It’s a valid question: what the hell do we actually learn in business school? Business isn’t a distinct skill or a body of knowledge. Isn’t success in business usually due to some combination of experience, common sense, savvy, and force of personality, with maybe a little luck thrown into the mix?
Here are the classes I’ve taken so far: accounting, finance, economics, statistics, strategy, marketing, general management, ethics, and operations management. These aren’t so much classes as broad topics, and I’ll be getting into the specifics of individual courses in future posts. For now I’ll just offer some general observations. I may as well let you know up front that this is a groundwork post, and it’s not really going anywhere.
Business school classes rely heavily on case-based discussion. The professor assigns a professionally researched case analysis of (usually) a real-life business situation, and the class dissects the case in the context of whatever topic we happen to be studying. Ostensibly, the rationale for case-based learning is that real business decisions have to be made under the messy circumstances of the real world, which include conflicting objectives, limited resources, and incomplete information. A cynic might suggest that the reason we study cases is that nothing we are taught in business school is worth putting in an actual textbook.
So, for example, in my operations management class, we discussed the cranberry case — which my professor actually refers to as the “famous cranberry case” — to better understand how to handle heavy seasonal variations in demand. In my ethics class, we discussed the case of Merck, which had to balance shareholder interests against humanitarian goals when deciding whether to develop a treatment for African river blindness.
Because cases attempt to dramatize a strategic decision point, they have an annoying tendency to abuse a rhetorical device that you might call “Enter the Mind of the Executive.” About 30% of business cases start like this:
But certain unpleasant thoughts kept intruding on Bill’s sense of self-congratulation. Although the business press had dripped with praise for his handling of the blockbuster merger with SteinCorp, Bill knew that the real work of integration lay ahead. And reports of labor unrest in SteinCorp’s South American monkey mines had lately become too persistent to ignore. In his rush to get a deal approved, had Bill taken on more than he could handle?
Clunky writing aside, cases can be pretty fun, especially when they bleed over into history or sociology. America’s is a commercial culture, and cases often touch on topics that are compellingly familiar from everyday life. Did you know that Coca Cola’s dominance in Europe is largely a result of Eisenhower’s decision to set up bottling operations in the areas controlled by Allied troops in World War II? Did you know that in the ’70s, Levi’s made a strategically disastrous decision to extend their brand into formal men’s wear, including three-piece suits? Beyond factoids, cases often tell the story of how companies that we all know, love, or love to loathe became the companies they are today.
Another miscellaneous fact about business school cases: they are almost all written by professors at Harvard Business School (HBS). The ubiquity of the Harvard seal in our reading material annoys a small handful of Wharton students, but most of us couldn’t be bothered to care. A few of our cases have come out of Wharton, Stanford, the London School of Economics, etc., and the simple fact is that the HBS ones are better. Their superiority doesn’t arise from any magical Harvard talent that, say, the faculty at Kellogg or Chicago lacks; rather Harvard simply places a much greater emphasis on producing high-quality cases.
Coming soon: the results of the HP case competition.
