Columbia Business School wants to have a conversation - but make it brief, like in 200 characters - with its applicants.
Harvard Business School asks applicants to ask and answer the question they wish HBS had posed. Incidentally, mine would be: Would has suffering taught you about doing business which you couldn't have learned so efficiently and effectively any other way?
Clearly, the zeitgeist of social media has reached into the training camp for the future leaders of capitalism and is transforming the language, tone, and length of business communications.
Melissa Korn captures this flight from corporatese in her THE WALL STREET JOURNAL article "Tweets, Plays Well w/Others: A Perfect M.B.A. Candidate." Never again will an executive, at least not one who wants to resonate with Generations X and Y, speak and write the rhetoric of the 1970s annual report. Back then the discussion was framed to mask, not break open a conversation about what really was, what really is, and what really could be.
Remember when we corporate ghostwriters and ghostwriters saw our mission to walk on the safe side? Controversy, no one would allow that. Authenticity, we were allowed to mix that into the brew in atypical settings like Lee Iacocca's Chrysler. Brevity, that was not a priority.
Stepping on the stage and likely orchestrating the greatest performance art of capitalism is a new generation. They frame their thinking in tweet short form. They create word pictures since they are the YouTube generation. They want to connect, for real. Their colleagues and significant others demand nothing less.
Prediction: The great communicators of our time will come from business, not politics.
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