What is INSEAD like? Well, it’s like the Land Rover Evoque
I’m pretty sure you would agree that there’s seemingly not much in common between INSEAD and a baby Range Rover. For instance, INSEAD doesn’t come with an interior designed by Victoria Beckham, nor does it have a 4-wheel drive system. And when the time comes to take your children to school, INSEAD isn't going to be of much help. Well, this is weird, because both are brilliant.
Take the INSEAD MBA. It’s been ranked number 1 MBA Program in the World by the Financial Times as recently as last January, it produced the second biggest amount of Fortune 500 CEOs among all MBA Programs, and it has a pretty neat tagline: The Business School for the World. The Land Rover Evoque on the other hand doesn’t bother with CEOs or Financial Times rankings, it cares about remaining the coolest SUV ever produced, and as far as I’m concerned, it does the job pretty damn well.
Now, if you take a step backward, and overlook these few differences, you'll notice that INSEAD and the Evoque are in fact mind-blowingly similar. So shall I demonstrate with facts and data:
- Like INSEAD, Land Rover produces the Evoque both in Europe and in Asia, and took advantage of being global. That's what made their venture successful.
- The Evoque disrupts the SUV market, which was essentially invented in the US, by proposing better features with a focus on quality. So does INSEAD with the MBA.
- The Evoque drives very well off-road. It doesn’t really matter if the sat-nav lady said to take the first exit on the right after Tesco, it makes its own path. It's what INSEAD teaches us.
- Like INSEAD, it’s true that the Evoque is shorter than its competitor, but it’s specifically what makes it nimbler, and provides it with one of the best power-to-weight ratio (a.k.a ROI) on the market.
- Finally, I mentioned it before, but it’s also the coolest thing ever launched since Ray-Ban handed a pair of Wayfarer to Audrey Hepburn. You guessed it, like INSEAD.
Think of it this way, you could turn up at a party with two, very big, very American, very black Cadillac Escalades, and a bunch of bodyguards, as if you were Barack Obama. You could also show up at the same party driving a Phoenix Orange Land Rover Evoque HSE Convertible. Now, even if you were in fact Barack Obama, it's needless to mention which of the two options would get you the most approval smiles from the crowd.
Finally, and like INSEAD again, some say it’s expensive. But if this were true, Land Rover wouldn’t have been celebrating its 500,000th sale of the Evoque last February, and INSEAD’s admissions team wouldn’t be scratching their heads every 6 months when the time comes to attribute only 500 seats to the thousands of accomplished individuals applying for the next intake. And think again of the two black Cadillac Escalades alternative: your Land Rover Evoque just became a hell of a deal. Actually, I configured my ideal Evoque on Land Rover’s website. It turns out that it would make me EUR 73,763 lighter. So, here we are, the INSEAD MBA is exactly the same as the Land Rover Evoque.
My name’s Aymeric Salley, I’m a French Automotive Engineer, and as much as I’d love to show up at parties driving a Land Rover Evoque, I’ve decided that I was better off for now with an INSEAD MBA and a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarer.
