TIL: Why Harvard Business School stubbornly holds on to the Case Method
Harvard Business School has a strong economic incentive to continue to support the Case Method: 30% of its annual revenue comes from publishing (e.g., selling HBS cases):
In 2011, over 9.5 million HBS cases were sold, the circulation of Harvard Business Review was more than 240,000, 59 new books were published, and 3 million article reprints and 1.6 million books were sold.
The Case Method was pioneered at HBS and it places the student as the core-decision maker at the issues facing a leading company, nonprofit, or government organization.
The Case Method pedagogy is also inherently backward-looking: the event had to happen for a case to exist. The conversations around cases predominately become critique, because students appear smarter when using pessimistic language than optimistic rhetoric.
However, creating anything ground-breaking in our world requires optimism. Visionary leaders often come off as “naïve” or worse. Isn’t it safer/easier/more profitable to build a business within the known-bounds of today’s economy?
To be successful in our changing economy, business schools will need to instill “making / doing” skills into its student population and decrease the over-emphasis on “critique”. As Teddy Roosevelt famously said in 1910:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
A brief review of the financial statements reminds us that business (and academia) is still all about the incentive scheme.
Note: For those curious, the other 70% of revenues is from exec education (26%), endowment distribution (20%), MBA tuition & fees (19%), and housing, rent, interest income is the rest (source).
Thanks to Adam Behrens and Evelyn Lee
