Imagine that you bought a company out and walked into its office on the first day as the new owner, only to find that half the workers have gone on strike. To make it worse, you find that your customers are awaiting order shipments beyond the due date and just then, you unknowingly end up offending your assistant with a rude remark.

INSEAD Europe (France) and Asia (Singapore)’s one-year MBA program has a course that teaches you how to handle situations like these using an exciting reality show based format. Called ‘Your First 100 Days’ (abbreviated to YFCD, the ‘C’ standing for the Roman 100), the course has the kind of reputation that makes applicants write it as the reason for joining INSEAD in their application essays.

Over 10 days of real enacted drama and stress, student groups acting as CEOs, directors of finance, directors of marketing, etc find their feet in a newly acquired mock company even as things keep going wrong.

PaGaLGuY drills into the course in an interview with Prof Patrick Turner, who teachers the course at INSEAD’s Singapore campus.

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How did the need for the ‘Your first 100 days’ course arise and how did it end up being a simulations-based course?

INSEAD already has a course which is all about acquiring a business but doing so as an individual or group of individuals rather than as a big company. This is a 17-year-old course which teaches how you go about finding, valuing and buying a business. Not many people realise that individuals can buy companies. We see it as a way of being an entrepreneur without starting up a company or having a great idea. There is also a mergers and acquisitions course which is about one company buying another company.

Ten years ago, the guy who was in charge of the entrepreneurship department at INSEAD said to me and my colleague, “Why don’t you come up with a follow-on course?” Since the first course was about acquiring a business, we thought that the follow-on course naturally had to be – what happens when you acquire that business. The one thing which we were pretty clear about is that we didn’t want a traditional course based on case studies. At some point, we had the breakthrough idea that instead of having cases where students look at what other companies are doing, why don’t we have a huge case where the students are the people doing things, where they have to play the roles of managers who acquire a mock company. Once we got that central concept established, it was then a question of building up a storyline of what events did we want to put in, what things should happen and so on. We were struggling for a name for the course and the guy who’d asked us to do it in the first place said, “Why don’t you just call it Your First 100 Days?” And that is what it was called.

So in ‘Your First 100 Days’, people join the course as teams. So your team has a CEO, a finance director, an operations director and a marketing director. Each team is managing the same company but they are doing it in parallel universes. Various things happen during the 10 day duration of the course. They have to handle the situations as they come up. There is quite a lot of role-play, including by people from outside. For instance, we have people come in and role-play lawyers, bank managers, etc. That’s where we got the idea where we are putting them in a situation where they have act out what they would do. That’s why we called it a reality show.

What’s a typical scenario given to students at the start of the course?

It’s fairly logical. If you think about what you’re going to be doing in your first 100 days (after acquiring a new company), you’re going to be talking to customers, bank managers, etc. You will have to get people on board. People in the new company don’t know you and have to get used to you. All those kinds of interactions are the main source for the specific things that go on in the course. For example, right after they begin they get a message from one of the middle managers that the previous management didn’t honour a promise and therefore what is the new management going to do about it. Perhaps there is a customer who says there was a huge mess on the last delivery and now he wants a refund. You are new in this company and you don’t really know what is right and what is wrong. So how do you handle such situations? It’s all about that.

How do students react to these problems? Are they supposed to give you written answers or do they key it into a simulation software?

There are computer simulations where people will make decisions and put the answers into a computer. But what also happens in this course is that there is a lot of email correspondence. For example, if you are a finance director, you’re given an organisation chart on the first day. And there you will see that the accounting lady is called Lucy. So you might want to write to Lucy saying, “Dear Lucy, just to touch base, we’ll be meeting tomorrow. I’m looking forward to working with you.” Then Lucy will send a reply saying, “Thank you for your mail. Looking forward to working with you as well.” All of this email traffic goes back and forth. There is actual role-play too, which I call set pieces. The dynamic of the course is a mixture of all these things. We also have daily meetings with each team where we comment on how they’re doing. They can ask questions and even do other role-plays if they want to. So there’s a lot of direct interactive stuff going on.

Not only does real role-play drama happen, we also take videos of it. We put up all these videos on a website so everybody can see what they did. We nominate the best performers and we also have a hall of fame. So there are four learning opportunities from each role-play – playing the part, watching yourself later, watching the best in the class and then watching the best ever doing it.

Are these videos public?

None.

Are there edgy moments during the course, do people get excitable and do crazy stuff?

I’ve got various moments. Let me go back to the email system we have. If you are one of the team, you can write emails to anyone you like. You can write to Barack Obama if you want to and you might get a response back. There are two responses possible – one is either from the recipient concerned and the other one is a system we call Notes from Course Management (NCM), which represents us, the course instructors. We will reply as NCM when we want to make a comment on what’s going on, we will act like mentors and ask them to think it through.

