9 phrases only MBAs understand

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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.

Resume walk

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.”

PAR and STAR

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

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.”

The 4 P’s of marketing

“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.

The 3 C’s

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.”..