Here are some ISB Essays 2026 – 2027(New!!):

ISB Essay 1 (Old):

Contemplate situations that have shaped your personal journey. Present what these situations have taught you about your strengths and weaknesses, and how they have shaped your personal and professional journey (400 words).

ISB Essays 2026 – 2027 Topic 1 (NEW):

What unique experiences have shaped who you are? What have these experiences taught you about leadership and the kind of leader you aspire to be? (Word Limit: 400)

This new ISB essay is a typical leadership essay, although not very direct. ISB would like to peek into how you behave when assigned larger responsibilities. The tone of the ISB essay, the actions, and the results you achieved give hints about your leadership style.

You may already know that the most commonly known leadership styles include:

1) Autocratic:

This command-driven style often gets a bad reputation, but context matters. Steve Jobs, for instance, empowered his team creatively but made final decisions himself- his way or the highway. Such leaders demand excellence and can thrive in crises where quick, decisive action is needed. However, in MBA applications, portraying this style can backfire if it appears authoritarian or dismissive of team input. Use such examples carefully, especially if they led to conflict or low morale.

2) Delegative:

Often seen as the least effective, this style works best when the team is highly competent and self-motivated. While risky in uneven teams, it can highlight your ability to recognize strengths and empower others. If you designed the strategy but delegated tasks thoughtfully, you are demonstrating trust, motivation, and team management—all valuable traits.

3) Democratic:

This inclusive style encourages input and often leads to better outcomes, albeit more slowly. In MBA applications, it’s ideal for showcasing communication, collaboration, and coaching skills. It also addresses a common workplace pain point: lack of open dialogue.

However, the hidden objective of the first essay is to not talk about one of the three leadership styles explicitly, but to highlight ‘implicit leadership traits’ through thinking about your professional and personal experiences, and where you have applied similar traits. You may be someone with no direct leadership experience, and this essay is a shortcut to capture relevant ‘implicit’ leadership narratives.

As examples to show how you must start thinking about your essay, I will cover some of the implicit traits that will impress the admissions committee. Please do not follow a cookie-cutter approach or template for ISB essays as that could be a recipe for rejection. Also, this list is not exhaustive and you must spend good time thinking about your other implicit traits and when did you demonstrate those:

Personal Responsibility

“My team did not perform well,” “We lacked coordination”, “Our communication was poor”. You may have heard yourself say these often to escape responsibility. ‘Personal responsibility’ does not come easily. You can make all the excuses you want, but if you are leading a team, the failure is because of one person—“You”. The team has given you the authority to lead. So how do you go about explaining failure?

As an aspiring leader, you must learn to own your mistakes. Real leaders own up for the team’s mistakes and give credit for their successes.

Once you own the mistake, it becomes easier as a leader to look back and analyse what went wrong. The admissions teams also believe that every failure has a hidden lesson, and they want to see how you find the root cause of the failures and explain how it has been useful for evaluating decisions.

When was the last time you took personal responsibility for your team’s performance? How has that shaped you as a leader?

Aiming for a Shot at The Top B-Schools But Confused About Your Strategy? Reach Out to Us

Trust

Perhaps you aspire to be a leader who builds trust. How have you done this in the past?
Perhaps by maintaining a consistent standard for yourself.

If you never show up to a meeting on time, you don’t have the authority as a leader to demand that others be on time.
If you lead a marketing team, you should have a sound knowledge of marketing and be able to lead the team.
If a leader only plans, the team may trust your management skills, but they won’t trust or respect your knowledge.

To build trust, perhaps you empower the team to make decisions on their own, boosting morale. You may believe that visibility is important if you want to prove yourself as a leader. If the office starts at 8am and finishes at 5pm, you will be there before everyone else and be the last to leave, unlike many virtual leaders who work from home and make a guest appearance at Friday meetings.

So, how do you want to build trust as a leader? Give examples

Listening

In popular culture, the image of a leader is that of a person who gives orders and is always planning something. In reality, however, leaders should have exceptional listening skills.

