A Hands-On Classroom at the B-School

The case study method--now regarded as the academic trademark of the Harvard Business School--has become a fixture across the River since its curriculum-wide introduction in the 1920s.

But the B-School is virtually the only graduate business school in the country that has fully adopted this system, which stresses hands-on experience over abstract approaches. Using the case method, B-School students spend the majority of their class time examining recorded histories of actual workplace problems.

Proponents of the case study method say that the system's ability to involve students directly in the discussion and decision-making process is its foremost advantage. Students have the floor in most case discussions and direct their comments and questions towards each other as they work through a real business scenario. Professors remain in the background, instead of lecturing or controlling discussion.

"The case method is a crackling experience of involvement by both students and professors," says Walmsley University Professor C. Roland Christensen, widely regarded as the pioneer of the case study method at the B-School. The system, he says, represents "an important part of our total mission to do an excellent job of teaching."

"There is a great excitement generated by the participants in the analysis and solution of problems," says Kenneth R. Andrews, David Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus. "It's a stimulation that discussion provokes, as opposed to the glazing over of the eyes that occurs during some lectures."

Lack of Depth

But in business courses that involve more number-crunching than subjective policy decisions, enthusiasm for the case method begins to fade. Professors outside the B-School say that studying topics such as accounting and corporate finance requires an understanding of basic principles before exploring complex scenarios, adding that using case studies from the start allows for only a superficial treatment of the subject.

"Harvard's way is the way you'd learn a foreign language if you were just thrown into the streets of Paris--it's like Berlitz," says Roman L. Weil, professor of accounting and director of the Institute of Professional Accounting at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. "I don't teach Berlitz. It's not merely how to get along. We want to go deeper than that--we want our people to be leaders in their profession."

While B-School professors acknowledge that the case method is less ideal for teaching highly quantitative fields, they maintain that it still proves valuable even in such areas as accounting and finance. Since these topics do not lend themselves to the case method as easily as business policy does, professors at most business schools are often left to decide whether lectures, cases or a mixed approach will work best for their courses.

At Chicago's Graduate School of Business, says the director of its MBA program, the choice rests with the professor, and not with curriculum administrators. "The faculty are free to teach in any way they feel is best to convey their material," says Joanne Reott. "We use a variety of approaches. Especially in the beginning, we rely on more analytical or theoretical preesentations--the faculty introduces the basic principles. In the upper level classes, though, more case studies are brought in."

But at Harvard, cases are the rule, and they serve as the foundation for all courses. Although professors occasionally provide mini-lectures or summarize past classes, they must use case studies rather than lectures as the basic unit of instruction.

In addition, since all first-year students take the same courses at the same time, an effort to achieve parity between the 90-student sections results. Digressing too far from the planned curriculum means that one section will fall behind the others; and as a result, the flexibility of course material is minimal.

The rigidity of Harvard's use of the case method is not missed at other schools, such as the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and Chicago's B-School.

"Wharton's like total anarchy," says Joanne B. Ciulla, a Wharton lecturer specializing in ethics, who was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard's B-School. "At Harvard there's much more structure. There's the sense that you all have to get the same things done so that there's equitable teaching. That's tough--really tough."

"At Chicago," says Weil, "there is absolutely no attempt to coordinate the sections, whereas at Harvard it is absolutely forbidden to do anything different. There's a running joke that at the Harvard staff meetings, they don't just discuss what to talk about in class--they also tell you which blackboard to write it on."

But B-School professors say the case system does allow flexibility for students to depart from the curriculum and discuss outside events such as the Wall Street insider trading scandal.

Since the students normally control the flow of class discussion, says Christensen, they may direct their comments toward current issues if they choose. "I can't imagine a method that allows more freedom," he says.

