Harvard Business School is in the middle of celebrating the 100th anniversary of the case study teaching method, and is doing so with the aplomb that you would expect from the world’s richest business school. The campus is festooned with banners. A website features video lectures by celebrated professors. Forthcoming events include an exhibition in the Baker Library later this month, a Centennial Celebration Day on March 30th, and a colloquium on the future of case studies on May 31st.
I say “in the middle” because the celebration is continuing throughout the 2021-2 academic year. The first case study — “General Shoe Company” — was published in 1921. (It dealt with the perennially fascinating subject of what to do about the decline in workers’ productivity toward the end of their shifts.) The method was properly institutionalized in 1922, when the faculty voted to give it a name and 93 other universities decided to adopt the method. By 1923, two-thirds of the school’s courses were taught through cases.
The method has evolved a bit over the years. The cases feature a wider range of countries and a more diverse cast of characters. Professors are experimenting with manga cartoons, audiovisual aids and even “simulations” and “immersion placements.” But the method is basically the same as the one that was settled upon in 1922: The instructor calls on a student to summarize the case and suggest ways of addressing the central business problem — the famous “cold call” that many business titans still remember with a shudder. A general discussion ensues in which students compete to gut the case and suggest solutions.
The case method is now both the cornerstone of the HBS experience and a lucrative business in its own right. Students study about 500 cases during their two years at the school — a significant exercise in time-management given that the cases average 11 pages in length plus several figures, compared with the sparse elegance of “General Shoe Company’s” single page. HBS faculty produce some 225 new cases a year and each one takes about 160 hours to research and write. The school sold 15.4 million cases globally in the 2021 financial year, mostly to other business schools, generating revenue of $59 million.
Other professional schools have also borrowed the case method from HBS, just as HBS originally borrowed it from the law school across the Charles River. Oxford University’s new (in Oxford terms) Blavatnik School of Government has made a big bet on applying the Harvard method to public administration. It has recruited case-study veterans from HBS such as Karthik Ramanna, a former professor, and Sarah McAra, a former associate director of the school’s case-study center. It is building up a collection of public-sector cases such as one dealing with the Vatican Bank’s financial management and another with the Metropolitan Police’s stop-and-search policy.
HBS’s penchant for self-congratulation can be infuriating. “If Robespierre were to ascend from hell and seek out today’s guillotine fodder,” Philip Delves Broughton, himself an HBS alumnus, wrote during the hoopla surrounding the school’s 100th anniversary in 2008, “he might start with a list of those with three incriminating initials beside their names: MBA.” But in this instance it is justified. The case method is an antidote to the two biggest curses of business education.
The first curse is “scientism”: the idea that management is a science that can be derived from rigorous study and applied to all businesses in all circumstances. This was the approach championed by Frederick Winslow Taylor, the so-called father of scientific management and a big noise when HBS was established in 1908. It is also the approach of many ivory tower academics today, from exponents of “evidence-based policy-making” to devotees of value-free economic models. The case method exposes this approach for the nonsense that it is by focusing students’ attention on a “chunk or reality” rather than on theories on the blackboard.
The second curse is “faddism”: the cycle of big ideas that are supposed to offer the secret to revolutionizing the business world, such as “business process re-engineering” in the 1990s (a Google Ngram search shows it rising steeply from 1987 to 1996 and then dissipating downward) or “purpose-driven leadership” today. These ideas sweep through the business world, generating dozens of conferences, articles and, these days, Zoom calls, before blowing themselves out, leaving their promises unfulfilled and the landscape flattened. True, HBS-based professors generate many of these fads and Harvard-branded products such as the “Harvard Business Review” disseminate them. But at least the school is good enough to produce the antidote as well as the venom.
The great virtue of the method is that it puts the humanity back at the heart of business thinking. It introduces students to the extraordinary variety of business organizations. It shows that choices are always open-ended. The objective facts of the business case — the structure of the industry or the flow of capital — may constrain the choices available, but it can never determine them entirely. And it demonstrates that half the battle lies in persuading your colleagues (or in this case fellow classmates) that you’ve made the right decision. Management is as much about telling a compelling story and crafting a persuasive argument as it is about establishing the facts.
The method does all this in conditions of relentless pressure: As soon as you have finished one case you have to start another. Powell Niland, a former HBS faculty member who went on to the Olin Business School at Washington University, said that “the case system puts the student into the habit of making decisions.” David Garvin, also of HBS, talked about developing “the courage to act.”
Isaiah Berlin once wrote an artful essay on political judgment. He argued that the best politicians don’t think like scientists who try to generate systematic principles from a welter of facts or like intellectuals who try to come up with exciting ideas. They are nevertheless engaged in a highly sophisticated intellectual activity — plucking what they see to be the salient facts from the whirling storm of daily events, processing them with extraordinary rapidity, and then deciding, on the basis of an almost animal instinct, how to make their next move. The British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury was one day asked on what principle he decided whether to go to war. He replied that in order to decide whether or not to take an umbrella he looked at the sky. Political judgment is the art of looking at the sky and producing correct guesses about how the weather will turn out.
The same thing can be said about business judgment. What makes a successful businessperson is not their brain power or command of theory. It is their ability to size up ambiguous situations — emerging technologies, nascent markets, complex investment instruments — and then make a sensible judgment under pressure. This ability to produce sound judgments is becoming more important as politics intrudes even deeper into business life and managers are being obliged to make difficult trade-offs between commercial logic and political pressure and between various rival constituencies.
The obvious objection to this argument is that all too many business school products have lacked judgment: Look at the great business scandals of the past few years, from Enron Corp. to the global financial crisis, and you will probably find HBS graduates at the heart of them. HBS even wrote a number of case studies lauding Enron as an example of “asset light management” and the school’s alumnus, Enron president Jeffrey Skilling, as a magnificent manager.
High-profile lawbreakers like Skilling necessarily attract disproportionate attention. But for every Skilling there are thousands of managers who did the work of running their corner of the business world professionally and honestly. And Skilling was as much as anything an example of the evils of management theory — in this case the financialization of everything — particularly when that management theory seemed to justify the ancient vice of greed.
The case method arguably needs to be reinforced by other pedagogical techniques that are designed to teach judgement: I would advocate obliging MBA students to spend at least some of their time reading great philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle and studying the recent rise of populism (a good name for the course would be “Why Do They Hate Us?”). But for its part the case method has amply justified its place at the heart of business education. It deserves to remain there for at least another century.
More From Other Writers at Bloomberg Opinion:
• CEOs Learn Something in Business School: Matt Levine
• Modern CEOs Have to Go to Lots of Meetings, Too: Justin Fox
• No, My MBA Alma Mater’s Initiation Rite Isn’t Hazing: Leonid Bershidsky
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously a writer at the Economist. His latest book is “The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.”
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