INSEAD pre-reading

Term starts on 7th January 2008 and the various items on the to do list are being ticked off. For example, accommodation is almost finalised and today I sent a whole a suitcase of stuff with a friend. This whole thing is starting to feel more real.

Some of my classmates are preparing for the business foundations course. This is for those students that do not have a "finance" background, to bring them up to speed in a four/five day course.

Part of the precourse preparation for all of us is to undertake the precourse reading. This involves reading chapters of two of the the three texts advised and the whole of the third accounting text.

The first challenge is obtaining the texts and at a reasonable price. The texts can be purchased from INSEAD for between €45 and €55, which is not unreasonable. As a matter of interest I checked the prices in London bookshops, when I was there last week. So if a book is €50, one would assume that given the present exchange rate that the book would be approximately GBP£34. Wrong - the actual price is GBP£47?! How does this work then? It just seems that the publishers feel that there is an opportunity to obtain a super profit and so go ahead and charge the maximum they can. Fortunately, Amazon.com charges a price that is much closer to the one would expect to pay and so I am awaiting free (thanks to Amazon's super saver service) delivery of my books.

For completeness pre-reading is :

ESSENTIALS OF ACCOUNTING - R. Anthony - L. Breitner
9th edition -Prentice Hall

MODERN FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT – S. A.Ross - R. W. Westerfield -
J. Jaffe & B.D Jordan 8th Edition - McGraw Hill

PRINCIPLES OF MICROECONOMICS – N. G. Mankiw
4th Edition – South-Western

Hopefully, I will do some work on this in the near future, particularly as some of my classmates volunteered that they had begun reading over a month ago. I guess this demonstrates how motivated some of my classmates are and how the forced curve class performance indicator could make life interesting.