That Harvard MBA's may have a less technical understanding of subjects such as finance and accounting than their counterparts elsewhere is by design. While the business schools of Chicago and Pittsburgh's Carnegie-Mellon University may train their accounting students to pass the Certified Public Accountant exam and marketing students to be consultants, the stated purpose of the B-School is to train managers. As a result, Harvard MBA's don't necessarily know all the intricacies of such financial operations; but they can efficiently oversee those who do.

"Harvard does what it does better than anyone," says Weil. "For its mission it's the best."

"The true academic wants the timeless answer--we want the timely," says Christensen. "We want you to learn and discover." The case method, he says, "isn't trying to intellectualize up to higher levels of abstraction, but down to the lower level of what you would do in a particular situation."

Harvard-Bred But Unwanted

As a result of the gap between Harvard's predominantly case-based curriculum and those of other major business schools, B-School doctoral students often find that their alma mater is the only option for a career in business academia. Many B-School professors completed their doctoral study at Harvard; but at other schools, fewer Harvard MBA's join the faculty ranks. Harvard students' excellence in case research is unquestioned, say other business school professors, but their potential for scholarship in a non-case atmosphere is limited.

"Since the Harvard Business School Ph.D. is more oriented toward writing cases, the students often don't come out with as keen a level of scholarship and as theoretically-minded," says James W. Kuhn '50, professor of management and organization at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business. "I tend to accept this general impression as a little harsher than reality justifies...but you certainly do not have the same kind of scholarship you see at [the business schools of] the University of Chicago or Carnegie-Mellon [University]."

"The Harvard student is very smart--he will do very well--but he needs to do more work," says Weil. "We want people who can do their own analytical work, not who are always relying on staff."

Weil adds, "Harvard's training is different, and its research is different from the rest of the world. Harvard considers research to be the documentation of cases, that the way to push knowledge forward is to write cases, not scholarship."

The discrepancy between these schools of thought is no accident. As Harvard's Christensen explains, "Many schools are devoted to the study of the practice of management--we are devoted to the practice of management." Nevertheless, this fundamental difference in training is still often regarded as a weakness in other business schools' assessments of B-School graduates.

"In the cutting edge of methodology, Harvard has not been as productive, but there are other dimensions, like case research, in which Harvard excels," says John Deighton, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Chicago. Still, says Deighton, "there is something wrong" when Harvard's B-School, often regarded as the best in the nation, doesn't produce students who go on to take teaching positions at other top business schools.

System Forces Preparation

The case study method, say Harvard professors, forces students to control each day's discussion, allowing them to dictate which aspects of a general case are examined, but also requiring intense preparation for each class. Professors are often referred to as "facilitators" rather than lecturers; they don't lead the discussion so much as moderate it.

"The class won't be as insightful if everyone is unprepared, but that's a risk representative of the business world," says first-year student Eric-Vincent Guichard. This risk looms largest during the corporate recruiting season, says Guichard, when preparation for job interviews tends to take priority over classwork.

Often the past business experience of students can be counted on to help carry the day's case study. The unwritten rule of B-School admissions requires two years of work experience before matriculation, and each first-year section contains a diverse mix of former managers, consultants and engineers.

In fact, students are sometimes assigned cases that they have already studied in their past employment training. In November 1987, a case appeared on the marketing midterm exam which 22 students had previously encountered at their Bain & Co. orientation. Before selecting the case, the professor failed to make a routine check on whether Harvard had already sold copies of the case to the Boston-based firm.

Changing the Professor's Role

Student participation, together with the fact that much information on each topic is presented directly in the case, allows professors with little expertise in the field to conduct classes nonetheless. Some say this frees professors to teach and learn about a variety of subjects, but critics maintain that the B-School's expertise in methodology comes with a loss of expertise in subject matter.

Ford Professor of Business Administration Michael C. Jensen says that he came to recognize the merits of case teaching--even before coming to Harvard-when he taught at the University of Rochester's lecture-oriented Simon School of Management.

