GLOBAL
Six words to sell your sauce
How can a business school or programme stand out in a crowded field?I spoke at the Graduate Management Admission Council, or GMAC, Asia Pacific Conference in Manila last month about how business schools can stand out from the crowd. With nearly 17,000 business schools worldwide offering business degrees, it’s more important than ever for each school to articulate to prospective students what’s unique and valuable about that school – and then to communicate it in such a way that the school’s personality, or 'secret sauce', comes through.
As part of my presentation on Positioning Your Programmes in a Complex World, I asked each person to introduce himself or herself to everyone else at their table in a new way. And, just as I tell my students that it is harder to write a short paper than a long paper, I told the conference attendees that it’s harder and much more interesting to tell a story – any story – in very few words. Their job was to tell their story, their introduction, in just six words.
I’ve started using Six-Word Memoirs as a fun, creative (and somewhat addictive) way for having people introduce themselves to others. The idea came through an exercise created by SMITH Magazine and popularised by the book Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-word memoirs by writers famous and obscure. This exercise gets some phenomenally interesting introductions – some hilarious, others poignant and some quite revealing.
Here are some examples from the book:
- • Cadavers played an unexpectedly large part (Mary Roach)
- • Well, I thought it was funny (Stephen Colbert)
- • Arty dad, rocker mom, crazy childhood (Summer Pierre)
- • Many risky mistakes, very few regrets (Richard Schnedi)
- • Six kids; life stranger than fiction (Deborah Carson)
- • Revenge is living well, without you (Joyce Carol Oates)
- • Learning disability, MIT. Never give up (Joe Keselman)
- • Wife: one; Degrees: two; Arrests: seven (Patrick J Sauer)
- • Should have used condom that time (Rob Bigelow)
- • EDITOR. Get it? (Kate Hamill).
After introducing themselves to each other with a Six-Word Memoir, the participants introduced their school using the same technique. While it sounds difficult (and it can be) and as if there would be a lot of similarity among responses (there wasn’t), it took some time, as well as some laughter and counting on fingers, for each person to come up with a compelling six-word story to convey their school’s personality.
While we didn’t capture the results, those who shared theirs were able to capture the essence of their business schools in just a few words – and each was unique. Some were formal, some staccato, some funny, and a few sounded like a good tagline.
Why try the Six-Word Memoir for your institution? It forces you to explain its essence, its ethos, its personality. And these are the very things that will attract the right students.
Can you describe (or better yet, market) your business school or programme in six words? If so, send it to me at the email address below and, if I get enough of them, I’ll publish them in a future post.
Margaret Andrews is an academic leader, instructor and consultant. Academic leadership positions have included vice-provost at Hult International Business School, where she managed a global academic team across five campuses in four countries; associate dean of management programmes at Harvard University’s Division of Continuing Education, or DCE, where she managed degree programmes and professional and executive programmes; and executive director of the MBA programme at the MIT Sloan School of Management, USA. She teaches a variety of leadership and strategy courses at Harvard DCE, and is also president of Mind and Hand Associates, a boutique consulting firm serving a global higher education clientele. You can reach her at margaret@mind-and-hand.com.