Values@MIT Sloan Committee

In Spring 2009, the Sloan-wide committee formerly known as “Professional Standards” began re-evaluating its mission and rebranded itself as the “Values @ MIT Sloan” Committee. A key goal was to identify the core values of MIT Sloan’s culture, which were ultimately recognized as Respect, Integrity, Collaboration, Innovation, and Positive Impact.

In a parallel effort, the Sloan Senate sought out communication methods to help personalize and drive home the new Values@MIT Sloan message to the student body. The Senate recognized the Values@MIT Sloan Videos initiative as an opportunity to portray honest yet humorous examples of how to aspire to “Be a Sloanie”.

Creating the Values@MIT Sloan Videos

At the end of the Spring 2009 semester, the Senate Marketing Committee chair Ash Martin MBA ’10, and the Senate Values@MIT Sloan committee co-chairs, Raj Bhatia and Alex Rosemblat (both MBA ’10) began a collaborative effort to produce the Values@MIT Sloan videos. After agreeing upon the context of the values that we wished to focus on, we created video concepts, wrote scripts, and scouted filming locations. In July 2009, we organized a Saturday afternoon video shoot with fifteen 2010 MBAs who were in Boston for the summer.

Following several hours of editing, which included animating a picture of Alfred P. Sloan to share an aspirational message, the videos were ready to help express aspects of the MIT Sloan culture to the incoming MBA class. The first two films were incorporated into first-year orientation, and the other videos, which focused on recruiting, were aired at the beginning of on-campus company presentations.

Video Response and Next Steps

The films have been well-received from both the class of 2011 and 2010 and we believe that the videos have been effective in raising awareness of Sloan’s core values. As this initiative continues, we are working to create more videos to focus on other core values, sharing the videos with other Sloan graduate programs to help develop Values@MIT Sloan messaging, and are beginning to work with the Alumni committee to make a series of videos on how to “Be a Sloanie” after graduation.

MBA Program