Perhaps you aspire to be someone who engages deeply with the team. You can’t do that if you are multitasking or passively listening while planning what to say next or thinking about a new project. You need to give your team member your undivided attention. Remember if you are leading a big team, it is not easy for someone to come and talk to you. You have to enable that.

You may speak in the essay about moments when you observed the non-verbal signals, the message behind the words and the tone of the conversation. Too often, managers think one-on-one meetings are a waste of time. In the short term, many of these conversations will add little value, but by actively listening, the manager is contributing to the future success of the team.

How have you solved a team member’s problem through active listening? How did that impact the individual and the team? How did that impact you?

Some of the other implicit leadership traits that you may explore are humility, focus, self awareness, reaching out etc.

ISB Essays 2026 – 2027 Topic 2:

What intellectual experiences have influenced your approach to learning and have led you to pursue an MBA? Please describe using anecdotes from your own experiences. (400 words).

What I like is that candidates who occasionally get by with surface-level deliberation behind their reasons for applying will be forced to take a moment and reflect on all the instances where they truly felt “self-aware” about a gap in their knowledge toolkit and skillsets.

The best way to approach the essay is to write terrifically compelling career progress and goals. If you get these two right, you will have created the inexorable and compelling a case for needing an MBA that the adcoms may feel the can answer “Why an MBA” for you.
“Ofcourse she needs an MBA. She has proven she can lead culturally and functionally diverse teams. And since that Unilever project, she has obviously known that operations management is the best way to use her leadership and problem solving skills.”– the trigger for the need of an MBA
If you can manage to get the adcoms rooting subconsciously for you like this, you need not belabor the essay with vague references to “enhancing my skillset” and “honing my soft skills”.

If your “Why MBA” pitch reads like it could describe every person who has ever graced the ISB campus, then my friend, you need to dig deeper.

There are, of course, several solid reasons for wanting an MBA:

->It is an accepted and required credential for advancement in many industries
->It is a universally recognised degree that will enable you to jump from one industry to another or from one ->function to another. Or country to another
->It gives you skills to launch a new business and so on

But these too are very generic!!!!
They aren’t too far from saying “Hey I just need another shiny credential on my resume”
Do not forget that ISB views itself as a temple of personal metamorphosis and not a diploma mill.
So you need to back your answer with concrete examples and reasons specific to you.

Here are some key triggers candidates may consider, although this is not exhaustive:

Career plateau – you have identified that your learning curve has flattened and there are no new challenges on the horizon in the next two years. If you stay on your current career path any longer, you run the risk of being pigeonholed, making it difficult to break out.

Epiphany of goals – You have just realized the purpose of your career, and now that you know it, there’s no reason to procrastinate.

Post-MBA goals have a time component – your plans are linked to trends that are beginning to solidify by the time you do your MBA. You can not afford to wait to acquire the skills you need to capitalize on these trends.

Maturity – You finally have the professional and personal knowledge, balance and perspective to make the wise decision to invest in your long-term future. This is a tactful way of expressing that your age is in line with the average age of job applicants.

Natural career break: You are nearing the end of a clearly defined career phase, such as a two- or three-year analyst program at a consulting firm, a two-year management training program at a company, or a stint abroad in another country.

Networking: Networking provides insights into industry trends, market dynamics, and business strategies that are not always covered in the classroom. It allows you to learn best practices from professionals who have real-world experience.

Optional ISB Essays 2026 – 2027 NEW (250 words)

Peer Contribution

“Share with us any intellectual pursuits, unique perspectives, or experiences that you pursued that have shaped your worldview, your growth through these pursuits, and how they could potentially contribute to our learning community

This is a masked extracurricular/ extraprofessional pursuits essay.

You spent years excelling in academics and building a stellar career, only to come across this ISB application question that asks about your additional pursuits. Panic sets in—Do I even have anything worth mentioning?

