9 phrases only MBAs understand

Shana Lebowitz
Jan. 17, 2018, 4:54 PM

https://www.businessinsider.com/words-and-phrases-only-mba-grads-understand-2018-1

Every industry has its own lingo. Business-school jargon may be especially perplexing to outsiders.

To help clear up some of the confusion, we asked two MBA grads about the most unusual terms and phrases they picked
up in business school.

Paul Ollinger graduated from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth in 1997 and was an early Facebook employee
before becoming a standup comedian. He recently published a comedic career guide titled, " You Should Totally Get an
MBA," which includes a glossary of "MBA Talk."

Alex Dea graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Kenan-Flagler Business School in 2015 and is
now a product marketing manager at Salesforce. He also runs the blog MBASchooled, which is a resource for business
school students, applicants, and alumni.

Read on to find out what MBAs really mean when they call you a "Herbie."

Resume walk

< Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design/Flickr >

The "resume walk" is a high-level review of your resume during an interview.

Dea said: "It's almost like a very short, succinct elevator pitch about your background or what you've done, the skills
that you have, anything that gleans a little bit into how your personal and professional life connect."

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PAR and STAR

< Strelka Institute/Flickr >

These are two frameworks that MBA students use either to describe their accomplishments on a resume or to
answer interview questions, Dea said. "You don't always get a lot of time for interviews, so you want to make sure
that you're being concise."

PAR stands for "Problem, Action, Result." If you're using this format, Dea said, "you would talk about the problem,
then you would dig into the actions that you took to help solve the problem, and then you would finally close with
the end result that you specifically made." STAR is very similar — it stands for "Situation, Task, Action, Result."

Blue ocean and red ocean

< OldakQuill/Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0) >

Ollinger describes both terms in his glossary.

Blue ocean is a "nerdy way of describing a market that has yet to be chummed up with competitors or great whites
(which are, by the way, man-eating killing machines)."

Red ocean is a "nerdy way of describing a market chummed up with competitors and man-killing sharks."

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The 4 P's of marketing

< Dan Kitwood / Staff / Getty Images >

"Four things — Product, Place, Price, Promotion — contribute to make a product successful or not," Ollinger writes
in his book.

The four P's are also called the " marketing mix," a term that was popularized in the 1950s by Neil Borden (a Harvard
professor of advertising).

The 3 C's

< Apple/YouTube >

Ollinger defines the term in his book: A "business model developed by Kenichi Ohmae. ... It analyzes how the
dynamics of Customer, Competition, and Corporation lead to strategic advantage."

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Circle of death

< University of Exeter/Flickr >

At a business-school networking event, Dea said, there will typically be more students than potential employers. And
all the students are eager to talk to the employers.

"What ends up happening is that a lot of students end up congregating around one employee," Dea said. "It looks
like a circle where there's one employee and the rest of the students are around him or her and it is a game of back
and forth of question and answer."

The term is tongue-in-cheek, Dea added, because all MBA students know it's an unfortunate part of the recruitment
process.

tongue-in-cheek = intended to be humorous and not meant seriously; funny, humorous, playful

MECE

< Flickr / frankieleon >

Ollinger says MECE is an acronym for "a McKinsey-created data analysis concept called 'Mutually exclusive,
completely exhaustive.'"

For example, categorizing people by age group would be MECE. That's because no one can appear in more than one
category and all the categories together cover all the options.

Categorizing people by their hobbies is not MECE, because one person may have more than one hobby.

McKinsey is an American management consulting company.

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Herbie

< Paxson Woelber/Flickr >

The 1984 novel " The Goal," by business consultant Eliyahu M. Goldratt, is often assigned at top business programs,
Dea said. The novel explores principles of operations and supply chains.

In one story line, a boy named Herbie is on a Boy Scout hike and ends up holding up the rest of the troops (=
causing a delay for…). So "Herbie" has become synonymous for "bottleneck," or the thing that's holding people up.

Dea said MBA grads will often say things like, "Don't be the Herbie" or, "Stop being the Herbie."

SWOT analysis

< REUTERS/Grigory Dukor >

Ollinger says this term is a "framework for analyzing a business' situation by looking at their Strengths, Weaknesses,
Opportunities, Threats."