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For students used to listening to lectures, the case method changes everything, most of all, the roles of instructor and student. No longer does the instructor assume the mantle of expertise and authority. No longer can the student enter the classroom expecting to be a passive recipient of knowledge. Both instructor and student must be active in different ways to make the method work. Each is dependent on the other to bring about teaching and learning.

The instructor is still the expert, at least in an academic sense, but she doesn’t deliver that expertise in a lecture. The art of a case method instructor is to ask the right question at the right time, provide feedback on answers, and sustain a discussion that opens up various meanings of the case. The feedback is derivative because it is based on a student’s comment; it is often suggestive rather than prescriptive.

To illustrate the pattern of question and response, here is a portion of a simulated case discussion of the Harvard Business School case Malaysia in the 1990s (A):

Instructor: What do you think the prime minister should do? What should he say at the United Nations?

Student A: He shouldn’t give in to the environmentalists. The country should be free to do what it wants inside its borders. That’s nobody else’s business. The environmentalists should focus on problems in their own countries.

Instructor: So he should go it alone, then? Say you were interested in putting your money into the country. Which would you prefer: a government open to discussion and negotiation about issues, or one that takes a hard line with outsiders?

Student A: I guess I would want the government to be willing to talk. But I don’t think this is an issue that needs to be discussed.

Instructor: You said you think environmental groups should only concern themselves with issues in their home countries?

Student A: Yes.

Instructor: Does Malaysia have a strong environmental movement?

Student A: I… I don’t know. The case doesn’t say.

Instructor: So we can assume by the absence of any mention that the country probably does not have a strong environmental lobby?

Student A: I don’t know… maybe.

Instructor: Does an environmental point of view have any utility for a developing nation? Are there any negative consequences, local consequences, from rapid deforestation? Are there any results that could damage the country’s development, or is it just a matter of saving, say, a species of frog that Western scientists have not yet had a chance to study?

Student A: I think the country can’t afford to have Western standards for environmental protection.

Student B: The case does mention some negative consequences for Malaysia, things like erosion, floods, and some types of plants might be destroyed that could be developed for medicines.

Instructor: OK. Can deforestation hurt the country’s long-term development?

Student C: It could. Harvesting trees at a rate that isn’t sustainable means the timber harvest will get smaller and smaller. Eventually, the industry and the revenue from it will disappear.

Instructor: You mean, in the entire country? Is this a big problem, a small problem, or something in between?

Student C: I think it’s mostly in one area.

Instructor: What is the overall picture in the country? What are the numbers that can tell us whether there is problem, how big the problem may be, and where the problem may be concentrated?

Student C: I don’t have specific numbers. I know timber is going down as a percentage of exports….

A case method teacher uses questions, responses, and feedback to weave together a view of the situation depicted in a case. That view can consist of many elements, but the instructor does not provide those elements. That’s the job of the students. You are indispensable participants in the creation of knowledge. In fact, if you don’t come to class well prepared, the case method will fail because the people responsible for making meaning from the case are not equipped to do it. In a lecture-, or expert-based, teaching method, facts tend to be configured in a way that yields a single interpretation, the “truth.” This is comparable to an orchestra conductor showing orchestra members how to play the notes of the score on their instruments. In the case method, the instructor never plays the “notes.” The class is responsible for them.

The logic of the method sounds fine, even inspirational. The reality of the experience can be baffling. Case method instructors usually do not end the class by summing up the case and providing a nicely packaged interpretation. They may teach something about the analytical tools appropriate to a case that sounds a lot like a lecture. They may even demonstrate how the tools are applied to the case. What they usually don’t do is reveal a definitive interpretation of a case, although they may discriminate between more and less plausible interpretations. Students enter and leave the classroom responsible for interpretation.

For students, this can be a monumental shift in the educational experience, from the comfort of authority and the officially sanctioned truth to the hard work of personal responsibility and the unease of ambiguity and multiple meanings. Some students feel as if their world has been turned on its head. In a way, it has been.

What a Case Is, What It Does, What It Doesn’t Do
A business case imitates or simulates a real situation. Cases are verbal representations of reality that put you, the student and reader, in the role of participant in the situation. The unit of analysis in cases varies enormously, from the narrow issues affecting a single individual or organization or broad issues pertaining to an entire nation or the world. Cases can range in length from a single page to 50 or more pages. But they all have a common purpose: to represent reality, to convey a situation with all its cross currents and rough edges—including irrelevancies, sideshows, misconceptions and trivialities, a small fund of data or an overwhelming amount of it.

