Tyra Banks Graduates Harvard
As the brains behind the America’s Next Top Model franchise, we already knew Tyra Banks was more than just a pretty face.
Now the model and mogul has defied any remaining doubters by graduating from Harvard Business School.
While the rest of the style set was in New York for Fashion Week, the 38-year-old was in Boston, Massachusetts, collecting her diploma
Ms Banks, who enrolled in the Owner/President Management Program in 2010, tweeted a photo of herself at the event on February 17.
She wrote: ‘On stage at my Harvard Business School graduation! Lil blurry but SUCH an exciting moment 4 me & wanted 2 share w/u!’
Wearing a strappy black dress and towering heels, she was likely one of the most glamorous graduates.
But it seems, as the founder of Bankable Enterprises, she was one of the students to most impress her professors too.
In an interview with Business Week, she revealed: ‘My marketing professor Rohit Deshpande is now doing a case study on my business, so I’m now going to be part of the Harvard Business School curriculum.’
She would certainly be an interesting subject, but it does open her to some potential criticism, which she is at once positive and apprehensive about.
‘Of course you’ve got to be worried because these guys are going to come and tear apart your company,’ she explained.
‘As the protagonist of the case, I am welcome to be in the classroom when they present it. So it is like free advice – free, harsh, honest, unfiltered advice. I just have to put on my armor to go there.’
Many might wonder how Ms Banks, already busy with promotion of her book, Modelland, the various America’s Next Top Model cycles, her talk show and her production company even managed to find the time to attend a course at Harvard.
But the £33,000 programme was created for owners of existing businesses, and its structure, of three-week instalments over three years, is designed to fit in with demanding schedules.
It was well worth doing, too. The star admits that even after her first term, she was approaching the running of her business differently.
‘After my first term at Harvard, I came back and killed a whole bunch of businesses we were going to go into,’ she told Business Week.
‘We have to say no more often than we say yes, no matter how much money people put on that goddamned table.’