If that sounds familiar, you are not alone. Many applicants, especially those from demanding professional fields, struggle with extracurricular essays because they have prioritized work and studies over hobbies or community initiatives. However, these ISB essays are an important opportunity to showcase your passions, leadership skills, and the impact you have made outside of your work and studies. Learn how to write a compelling response here.

Step 1: Take Inventory of Your Activities

Before writing your ISB essay, you should make a list of all the activities you have pursued outside of your professional and academic life. Many people instinctively think of traditional hobbies such as music, dancing or sports, but what really matters is how intensely you have pursued these activities and whether you have contributed to a larger cause or community through them.

For example, suppose you have a passion for dance. In that case, you should not just be learning or performing— have you organized dance classes, created choreography for cultural events or developed online tutorials to share your knowledge? Have you won any awards to prove your commitment? Schools want to see real passion combined with initiative and leadership skills.

Step 2: Make an Effort to Recall Less Obvious Contributions

Not all pursuits need to be formal or structured. Sometimes, the most impactful actions are subtle and personal. Reflect on moments where you took initiative, advocated for change, or helped others in meaningful ways.

Here are some subtle examples to spark ideas:

• Advocating for gender diversity at work by highlighting the low female-to-male ratio to HR.
• Being actively involved in diversity-focused clubs at work such as Working Mothers Club, or LGBTQ+ support groups. Many MNCs will have DEI initiatives that you can actively contribute to.
• Supporting your family financially in difficult times by taking up tutoring, organizing dance classes, or running small businesses.
• Helping underprivileged communities, such as teaching children of support staff or organizing donation drives in your apartment complex.
• Creating awareness about social issues by leading workshops, participating in theatre during college, or organizing mental health discussions at work or school.

By incorporating such examples, you highlight empathy and initiative, making your ISB essay more impactful.

Step 3: Put Together a Strong Narrative on how you will contribute

This is a short ISB essay, but a good ECs essay should not just list a bunch of activities, but rather put together a compelling story about your journey and your various impact initiatives. Below are different thematic approaches you can incorporate into your ISB essay effectively:

Example 1. Reflecting on Formative Years

Information about your background helps the admissions committee understand your journey. A successful applicant once recounted how frequent school changes due to family circumstances forced her to overcome her shyness by participating in debates and public speaking. This showed adaptability and perseverance — qualities that later stood her in good stead in management positions.

Example 2. Small Actions, Big Impact

One candidate described how she helped her family during a financial crisis by taking on entrepreneurial ventures such as taking tuitions for neighborhood children, marketing her mother’s homemade snacks through social media, and opening a clothing boutique based on a profit-sharing model with local artisans to solve the problem of attrition. These early experiences prove her business acumen and problem-solving mentality and reinforced her MBA ambitions.

Example 3. Taking a Stand on Social Issues

Another candidate spoke about growing up in a conservative society where topics such as domestic violence and AIDS were taboo. She used her passion for theatre to write and direct street plays to raise awareness of these critical issues in rural areas. Her ability to use storytelling for social change greatly impressed the admissions committee.

Example 4. Show Inclusive Leadership at Work

Those who struggle to pinpoint ECs outside of work should consider how they have promoted inclusion and engagement in their workplace. One candidate described how they initiated a training program to support women in a male-dominated sales team, while another launched a book club featuring literature from emerging markets to promote cross-cultural discussions.

Schools are not looking for a bulleted list of volunteer efforts. They want to see your unique perspective and the deeper impact of your actions. Even if your involvement hasn’t been continuous, a single strong initiative or well-articulated stance on an important issue can make a strong impression.

Take the time to analyze your journey, identify moments when you were particularly engaged, and create a narrative that highlights your values and leadership.

Curious about the strength of your profile for ISB? I am still taking evaluation sessions so connect for a deeper discussion.

Sign up for a free one-on-one personalized advice session tailored to your specific situation.