Yahoo Finance Meet Tyra Banks, Stanford B-School 'Professor'
By John A. Byrne, “Poets & Quants”
Four years ago, supermodel Tyra Banks made headlines when she showed off her newly won Harvard Business School diploma after completing a nine-week program for executives called the Owner/President Management program.
Now she’s moving to the front of the classroom as a teacher at, of all places, Harvard’s biggest business school rival, Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Poets & Quants has learned that the 42-year-old Banks is scheduled to co-teach a spring elective for MBA students called “Project You: Building & Extending Your Personal Brand” with GSB lecturer Allison Kluger.
The supermodel-to-professor switch apparently came about after Banks showed up on the Stanford campus last May for a fireside chat as part of a Stanford Women in Business leadership series, according to a spokesperson for the school. Kluger, formerly a producer for “The View” and once a host for a cable-TV shopping network, was in the audience.
IN HBS FINANCE CLASSES, SHE HOPED NEVER TO BE COLD CALLED BY A PROFESSOR
For the past two years, Kluger has been teaching courses in reputation management and strategic communications at Stanford’s business school. An early conversation between her and Banks at the business school event ultimately led to the co-teaching partnership for the new MBA elective.
Banks should know a thing or two about personal branding. She turned her runway success into a multimedia brand and was at the center of two successful TV series, “America’s Next Top Model” and “The Tyra Banks Show,” which ran for 810 episodes and won two Emmys. She took the HBS executive education course to help her build and lead her self-funded startup, TYRA Beauty, a cosmetics business. Her reinvention from a model to an iconic consumer brand gives her plenty of classroom cred.
When she was asked to name her most difficult HBS class, she quickly noted it was finance. “For the first 30 minutes of the class, I’m raising my hand, I’m all into it, ‘cause it’s kind of like theory and just like, the social part of the case,” she told VH1 during an interview. “The last hour it’s all like Einstein and algebraic equations and craziness. And I’m just like, what the [heck] is going on? Please don’t call on me because it won’t be pretty.“
HOW TO BUILD, BROADCAST, MAINTAIN & PROTECT YOUR PERSONAL BRAND
Now Banks, who gleefully tweeted a photo of herself on the HBS campus with her Harvard certificate, will get to call on others. The two-credit course, recently listed in the school’s online course catalog, focuses on how to build, broadcast, maintain and protect your personal brand. According to the description of the course, “Project You will help each student realize: What is a personal brand and how can it be unleashed as a valuable, competitive advantage? Why do you need a personal brand? How do you differentiate yourself and create a brand identity and strategy? How do you use social and traditional media to enhance your brand effectively as well as measure the metrics of social media responses? And how do you know when to pivot and evolve your brand for sustainability?”
Smiling ear2ear on the Harvard Business School campus w/ my diploma! Tnx 2 my fab photographer mama 4 the pic! pic.twitter.com/4nAUikL4
— Tyra Banks (@tyrabanks) February 23, 2012
Kluger and Banks appear to be planning what they are calling a “highly interactive learning” course that will inevitably be oversubscribed. MBAs who get into the class have to watch a video entitled “Who you are, what your personal brand is, and what you want it to be.” Among the assignments will be “image transformations, live broadcasting of presentations at a television station, live streaming of portions of the class on Facebook Live, and YouTube recordings,” according to the course catalog.
For Banks, the supermodel, TV and movie star, talk show host, producer, and entrepreneur, it’s a chance to add yet another title to a striking resume of achievements. After all, while she won’t officially be a professor at Stanford, she will be a guest lecturer at one of the best business schools in the world.
