The Poetry within Business School Mottos

Leading researchers at ADHOC Business School believe they have constructed the perfect motto to reflect the stance of the 21st century business school.

That motto, explains ADHOC marketing professor Priya Fasdolla, is the truly inspiring: ‘World education for business leaders’.

If you think this phrase bears more than a passing resemblance to ones you’ve heard before, well, it should, as the school’s formation is the product of a sweeping analysis of the most frequently-occurring individual words which adorn the mottos of some of the world’s leading institutions, including the likes of Stanford GSB, HEC Paris and Melbourne Business School.

To fashion what the school is proclaiming as ‘The Business School Slogan of the 21st Century’, researchers limited themselves to those mottos appearing front and center on schools’ homepage, throughout their websites and often paired with logos, albeit with special dispensation granted to those schools who display a slogan throughout any MBA microsites.

Fasdolla, who specializes in brand narratives, says that the analysis has much to tell us about the aims of today’s postgraduate business school providers and indeed, their target demographic. However, she stops short of saying that the ADHOC creation is perfect on all counts:

“The thing about a good slogan in this context – one that sticks in the mind and resonates with its intended audience – is that it shouldn’t just embody what the institution offers prospective students; it should also roll off the tongue and cast a picture of the business school experience in the reader’s mind’s eye. In this way, it’s a lot like poetry.”

With this in mind, ADHOC has also released what Sterling P Lucre, head of the school’s North American base, refers to as “a humble attempt to curate some noteworthy business school mottos to bring out their poetic qualities."

Traditional and long-standing mottos of universities have attracted recent praise in Canada’s University Affairs:  “Perhaps because of their age, university mottos speak to nobler sentiments than most contemporary discourses coming out of universities,” writes an English professor at Cape Breton University. However, others have not been quite as generous of their more modern incarnations, with an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education referring to today’s college taglines as “a genre of marketing rhetoric that is lofty, predictable, and numbing at a certain dosage."

But the proof is in the pudding; the ADHOC poem is reproduced below. Do you find them inspiring or grating? Can you decipher which motto belongs to which institution? You can click on the individual links to find out, or just enjoy the collated experience. You can also let us know which motto you like best by leaving us a comment below.

Go Beyond

Real world. Real learning

inspiring growth

Inspiring Personalities

inspiring futures

Future anything

Original Thinking Applied

At the very center of business

The Business School for the World

Tomorrow is our Business

Global. Business. Leaders.

Shaping Leaders & Driving Results

To advance knowledge and cultivate leaders for China and the world

World Class in Asia

German Excellence. Global Relevance.

London experience. World impact

Connects you to What Matters

Education with Purpose

A way to learn, a mark to make, a world to change

Change lives. Change organizations. Change the world.

World-Class Business Education Institution to Develop Creative, Challenging, and Socially Responsible Global Leaders