Reconsidering the Case Method

Credit: Generated by author with Dall-E

To develop well-rounded managers, HBS needs to diversify its pedagogy.

After half a semester at HBS, the three days of START are a blur for most of us. I remember little from those days except for one statistic: 17.7 million. 

During his welcome address, MBA program Chair Matthew Weinzierl quizzed the incoming class on an assortment of HBS trivia. 17.7 million was the number of cases HBS sold last year.

To contextualize that number, Weinzierl described HBS’ mission: to pursue bold experiments in teaching. A century ago, HBS settled on the case method as the bold experiment to train the managerial mind. Two months into my own education here, I have found myself in turns enthused, amused, and disappointed by how cases have played out in my classes. I am convinced the method excels in teaching us how to find locally optimal decisions in information deserts — a critical role of the manager — but I am less certain that it equips us to consider deeper structural issues. When we condense complex choices into ten pages from a single point of view, we fail to see the historical context behind and structural implications of the issues we are tackling. We rarely explore how consumer preferences, values, technology, and politics are all intertwined. We take our constraints as a given instead of interrogating our own role in creating them and seeking to imagine new paradigms. 

The RC does incorporate the occasional simulation, problem set, and exercise, but the vast majority of our learning is founded on the case method. It is also as much part of HBS’s brand as its pedagogy. The 17.7 million cases sold last year accounted for the majority of the $310 million HBS made from publishing. Most of the 350 cases our faculty write annually are vetted and approved by company representatives. While professors lead us into critique in class, I worry that discussions based on a premise that has been moderated by public relations departments are inherently limited.

The case method is so intertwined with HBS’ institutional identity and economic model that it has become the default teaching tool when alternatives may serve us better. The Swiss Army Knife of skills a manager needs must be delivered through an analogously diverse set of pedagogical choices. 

Legal origins of the case method

The “casebook” method of teaching was first adopted by Harvard Law School in the 1890s. Instead of simply studying the rules of law, as had been the norm until then, students were encouraged to reason through real judicial opinions and cases. As an HBS blog describes, “With the case method, pedagogical emphasis shifted from facts and theories to practical situations and outcomes. This shift was part of a larger cultural movement toward instrumentalism and pragmatism.”

HBS’ inaugural deans, Edwin Francis Gay and Wallace Donham, were ardent devotees of the “case method.” They believed the best way to train managers, as with lawyers, was to immerse them in real-world decision-making. With a wide mandate over the newly founded HBS, the deans were able to reimagine management education. In his institutional biography, The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite, journalist Duff MacDonald notes, “The only thing holding Gay back from a full-scale implementation was a lack of actual cases and of professors capable of teaching in such a way.”

What followed was a century-long pursuit of case production. HBS faculty currently produce over 350 cases per year, which are licensed by universities around the world. 30% of HBS’s revenues last year came from publishing, double the amount received from MBA tuition. Over the course of a century, the case has become as much a “product” as a “pedagogical method.”

Training the managerial mind…

Before starting RC, I spent a year in the MPA International Development program at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). My academic year consisted of economic, political, and development theory, coupled with a smattering of HKS case studies and a joint degree seminar with HBS cases. Moving from relatively diverse pedagogy at HKS to a purely case-based environment at HBS has left me rife with comparisons of the two experiences. 

While HKS trained my critical mind (I learned increasingly sophisticated ways to say “I don’t know”), HBS has been training my managerial one (I am gaining an unfounded confidence in my decision-making capabilities). 

In my first weeks, I have been impressed by the encompassing reality the case creates. I have often found myself completely ensconced in the context of the protagonist — be it Erik Peterson or Mr. Butler — regardless of how different it might be from my own context. Cases, which are ultimately stories, have been far easier to remember than dry theory. I have been able to micromanage strategies and tactically analyze issues in ways that seem directly relevant to my post-MBA career. I initially felt daunted by approaching a case before having been “taught” it, but I have been gaining the self-confidence to test my ideas before my entire section. 

But any of the tens of Harvard Business Review articles on the case method could have told you this.

…and the moral mind

I worry more that the wholesale embrace of the case method at HBS does not adequately acknowledge the method’s inadequacies. While embracing the character of a “protagonist” clarifies the key challenges at hand, it also prevents us from looking at structural issues and asking normative questions. The case traps us in reacting to how the world is without asking how the world should be.

