Akshay Rao: A Man of His Words

Akshay Rao really knows how to tell a tale. The General Mills Chair in Marketing at the Carlson School is soft-spoken but carries the self-assuredness that comes from being a professor who has spent a lifetime listening to, reading, writing, and telling stories. His conversations are peppered with references that almost better fit the syllabus of a world lit professor, not a business one—think ancient Greek poetry of Homer or the Bhagavad Gita.

But despite his encyclopedic references, Rao’s approach is straightforward. “I like to tell stories, and people seem to like the stories I have to tell,” he says, explaining how his CV has become so crowded. His prowess shouldn’t come as a surprise: He has devoted his professional life to marketing, a world that often hinges its success upon telling the right story, in the right way, at the right time.

But Rao’s prolific and kaleidoscopic portfolio of storytelling feels like its own ongoing epic, a saga of a Renaissance Man whose interests have created more plot twists and chapters than most people manage to write before they close their book. 

He’s non-discriminant when it comes to form: He’s told his stories at firms, in classrooms, on stages, on TV, in research articles and newspaper columns, and via audio. His poetry “has been rejected by the finest magazines in the world.” Thirty-second commercials in which he plays a hospital patient dovetail with his 2023 novella-length memoir, Patient: A Humorous Memoir of Healthcare and Healing, written about his experience of acute renal failure during the COVID-19 pandemic. He has performed live with The Moth StorySLAM and self-funded a 12-CD set, in which he narrates the Mahabharata, an Indian mythological epic. 

His son, Aidan Rao, ’21 MHRIR, says, “Storytelling has always been a passion of his. There was rarely a night growing up that he wouldn’t send my sister and I to bed without one. I think it really comes down to the importance of a narrative for people in general. There are capital-T Truths, but to sleepy kids or even adults in class, a narrative is what is truly important to spark interest, motivate, and bring more meaning to everyday things.” 

Like any good writer, the professor uses his considerable and wide-ranging life experiences as source material for various projects: acting classes at the Guthrie Theater, serving on the board of the Alliance Française, fundraising for important campaigns, table tennis and tennis matches, and even once conducting the Minnesota Orchestra. 

He delivers his tales in a warm, unhurried, public-radio cadence that still manages to convey purpose and timing. When asked, Rao initially says it’s simply a love of story and storytelling that propels him. However, upon deeper introspection, perhaps his true impetus materializes. 

“The pen is mightier than the sword. We’re able to persuade people to do things they otherwise would not have done because of a powerful story,” he says. “The view to which I subscribe is that if there is to be hope for humanity, it has to lie in the belief that people of goodwill will tell stories to change the behavior of the rest of the world.”

That purpose seems to be echoed in the types of stories he tells.

Take, for example, Patient, his memoir detailing his weeklong hospitalization for acute renal failure after a bout of COVID-19. Upon returning home, enjoying the energy boost that can only come from a prescribed dose of the steroid Prednisone, he says, “I had cleaned the house top to bottom, clipped the cat’s toenails, alphabetized my spices and books, and was thinking ‘Now what do I do?’” Some people might flop on the couch and watch Bravo, but Rao outlined the idea of his book into chapters and got to work.

It was, as many say, an unprecedented time to be in the hospital, which makes his experience particularly insightful among an entire genre of brush-with-death tales. There’s a value in capturing a very specific mood or details of the moment that the collective experience shifts. These societal tectonic plates sometimes shift in ways that are later forgotten as the immediate aftermath evaporates, lives change, and systems adapt to a new reality.

“There’s data I’ve used to make a point in class: You can compare the week after September 11, 2001, to the year 2000 for purchases of alcohol, cigarettes, junk food—and there was a huge spike relative to what had been the case the prior year. There was more random sexual activity that week, too. People thought they were going to die. It’s how a lot of people behave under the threat of death. It’s when some people let their guard down,” he explains. Rao’s experience amid the pandemic uncertainty was much different—a tightly controlled, tasteless hospital-food diet, visits with his two children, and strict orders to rest despite his protestations. But in this so-called respite, he bantered with his healthcare team, and sometimes successfully took a brick or two out of their professional emotional walls. In a vulnerable time, they confessed their worries and fears to him, and even shed tears.

“That’s what I experienced: People were letting their guards down. So what’s the moral of the book? I don’t want to moralize,” he muses. When pushed, he chooses: “Be nice to people. Tomorrow you might be in the hospital with acute renal failure.”

Literally, he lived to tell the tale. Most people might stop there. Not Rao.

Next up: Conquering The Moth StorySLAM, a live storytelling performance competition. On his first outing in April 2024, he recounted an unexpected interaction with an orangutan on a family trip, a version of which appears in Patient. His win sent him to The Moth GrandSLAM several months later, which pits a group of previous StorySLAM winners head-to-head in a championship round. That wild tale—one he’s told in the classroom as an illustration about customer experience—described how Rao encountered a nemesis while making a Domino’s pizza order. (He did not sweep the GrandSLAM, to his dismay.)

Julie Censullo, producer for The Moth StorySLAM in the Twin Cities, says Rao’s performances were memorable for his “inventive” characterizations and his command onstage, which she says put the audience at ease, allowing them to fully enjoy his performances.

“He was describing a hill, and he used the word ‘verdant.’ We did a whole Slam about the color green, and no one had said that word,” she recounts. “At a show like The Moth—it’s an MPR crowd—they’re generally folks who use SAT words. The way he said it felt like the audience was enraptured by that one single word. It filled the room.”

Rao says when it comes to live storytelling he relies on the old adage that people will remember not what you said, but how you made them feel. “I think there is truth to that. You need to make them feel differently than they felt before,” he says.

Transformation, then, is one driver of Rao’s storytelling—and his son says curiosity is another. “He has spent a lot of his life in research and teaching and is surrounded by smart people all the time, so I think he’s constantly being challenged to expand his horizons just due to his environment, his career, even moving to a new country,” Aidan says. “He really does love the work he does. My sister and I often asked, growing up, when he would retire, and he said he never would. Curiosity, learning, and research are some of the biggest passions of his life.”

That is to say, don’t expect Rao to hit cruise control for this phase of his life. He’ll be finding ways to write new chapters until he can’t anymore.

“True cruise controllers are marking time, as the old Pink Floyd song goes, waiting to die. They don’t realize it because they don’t have the intellectual curiosity or motivation or desire to make a difference,” Rao says. “But there is lots of stuff to be done, and some things I can do better than other people, so I’ll step into the breach until they tell me to go somewhere else. I can’t imagine living my life any other way. Sitting on the beach somewhere? I have a fine tan already. I don’t need to sit on the beach. This is how you fill your life: With things that bring you pleasure. The power of story is certainly one of them.”

Photography by Dan Gunderson