Republic of INSEAD

The MBA Partners Scholarship – in Memory of Denise Kaplan it's hard to have a 10-year plan when the GFC happens in your 10-year plan. “I just want clarity because everything's so confused right now.” George Soros Open Society Fund E29: "Time happens" with Mike Kaplan E32: "God forbid men not having an erection" with Frederique Labadie

Our topic today - one of the biggest, most under-researched, underfunded areas in healthcare. This is a leadership conversation. A workplace conversation. A relationship conversation. If you’re a man listening—this is your wife, your colleague, your boss, your sister, even your mother. And chances are… you have no idea what she’s going through. Now it’s time for you to step up. And that’s the only...

Welcome to Nazaré, Portugal. A small fishing town north of Lisbon that has become the Colosseum of big wave surfing. Waves at Praia do Norte are so big and powerful that professional athletes from around the world travel here every winter to test themselves against the Atlantic. What fascinated me when I first heard my guest talk about this world…is that big-wave surfing is not really about surfin...

Here are partial lyrics of Hey Jude by The Beatles. You figure out whether there are any parallels out there with our “Hey Jeff” Hey Jude, don't make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better. Remember to let her into your heart, Then you can start to make it better. Hey Jude, don't be afraid. You were made to go out and get her. The minute you let her under your skin, Then you begin to make it b...

When Pierre Lusato wrote in our group chat “Milena, we want the podcast back!” I almost instantly received a private message from someone else, who practically said “I am ready to talk.” And so here we are. Ready to talk. I have been hoping to have this conversation for a while now, but did not know if he will ever want to have this conversation with me (or anyone else for that matter). As he said...

“If you want to help a community, then by far educations is the best way to do it. I don't know if it matters so much what you teach, but as long as kids get excited about learning and get excited about going to school, that makes a huge difference.” “Just by talking about it and it inspires other people to do something similar in their communities, you just never know what kind of ripples you're...

Top recommendations for Dean Veloso from the ‘03Ds: “Just make sure that your education is raising the bar on future management, not only in terms of technical knowledge, but in terms of values.” “The university has a great asset, it's the Alumni Network - invest more and with the expectation to get more out of it.” “Keep up the education of your alumni and give them the opportunity to get back to...

For me there were two options. I can be very rich and lonely 10 years down the line, or I had to change something so that I'm happy and I'm not lonely and I'm with someone that I enjoy being with. 20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: I changed absolutely everything. So I was in the recruitment industry in Poland before INSEAD, and then I ended up in investment banking in Austria. The only thing I didn't chang...

Running your own business is like a marathon at the speed of a sprint Your mental health is under constant stress, what I realized early on is it's a very lonely space to do it, because there are very few people who do this. Quite frankly, you're dealing with more failures than successes than from the outside people see. I still remember sitting on my balcony with helicopters flying by, with soldi...

“And remember, it’s not a judgement of your performance, it’s just we don’t need this position anymore.” After selling the chain of clinics business twice, I got fired from day 1 to day 2 with the typical capitalist view, you put your things in a box and leave the premises in 2 hours type of thing. This put me in a very difficult position of trying to redefine myself as a business person, so I too...

I'm sure when we started our first business together we were like “God, this is the learning one and we're just gonna smash it all the way through the rest of them”. Unfortunately hasn't quite turned out that way, it continues to be a learning experience. Turns out, there's new sh*t to learn every time. 20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: The journey is the destination. If you ask me where I thought I'd be 2...

s sana in corpore sano - it's been a great awakening, a scary awakening but now I'm in a good place. With a corporate job and globe trotting, moving international, living life as we would have dreamt of at INSEAD, you also need to have certain discipline which I did not have. When I just moved to Bangkok in 2019, I was basically living between Paris and Bangkok for close to eight months and then t...

When you're moving as a family, the only common denominator you have is the family, so you stick together and you make sure that everybody goes through the experience in the smoothest way possible. 20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: Quite a ride, it brought me through 5 different locations (Switzerland, France, Spain, Andora, Bulgaria and now Israel), 9 or 10 different positions and all with this desire, th...

It's surprising to me that people are still amazed at the fact that banks can go bust. It most definitely will not be the last time [a bank goes bust], it's a cyclical thing. 20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: “I try not to do stress.” We had initially gone to Dubai to spend 4 years there. 4 years turned into 13. All in all can't complain, it's been a good couple of decades. The challenge has been to mainta...

When I was very young I just was interested by politics because you can influence. It's very fulfilling when you see that you can make things change. So that's really the main driver now. 20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: From 2009 to 2020 I was having two hats - one was the local managing partner of EY in Luxembourg, a firm of about 1700 employees, the second one was to be the private equity leader for EM...

If you invested all of your tuition in Apple stock, last time I checked, it was about $22 million. 20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: Just over ten years ago I set up my own business with a partner from INSEAD and another friend to build, own and operate renewable energy power stations in the UK. We invested about a half a billion dollars at that time, had some great successes. I moved then to the States in...

The company I was working for, we were so extremely short-term focused and we almost changed strategy every three months, we were literally throwing money out of the window, just to get customers’ market share, and somehow it didn't feel right to me. I didn't have the financial understanding to really put a calculator to it, and then the company also literally almost went bankrupt at the end of th...

You're basically creating miracles that fit in the palm of your hand and you're helping reimagine life for patients. 20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: Givers are not good takers. I don't think of the 2000s as twenty years ago, I still think of the 80s, or the 70s as twenty years ago. I started in Singapore, then went back to the US and lived and worked in New Jersey and Chicago, then Munich, London and bac...

The story of someone about to disrupt a part of medicine. “What if we were able to invent a technology, basically a new material, that would allow to repair and reconnect tissues without trauma, in an atraumatic manner, in a non-penetrating manner.” What you're trying to do is big, it is going to take time and we're going to give you time. 20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: I love the last twenty years, I'm...

The adults were so weak they had to be carried off the shipwreck onto shore… Today, I lead the diabetes business in Medtronic, a global leader in medical devices. The business is about 2.3 billion, with over 5,000 employees. The story of “the person most likely to rule the planet in the future” 20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: I find myself not in the mainstream part of these companies, but having a big i...

The rocket was emblazoned with the INSEAD logo and underneath that it said KacificOne, the name of our satellite, and a FORCE FOR GOOD and so it was the force for good logo from INSEAD. Force for Food is part of the famous John Kennedy speech, when he declared that by the end of the decade he would send men to the Moon. I like that reference that space can be a force for good; money can be a force...

But when I genuinely enjoy what I do, then I do a really good job at it and then the financial side tends to take care of itself. 20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: I had realised that rather than trying to be someone else, or trying to fit into a system, the best thing I could do was focus on what I thought was right and follow my instincts. We spent what probably is the best 5 years of my life and career...

We'll break the rules because we're rule breakers 20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: It was one of those things where I've always believed that you need to look inside yourself and figure out will you regret saying no to this one. And this was just one of those ones where I said yeah, this one is something I have to do. Global marketing director for De Beers diamond jewellers, an LVMH company, an amazing ki...

20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: “People don’t remember books; they remember sentences. More specifically, they remember stories.” Four different places in the last 20 years. I married for the second time and hopefully the last time, I also fell in love with running, so I became an avid marathoner, hopefully I'll complete the 6 majors. Corporate culture matters quite a lot, so all those OB classes were ac...

20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: Mike Tyson, the philosopher, says that everybody has a plan until you get a punch in your face. INSEAD was a big part, a big success factor for us. We got the family out of it, but we also got pretty good jobs after. I learned to code and I wanted to go back into trading and I went into systematic trading for 5 years and then developed models for cryptocurrencies as well a...