You could argue that such normative questions belong in the realm of law, politics and philosophy. We came here for a business education — to learn how to make decisions within the constraints of the world as it is. If this were true, I would rest my case. But we are simultaneously told about our ability to be “changemakers” in society at large. HBS’ rhetoric hammers in the expectation that our influence will span far beyond the sphere of business, which itself is endogenous to society. As future stewards of large amounts of capital and influence, we must learn how to wield this power positively.

The case method limits us to first order optimizations without considering the second order implications of our actions. It implicitly teaches us to operate in a world akin to Milton Friedman’s imagination, where firms’ social responsibility is to maximize profits while abiding by the “rules of the game.” This does not consider that rulemaking is endogenous and that our actions will influence the constraints by which we are bound. Some of my professors have sought to explore these second order implications in class, but usually as a final intellectual exercise, time permitting.

While putting ourselves in the shoes of the protagonist is a valuable thought exercise, it is also inherently a limited one. We often only meet the “company-vetted” version of the protagonist, rather than the “real” person. While we get the insider view, we are also limited to dinner table niceties, the protagonist our host who has given us a view into their home. 

The case aspires to Socratic standards of deliberation, but instead of delving deeply into arguments as one would in a small discussion, we are limited to bite-sized quips in a 90-person classroom. We prioritize the “feeling of knowing” over actual knowledge. In focusing on “practical knowledge,” the case method sidelines the study of theory, which can transcend time. Combined with its retrospectivity, the case method limits our ability to ask imaginative questions about the future. As MacDonald writes, “Because a case study is by its very nature backward looking,... [MBA graduates are] armed with conventional answers to conventional questions.” We take the status quo as a given without being creative about the premise of the case itself. 

I would be excited to explore with my classmates how to challenge the premises with which we’re presented. Can we envisage a world where burdening young people with debt isn’t a lucrative path to ‘growth’? Where companies and governments engage in good faith interactions for societal benefit instead of offshoring profits? And once we start to imagine such worlds, can we think of ways to get there? 

Sometimes there are glimmers of what such a class might look like. For example, at the end of the Heidi Roizen case in LEAD, a classmate questioned the premise of networking, which is inherently based on biased social networks and “in-groups.” Instead of abiding by the constraints of the case, her comment challenged its very premise. It asked us to imagine a more meritocratic world where biased social networks don’t moderate access to opportunities. Unfortunately, in the pithy style of the case discussion we engaged with the question for two further comments and then moved along the teaching plan.

Diverse pedagogy for well-rounded leaders

I obviously chose to come to HBS because I believe spending two years of my life in Aldrich is valuable. I still think so and believe the case method can help me achieve many of my academic goals for business school. However, I worry that the cultish embrace of the case method, founded in the business model of the school itself, prevents us from gaining fully from its strengths, which might shine more in a mixed methods environment, where cases complement learning in large lectures and small seminars. To become proficient managers, we need a diverse toolkit. HBS does well to equip us with classes across finance, leadership, strategy, and more. It would also do us well to do so in a pedagogically diverse manner. I am excited for my classroom learning, but I hope to supplement it with lectures and readings elsewhere in the university, where theorizing does not take the current paradigm as a given and instead seeks to reimagine it. 

Regardless of where we came from, the moment we stepped into HBS, we stepped into great privilege. That leaves us with a moral responsibility to use that privilege for good. At the end of these two years, we will certainly know ourselves quite well. I worry that we will know less of the world at large, and at worst, be blinded by our hubris. The case method succeeds in creating future protagonists of cases — people who can isolate a problem from its context and optimize given the constraints they face — but not visionaries who challenge the constraints themselves. It equips us to be “doers” but not “do-gooders.”

And HBS has a moral responsibility too. 17.7 million cases is a lot of reach. It’s at least 25 million hours of  time learners around the world spend poring over cases every year. HBS should reimagine what it can achieve with this platform, and aspire to shape the world for the better.

Surbhi Bharadwaj (MBA / MPA-ID ’26) grew up in Delhi. She studied economics and statistics at Yale and worked in management consulting in New York and international development in east Africa before moving to Cambridge last fall. She hopes to use her career to support digital infrastructure and climate adaptation in emerging markets.