PinkLighthouse.com

You may have heard this claim from a Mary Kay director or consultant.

They claim that Mary Kay’s business plan is taught at Harvard business school.

Well, don’t tell Harvard Business School. They are sick of MLM consultants using this line because it isn’t true.

What IS true is that Harvard Business School is the world’s leading supplier of business “cases”. These cases provide background information about a company and examine critical junctures in their development.

Case studies are not opinions of the company or situation.

And Case Studies ARE NOT endorsements of the business or the business model, nor do they “teach” that business. (I’m not really sure what anyone who says that Mary Kay is “taught” means by that anyway.)

The case method is a process of teaching students by using detailed accounts of real-world business situations and has been used with great effectiveness by Harvard Business School since it was developed by its faculty in the 1920s. You can read about the case method on the HBS website.

A quick search on the Harvard Business School website found seven case studies involving Mary Kaydating from 1981 to 2004. AmoYou can find them on the Harvard Business School website. You can view these and order copies by following this link.

If anyone tells you that Mary Kay is taught at Harvard Business School they are either

1. Simply repeating what they’ve been told by an uninformed director;

2. Lying in an attempt to give validation to the Mary Kay “business”; or

3. Are too dumb to make the distinction between studying a subject and endorsing it.