Why? Most educational texts represent the real as logical and coherent. But real business situations generally are fluid and uncertain; they do not offer up evidence neatly categorized and packaged into relevant and irrelevant. Cases don’t either. Real situations consist of some clarity and a great deal of muddle characterized by a lot of contingency. They require vigilance, energy, and constant analytical effort to understand and negotiate. Cases are combinations of clarity and muddle achieved through art—a very difficult task, indeed.

In scientific and technical education, students perform laboratory exercises. The exercises demonstrate the concrete operation of laws and principles and teach the process of scientific investigation. In medicine, novice doctors train on patients under the supervision of experienced practitioners. Like business courses, clinical rotations are divided into categories such as pediatrics and emergency medicine. Cases provide business students with the equivalent of laboratories and patients. Divided into the categories of major disciplines such as marketing and strategy, they provide practice in business analysis guided by instructors.

There is a major difference between academic laboratory exercises or clinical work and business cases, however. Most lab exercises have a pre-determined, objectively correct outcome, and clinical work strives for objectively correct diagnoses and treatment. Business cases do not have an objectively correct solution; instead, they have alternative solutions that compete for the best use of the evidence available in the case. Having said that, I should add that the difference is not as great as it appears. The goal of scientific medicine is objective diagnosis and cure, but the reality is that diagnosis is highly fallible and treatment can have a large range of outcomes from inexplicable failure to inexplicable success.

Characteristics of a case
To fulfill its role in the case method, a case must have certain characteristics. As an analog of reality, a substitute for the direct experience of a business situation, a case must present:

• A significant business issue
• Sufficient data on which to base an interpretation

These two characteristics have to be satisfied for the case method to be effective. A case without a significant issue has no educational value. You can therefore assume that every case deals with something important, e.g., a pricing dilemma turning on basic marketing concepts, a finance case that involves fundamental debt-equity tradeoffs, an organizational development case that illustrates common leadership failures. A case without an adequate fact base has no educational value because it admits of no reasonable interpretation.

Still, we need to be careful about this characteristic of a case. The density of case evidence varies enormously. Some of them have small fact and data sets; others have very large ones. There are cases that support a very narrow range of reasonable interpretations, and there are cases that support a very wide range.

Besides data relevant to alternative interpretations, a case has these complicating properties:

• No conclusions
• “Noise” consisting of irrelevancies, dead ends, and false, biased, or limited testimony by characters in the case
• Alternatively, a small set of data and facts
• A nonlinear structure in which related evidence is scattered throughout the text and is often disguised or left to inference

Implications for the reader
A well-written case must have the four characteristics above in order to simulate reality. As a reader of cases, therefore, you must be able to:

• Draw conclusions from the text instead of hoping to find them in the text
• Be prepared to filter out portions of the text or furnish “missing” parts of the text through inferences
• Be able to associate evidence from different parts of the case and integrate into an interpretation

When dealing with educational texts, you have probably been trained to identify statements declaring conclusions and are poised, highlighter in hand, to find them and mark them out for later reading and reflection. But legitimate cases rarely make definitive statements. They may put statements that look conclusive in the mouths of case characters, but case characters have their own agendas and limited point of view, just as real people do.

Many cases have elaborate “padding” in the text and exhibits that serves as “noise” to distract you. Noise is a characteristic of real situations; indeed, it may be essential to the age we live in. We are awash in information, yet we always seem to lag in our interpretation of it. Part of the reason is that some of the information we receive has little value for understanding a situation. Cases provide a hard but invaluable education in the filtering of business information according to its relevance to fundamental issues.

Some of the best cases, however, use the opposite strategy. They offer what seems to be a fact base hopelessly inadequate for an interpretation. (Several are included in this book.) Again, cryptic cases effectively mimic the reality of scarce information, which places a premium on your ability to draw inferences from a few data points.

Finally, there is the seemingly simple issue of linear structure: how cases simulate the appearance of expository texts. They have an introduction and often a conclusion, a sequence of headings and subheadings, and frequently a series of exhibits. The introduction and conclusion can provide invaluable information, as we shall see, but they do not always, and they inevitably include content and references that are designed to hide significant information or create distractions. Those headings and subheadings that seem to divide the case into sections with the logic of a textbook or Wall Street Journal article are one of the most insidious hazards for case readers.