On one occasion, one of the finance directors had some bad news about the bank balance. And he wrote to Lucy, shifting the blame on her saying, “I thought I asked you to do this. This is not good enough and we need to sort out responsibilities. In the meantime, I want you to send me these three reports.”

Instead of responding as Lucy, I wrote back as Course Management saying, “Lucy sends you these three reports. She then disappears to the ladies toilet clutching her handkerchief to her eyes.”

Three minutes later, the finance director replied saying, “Dear Lucy, I just re-read what I wrote. I’m sorry I did go over the top. I want to assure you that we all appreciate the good work that you’re doing.”

Such moments make the course absolute magic.

So what are the some of the biggest disasters that can happen to you in the first 100 days after you buy a company?

Nothing which is not realistic. The company which we use for the course is an English-based company in the UK. So people don’t have volcanoes opening up underneath the factory or earthquakes or Martians landing.

But anything which could conceivably happen happens – it snows and that makes it difficult to get customers’ orders. Students do get paranoid as the course develops as people start wondering what’s going to happen next, but nothing in all that we do is unrealistic and students admit that afterwards. Everything that happens is credible and plausible.

We even stop short of things that could happen. Students are sometimes expecting factories to burn down, but it doesn’t happen. They do run into relatively serious things but they have to handle it. That’s what they are supposed to learn.

I’m trying hard not to answer your question lest I give away too much.

One of the INSEAD student blogs says about YFCD “the class is notorious for high stress levels, late night calls and a lot of rather hard work. I must say it’s rather intensive.” What makes for such high stress levels?

It’s a funny thing actually because all we’re doing is making them learn by pretending. And I’m not sure of the high stress levels but a lot of things happen in a fairly short period of time. We’re also talking about students whose average age is 28 or 29 years. So they all have work experience but they haven’t handled such situations before. Sometimes, they don’t know how to react. To that extent, there’s a high stress level. The experience itself is pretty intense and people tend to live it like that. When our course finishes, I get students telling me that they feel deprived and have withdrawal symptoms. Where are all the emails from Lucy and the other staff? It occupies so much of their life through the 10 days so intensely that there’s a hole when it stops.

What are the major learning outcomes of this course?

The major learning outcome is how to deal with people, the sort of things that can happen in your first three months at a company. I’ll give you an example. If somebody new comes into a company, people will try and take advantage of that newness. They will try and perhaps hustle the person into doing or promising something that shouldn’t have been done or promised. That is complicated by the fact that most of us, when we go somewhere new, we want to be liked by people although we may not be totally conscious of it. That makes us even more vulnerable to people trying to bully us into doing something, not necessarily aggressively but telling us to do something in a hurry which we might not usually have done. It teaches dealing with people and related issues. Sometimes, a student will back off and we will tell him that he can’t back off. It’s mostly about dealing with people and people problems.

How is performance evaluated in this course?

It’s relatively complicated. We need 35-36 role-players for every run of the course. On one level, the people who come into the role-play will rate the teams that they have been seeing on the lines of how effective they were, how well they used the time, how successful was the meeting. That will give them a score. There are about half a dozen of those.

On another level, I will be rating people on how motivated they look and to what extent do they get into the course and show commitment to the course. They also get rated by each other. At the end, each team member has to give a score to the CEO and the CEO has to give a score to each team member. The overall grade is a composite grade composed of all these elements.

What is the way in which someone can perform badly in this course?

By switching off. If a student doesn’t enter into the spirit of the simulation, they’re not going to get anything out of it. It happens very occasionally – in the last 10 years, it has happened 2-3 times. In other circumstances, they get second thoughts. For example, someone does something in the industry and the students who represent management have a certain reaction. I respond with my NCM saying, “Do you really want to do this? Have you thought this through? If you do this and that happens, where does that leave you?”

Then they go back and say, “We hadn’t thought of that. In which case, what we would probably do is XYZ.” So it’s a learning experience which functions on all sorts of different levels. We haven’t had anybody go bankrupt yet. We did have one team that caused a mass walkout of the entire company staff. But it takes talent to do that. Although there’s a going-in situation for everybody, everything that happens is a function of what each individual team does.

Do you factor contemporary economic problems into the course? Has the nature of the ‘First 100 days’ problems changed during recessionary times?

Not at all. The fundamentals underlying the realities of business are always the same and will not change. If you think about it, it all comes down to doing things for people. That’s what management is about. So a lot of it is to do with organisational behaviour and psychology. It’s about trying to be always aware about where is the other guy coming from and why is he acting in the way he’s acting. All of that is totally independent of the economic crises. For the rest, given that the company that we use is a small industrial company with 300 employees in an industry which has been around for decades, the difficulties of individual economic situations will perhaps make things more difficult. But I don’t think they’ll change the underlying nature of it. Unless you get to a situation where the economic situation forces you to cut back on workforce, which the teams are welcome to do if they want to. Or if it needs to close down completely, but we don’t go that far. Otherwise we wouldn’t have a course left.