1. FRC: Financial Reporting and Control (ie. Accounting)
2. TOM: Technology and Operations Management
3. LEAD: Leadership and Organizational Behavior

LEAD is unique for tomorrow (we’re following up on a special activity from Friday), but for most days you have one case study per class.  The FRC case tomorrow is on Depreciation at Delta and the TOM case is about one of Toshiba’s plants:

FRC and TOM Cases

(You can click on the image for a larger version.)  Cases vary significantly in length, but they average about 7 pages of text and 7 pages of exhibits.  Exhibits are typically quantitative reports, diagrams, financial statements, and even sometimes (as shown here) plant layouts and photos of operations:

Exhibits from a Case Study

There are also supplemental documents / readings of various sorts that are found on the “course platform” on-line… videos of operations in TOM, 10k statements for FRC, and financial models for FIN.

The cases essentially boil down into real-life business stories, written with the narrative flow of a novel.  The protagonist is introduced at the beginning, followed by a bit of background on the industry and market, then the case may state the decision to be made or the problem to be solved… but often it’s just a description of the situation and you have to figure out what the core issue is.  It’s rare to have a single “correct” answer to the case.  What?  No right answers?  It’s not really about learning what worked for Toshiba at a particular factory in a particular place at a particular time… what would that really teach you?  You’re never going to be in that exact same situation again.  I think the learning comes more from weighing the pros / cons of the fundamental principles and practicing the analysis process.

We typically prepare 13-15 cases per week.  That’s a lot of business scenarios!  All of the cases are based on real situations, and all the professors at HBS are expected to develop a few a year.  The development process is pretty involved — lots of interviews with the industry participants, etc.  As such, while we do have some “classic” cases, many of them are based on business issues that have occured within the last few years.

Basically, it’s all about learning via “stories” with limited information.  I think it’s pretty effective, and seems to be particularly enhanced by the debate and discussion that occurs in the classroom (which I’ll have to describe in greater detail later).  It’s also very different than what most people are used to.  It’s not an “Answer Problems #1-30″ type assignment.  I’ve read cases through 2-3 times before and still though “Huh?”!  You can spend hours preparing arguments, reading for nuances, etc… and still not have anything insightful to add to the discussion during class.  It’s a tricky business, this case process…

It’s an interesting idea, and basically implements across the entire student body the “informal study groups” that tend to form naturally.  It also gives HBS a chance to experiment with a bit of social engineering, which is always a plus.  The problem is: few of these groups continue to meet past a few months into the school year.  Why is this?

There will always be time pressure (they meet at 7:30am!), personality conflicts, and free-rider issues, but I think the fundamental problem here is deeper than that: Students form groups for radically different reasons. There seem to be a few dominant / traditional reasons:

1. Hedge the risk of an unprepared cold call by having other people “write-up” cases.
2. Ensure a solid understanding of the case fundamentals by working through difficult issues.
3. Polish ideas for public speaking by practicing in front of a group smaller than 90 people.

Unfortunately, these goals tend to lead to the 60 minutes every morning being spent reviewing what most people already know.  You covered it last night, you cover it again with your LT, and then AGAIN during class that day.  I find that I rarely use my LT’s write-up in class.  It’s easy to see why people get burned out once they’ve learned the fundamentals of how to prepare cases.  I think an LT should have more focused objectives:

1. Brainstorm “out there” ideas that might yield unique comments in class.
2. Brainstorm “unanswerable” questions that might yield unique comments in class.
3. Brainstorm “tying-it-all-together” concepts that might yield unique comments in class.

Notice the common theme?  This is the real opportunity here, but it seems like very few LTs pick up on it…