Harvard MBA Essays 2025-2026: Analysis, Tips, and Strategy

This session unpacks the strategic approach to crafting compelling essays for a top business school, emphasizing the shift from a single open-ended prompt to three targeted questions: businessminded, leadership-focused, and growth-oriented. It highlights how successful applicants demonstrate strategic thinking, influence without authority, and proactive skill development, showcasing tangible impact rather than just listing events or personal achievements. Real-world examples from luxury goods, AI, and biotech illustrate how to frame challenges as opportunities, create sustainable solutions, and translate growth into organizational wins.

The presentation delves into each essay prompt, revealing the underlying intent of the admissions committee. The businessminded essay requires demonstrating the ability to identify impactful opportunities, articulate their value, and achieve measurable results, akin to a miniature case study. The leadership essay focuses on fostering collective success by creating systems and opportunities for others to excel, rather than solely highlighting individual heroism. Finally, the growth-oriented essay underscores the importance of actively seeking stretch experiences, expanding capabilities, and demonstrating how this growth translates into tangible benefits for the organization or community.

Ultimately, the key takeaway is that these three essays must work cohesively, presenting a multi-dimensional portrait of a candidate who is strategic, influential, and adaptive. The session warns against common pitfalls like resume rehashing, a monolithic tone across essays, and over-polishing that sacrifices authenticity, stressing that essays should reveal how one thinks and why it matters, not just what has been accomplished.

• HBS has shifted from one open-ended essay to three targeted prompts: businessminded, leadership-focused, and growth-oriented.
• Successful "businessminded" essays demonstrate identifying opportunities, framing them, and delivering measurable impact, akin to a strategic case study.
• "Leadership-focused" essays should showcase creating conditions for team success and developing others, not just personal heroism, emphasizing influence without authority and capacity multiplication.
• "Growth-oriented" essays require proving proactive curiosity, skill expansion beyond comfort zones, and tangible payoffs that benefit the organization or community.
• The three essays must collectively present a cohesive narrative of a strategic, influential, and adaptive candidate, avoiding resume rehashing, a singular tone, or inauthentic polish.

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HBS Essay Prompts and Strategic Framing [03:30]

• HBS now uses three targeted essay prompts: businessminded, leadership-focused, and growth-oriented, replacing the single open-ended essay.
• Each prompt isolates a specific dimension, aiming to understand the applicant's strategic thinking, leadership approach, and growth mindset.
• These three essays must stand alone in excellence but also work together to form a cohesive narrative within the entire application.
• The goal is to decode the decision-making process of successful applicants and understand the narrative nuances that make their essays resonate.

The goal here is not for you to copy these uh essays. They have been written. HBS has seen them. So they pose no value to you in the context of what is being said, how it's being communicated. Rather instead we're going to decode the decision making of how they frame their story for the HBS specific question and the narrative nuance that made these these essays work.

Businessminded Essay: Identifying and Delivering Impact [04:32]

• This prompt tests the ability to identify crucial levers, make a case for action, and deliver impact that moves the needle.
• A great response reads like a strategic case study in miniature, not a life story.
• Examples included a luxury goods candidate aligning HQ's goals with local market needs and a tech candidate who expanded a proof-of-concept into an enterprise-wide AI adoption.
• Key elements for success: framing initiatives as aligning with organizational goals (not fighting them) and closing with measurable market or organizational impact.

Notice how this isn't about a simple execution of a marketing campaign. It's about diagnosing a blind spot, a mismatch between global messaging that the HQ can held and the local market resonance and creating a solution that works for both.

Leadership Essay: Cultivating More Leaders [10:47]

• HBS defines leadership not as being the hero, but as creating more leaders by designing systems, processes, and opportunities for others to contribute effectively.
• Examples included enabling a team to build new capabilities by connecting them with existing networks and proposing a structural split to clarify roles and restore project momentum.
• The focus is on sustainable solutions and capacity multiplication, empowering teams rather than solving problems for them.

At HBS, leadership is about creating more leaders. It's about designing systems, processes, and opportunities so that others can contribute at their best. It's not only you being the hero solving all the problems.

• Successful narratives demonstrate influence without authority, capacity multiplication, and the creation of sustainable solutions that endure beyond the applicant's tenure.

HBS looks for leaders who can create sustainable solution not just quick wins by them jumping into this to solve the problems.

Growth Oriented Essay: Embracing the Unfamiliar and Accelerating Learning [16:15]

• This prompt assesses the willingness to lean into the unfamiliar and accelerate the learning curve, which is crucial for the case method.
• Strong essays showcase actively seeking stretch experiences to demonstrate suitability for HBS.
• Examples included pivoting to an alternative gem when the preferred one was unavailable, volunteering for unglamorous tasks to gain access to projects, and absorbing technical knowledge from a departing colleague.
• Success hinges on demonstrating adaptability under constraints, calculated risk-taking, and growth tied directly to value creation for the organization.

The strongest essay show you actively seeking out stretch experiences so that you can communicate that you are the kind of candidate that belongs at HBS.

• Key components for this essay are proactive curiosity, skill expansion into unfamiliar areas, and tangible payoffs that benefit the community or organization.

Growth is tied directly to value creation. It's not learning for learning sake. It's strategic acquisition of new skills to protect and advance a company's mission.

Integrating the Essays and Avoiding Pitfalls [22:40]

• The three essays are not disconnected but rather three angles on the same person, showcasing dimensionality in personality and character.
• The "businessminded" essay shows strategic thinking and execution, "leadership-focused" demonstrates operating with and through others, and "growth-oriented" highlights evolution and adaptability.
• When these prompts work together, the reader sees a candidate who is strategic, influential, and adaptive.
• Common pitfalls to avoid include: resume rehashing, a similar tone or role across all prompts, and over-editing that removes authenticity.

When these pre three prompts work together, the admission reader walks away thinking, "This person is strategic, influential, and adaptive. All of the things that HBS is looking for in the context of the candidates that they say yes to."

• Essays should focus on how one thinks and why it matters, showcasing unique character nuances rather than sounding like a cookie-cutter template.