"My transition to using cases actually started about a decade ago," said Jensen. "I moved to being more of a moderator, a coach and a guide. I somehow or another stumbled onto the importance of it at Rochester, but [at the B-School] I learned how to do it better."

"The learning experience is largely a burden that students carry, not the professors," says Jensen, "which is not a bad rule." However, Jensen adds that for faculty, "it's easy to lay back and be protected form ignorance by the ethic in the classroom that you're not expected to provide the answers."

To teach at the B-School, "You don't have to know the subject. You just have to know the case method," says Ciulla. "One benefit is that professors can teach something they're not experts in. But on the other hand, people come in expecting to be taught by experts."

Students, though, say they are not disturbed by these conditions. Given the structure of the case method, they have come to judge professors by their ability to direct discussion, and not by their lecturing skills.

If the professors have little connection with a topic, says one first-year student, "it doesn't make such a difference. With 90 people in the class, you usually pick up someone who's been in the business before. The teachers whom people think don't have any credibility are the ones who don't cut off the conversation when it becomes just a bunch of spewed answers."

The Case Study Factory

The B-School plays a dual role in case studies--it not only uses them extensively in its own courses, but also is the major supplier of case studies to business schools and corporations around the world.

Harvard maintains a collection of 6000 cases, of which 2000 are used exclusively by Harvard professors, officials say. All have been developed at the B-School, and most are written by full-time case writers under faculty supervision.

The school distributes three-and-a-half to four million copies each year; one-and-a-half million are used within the B-School alone. Up until the 1950s the school served as a clearinghouse for the case studies of outside institutions, but later it abandoned this role.

The B-School has also helped other Harvard graduate schools to utilize the case study method. B-School professors last year helped Harvard's Medical School make its New Pathways program--a case-based system of instruction initiated as a 24-student experimental project four years ago--the foundation of its curriculum. The School of Public Health and the Kennedy School of Government also use the case method in some of their courses, says Christensen.

According to professors at other business schools, the overall volume of cases produced each year has usually been sufficient to provide new material for their courses. Where some have found problems, however, is in the breadth of the cases' subject matter.

Few Cases on Ethics, Minorities

Cases which deal specifically with problems in business ethics, or those featuring women and minorities as subjects, for example, are often in short supply. While in most areas Harvard is "always turning cases out," says Ciulla, ethics cases, as well as those dealing with certain other specialized areas, are few, and professors often write their own in order to make new material available.

Kuhn, who teaches business ethics courses at Columbia, says he writes most of his own cases, and uses the B-School's "only if I'm desperate and can't come up with any of my own. It's not that I think Harvard's are poor, but they just don't fit my needs."

"I did a big survey of Harvard cases and was quite disappointed," said Kuhn. "Harvard's cases," he says, "too much revolve around personal ethics, rather than systemic ethics"--they study the transgressions made by individuals rather than how these are caused by the faults of the business world itself-"and I think that's a very serious weakness."

"Most of the last new ethics cases I've seen were mine," says Ciulla. "We need more ethics cases, and we need them on women, and we need them on Blacks. There are also no international cases worth anything." When Ciulla needs cases on international business, she says, she writes them with her foreign students.

According to Andrews, however, the absence of women and minorities from most case studies only reflects the problem of their absence in the actual business world. Since the cases describe actual situations, the presence of women and minorities in business cannot be fabricated. Professors say a concerted effort is made to include them wherever possible.

"There is certainly an effort now on the part of the case collection to follow the opportunity [to profile women or minorities in business] whenever it is available. It's a question of development and evolution. [Case researchers] would go to a company run by a woman before one run by a man. The imbalance needs to be corrected."

While some observers find the case method regimented, and some charge that important groups and topics are commonly neglected, critics are not likely to outnumber proponents anytime soon. For all its faults, the system has maintained decades of popularity with both professors and students at the B-School. Although virtually no other business schools in the country have introduced the same system, the powers that be across the River have decided that it works. The venerable case study method has today become almost as much of an institution as the school itself.