Mastering The Case Method: A Prof’s Advice

Harvard Business School is where case method was invented and where it is most crucial to the MBA program. File photo

Harvard Business School is where case method was invented and where it is most crucial to the MBA program. File photo

IT’S ABOUT THE BIG PICTURE

Fairchild, who has taught at Darden for 16 years, has advice to avoid the trap of “distributing answers” — the sort of thing that could lead to a student standing in front of class holding a spreadsheet they don’t really understand. He learned early in his own MBA what he sees play out again and again with his students: Come ready to talk, and think always about the big picture.

“What we learned was, the more we came in ready to discuss rather than just to distribute spreadsheets or distribute answers, the better prepared we were the following day,” Fairchild says. “Because even if your banker gives you a spreadsheet and the spreadsheet is right, when you get called on you’ve got to walk the class through your thinking of what happened in the spreadsheet, and if you didn’t really understand that you’re kind of sunk. And I can tell you now as a professor, I see that, I see people who present me numbers that they don’t know what those numbers actually mean.

“The second thing is, not everybody who says they understand finance understands it deeply. So what’s really important is that the group really take the time to ask two questions. Not just, ‘What is the answer?’ but also, ‘What is the case building on relative to this larger body of thinking that the instructor is trying to  get you to?'”

It’s vital, Fairchild says, that that “big picture” mentality pervades all group and individual deliberations in case method courses. The big picture in each case, he advises, often is related to the case that was studied previously, and perhaps the case that comes next. “So it’s great that you know the break-even calculation is 257,” he says, using a random figure as an example. “But what’s better is that you’re trying to understand that there’s this larger discussion about the way you plan for the inventory that you bring into an organization, and try to make it relative to the sales. So it’s all part of a larger discussion on inventory management, how inventories intersect with your marketing claims, and so the more you think that rather than coming in with ‘The answer is 257,’ the better off you’re going to be.”

‘THE TASK HERE IS NOT TO KNOW, IT’S TO LEARN’

Fairchild has advice for working in a group setting in case courses. The first thing is, be open and honest about your needs when you first sit down with your teammates. How do you like to discuss things in a classroom versus in a group? “We find that there’s some people who don’t do very well in case method but we find out later they are exceptional in their understanding — they’re just not comfortable in the public debate,” Fairchild says. “So sit down and ask those questions. How do you like to learn, how do you like to talk about that you believe?”

The easy thing, he reiterates, is to fall into a pattern of dividing tasks by academic specialization. “Oh we’ve got two bankers — OK you guys lead all the finance and accounting things. And not only is that flawed in a learning standpoint for all people in the group, but it’s also flawed in this idea that to reduce people to their simple academic backgrounds is a big error.”

There’s a difference, Fairchild says, between efficiency and effectiveness. It might be a more efficient approach to split up the cases on the basis of someone’s past background work, “but it also means that you coming in won’t have read well or deeply or thought deeply about a case you weren’t assigned,” he points out. “If you’re going to do that kind of assigning thing, I recommend that you rotate it, and you rotate it across the group, and you rotate it functionally — you get some people to lead, to present, and if you have somebody in your group that has a jones for teaching, then have them try to model the teaching of the case.

“Then what you’re coming into the room with is this idea that we’re learning — the task here is not to know, it’s to learn. It’s to learn both in the group and to learn in the room.”

BE A HUNTER-GATHERER WITH A ‘BIGGER, WIDER, BROADER VIEW’

Fairchild says professors of case method tend to notice certain types of student — and certain types of student tend to be better at being noticed. “You learn as a professor that there are students that you go to for certain things. There are some people who like to come in right at the beginning of the discussion, and there are your people who like to lay it out. They are the people who want to come in with the final big analysis with the right number, and so they’re the person who wants to come in and say, yeah the valuation is $343 million.

“But actually there’s a person who often comes in after them, who can do very well in classes, and these people are the people who sum up what this all means. We call them the hunter-gatherers, and they come in right at the very end and say, ‘Well you know what this whole case was about? It was really about these larger questions that we’ve been dealing with,’ and they say, ‘The number $343 million was important but the really big thing we obviously were here to earn is, blah blah blah …’

“Then the professor is going to go back and he’s going to be thinking about who the memorable characters were over the course of the day, and psychology tells us that when people listen they remember what happened at the very beginning, and they remember what happened at the very end. And so these people who are kind of waiting and gathering all the crumbs and pulling them together to make a pie out of it, those people often get credited and remembered by professors as someone who really got it, while other people who came in during the second discussion — and maybe they had a lot of deep thoughts about why comparing Budweiser to Heineken was a bad idea — they’re noted, but they’re not as memorable as the person who had a bigger, wider, broader view.”

SEE ALSO HOW THEY TEACH THE CASE METHOD AT HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL or HOW THE WORLD’S TOP BUSINESS SCHOOLS TEACH THEIR MBAs 

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