world a better place. As the day came to an end, the students gathered in their YFCD teams and began tackling the Maywood cycles acquisition. there are a lot fo exciting ideas!

INSEAD’s very own Gandhi, Professor Subramanian Rangan, gave fascinating lectures that left us questioning the way we see the world, and even ourselves.

He analysed societal progress in a realistic yet zoomed-out way, talking about the present as a gray area between the old and the new, where we can either embrace change, move on and make an impact or get left behind. Interesting contrasts came up in the interactive lecture like ownership vs leadership or peace vs prosperity. Society, in his view, has moved from requiring leaders, to needing people who own up to their responsibilities, their actions and their outcomes; while peace and prosperity have given way to propriety. This means that fairness, ethics and integrity are increasingly key elements of the moral reasoning that defines propriety and hence promotes prosperity in the modern world.

Interesting questions about character and moral dilemmas came into play and the students were particularly engaged in ethical dilemmas like apple’s plan to sacrifice privacy in the interest of surveilling child pornography.

Today was a truly excellent guide to how the traditional role of leaders is evolving and how it should continue to evolve, following public practical moral reasoning.

Hilke Plassmann, INSEAD’s Octapharma Chaired Professor of Decision Neuroscience, talked to us this morning about the basics of behavioural science and the key elements to understanding human behaviour. In this context the students were rearranged into different groups to solve a digital escape game called “Paristopia”. A lot of constructive thinking, creativity and laughter went into the activity, and the outcomes of their performanced were later analysed by the Professor.

Professor Plassmann carried out an interesting social experiment with the students, using Virtual Reality to examine how the group responded social nudging and how that was reflected in their own decision making.

Our amazing sports team later organised a sports bootcamp, including a cycle of exercises like burpees, pushups and abs. The turnout of the bootcamp was great with students and counselors splitting up into teams of three and sharing a large amount of exercises in a coordinated way, before crossing the finish line.

Tonight was also Karaoke Night, where the energy was sky high despite the academically challenging day everyone had. Amazing performances like traditional country songs from Ukraine, Germany and the Netherlands kept the crowd lively until the end, where everyone merged into one act to sing the last song.