Authentic business cases imitate the structure of linear documents such as textbooks, but, despite appearances, they are nonlinear. This characteristic is probably the greatest challenge a case poses for most readers. Inexperienced readers try to read cases as linear texts, using the skills they have developed in traditional education. They become confused and often assume that they simply need to try harder, to spend more time on cases, to take better notes. They often fail to question whether their method of analysis matches the text they are trying to understand.

Unsuspecting Reader Meets Indeterminate Text
Well-written cases require active readers. The texts most of us regularly read encourage us to be passive readers. The journalism of newspapers, magazines, television, and the Internet, whether reporting or opinion, tells the reader what it means. If it does not, it has failed. A newspaper article, for example, states its subject clearly, often in the first paragraph, and carefully declares its main points, which are usually explained and amplified through specific examples. For instance, a recent front-page article in a leading U.S. newspaper began with an anecdote about a doctor who discovered that a pharmaceutical company representative knew a great deal about which drugs he was prescribing for his heart patients. Here is the third paragraph of the story:

Drug makers, in a level of detail unknown to many physicians, are spending millions of dollars to develop secret reports about individual doctors and their patients, according to consultants to the drug companies. (Liz Kowalczyk, “Drug companies secret reports outrage doctors,” Boston Globe, section A, May 25, 2003, p. 1.)

The paragraph succinctly states the overall point of the story. The balance of the text provides examples of the data collection and explores the reasons why the companies want to collect it, including the tension between the most commonly stated purpose, safety, and the apparent additional purpose of using the data to tailor sales pitches to doctors and influence which drugs they prescribe.

Textbooks are essentially a lecture in print. An expert delivers the truth to you, the reader. A history text on ancient Rome states on page 1 this “fundamental question”:

How was it possible, on Italian soil and on the basis of a league presided over by one of its members, to create a single power with a strong army and a rich treasury, whereas Greece, in spite of her creative genius, never succeeded in any of her attempts to secure the same result? In other words: why did Rome, just such a city-state as Athens or Sparta, succeed in solving the puzzle which had baffled both Athens and Sparta and even the Greek monarchies founded upon military strength by the successors of Alexander? (M. Rostovtzeff, Rome (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), page 1.)

The text of more than 300 pages seeks to answer this question. The initial question helps give shape to the more general purpose of describing the history of Rome from its origins to its decline and dissolution.

The Harvard Business School case Malaysia begins with the prime minister of the country preparing to address the United Nations General Assembly and participate in meetings with potential investors. Western environmentalists have been criticizing his country for deforestation. The prime minister must consider his country’s development strategy and performance and its relationship to internal and external interests. At the end of the case, he is left wondering whether he should accept his speechwriters’ confrontational statements that environmentalists are working hand-in-glove with Western timber interests to cut an upstart competitor down to size or take a less aggressive approach.

The text of the case between these two sections reports only those facts relevant to the controversy, as you would expect in a news story. It states no conclusions and reports information about the parties involved with complete impartiality. The case exhibits report data or display other information in ways that require work to draw conclusions from them, and some of the exhibits offer little useful content. This neutrality and the juxtaposition of important information with irrelevancies can trouble inexperienced readers.

Three Ways to Read
There are three possible approaches to reading a case:

• Receive it.
• Find it.
• Make it.

The first approach, Receive it, requires a text that states both a subject and its significance, as a news story or an online product review does. The second, Find it, needs a text that has keys or clues that the reader recognizes and puts together for a solution. A mystery novel is a good example. So, oddly enough, are highly quantitative cases. In these cases, the reader needs to find clues that help identify the correct formulas or equations and the necessary data that provide the answer to the case. The final approach, Make it, is appropriate for ambiguous texts that provide a great deal of information and few or no overt statements of their significance.

In Malaysia, the beginning and end of the case are clear enough. We can assume that the criticism of Western environmental groups has some basis—which is not say it is true as stated—and it could complicate the government’s development strategy. But when we read the case, it makes no attempt to present information selected for its relevance to the issue and has no editorial point of view. When you finish reading the case, you have the uneasy feeling that some content bears directly on the issue and some doesn't—but it's hard to tell the difference. Indeed, the most basic matters of fact are not clearly stated or are stated in multiple ways. If this were a news story, the editor would send it back to the reporter for a complete re-write.

If you read a case as you would another type of text, you will end up frustrated and perplexed. Expository texts require a reading process in which you track the course of the text against its stated purpose and seek to remember the key points or details in relation to the purpose. The process requires work but is passive in the sense that the reader is charged with remembering an expressed framework of meaning and its details, which can range from a handful of points in an op-ed column to hundreds or thousands in a book-length study.

A case doesn’t tell the reader what it means. It may pose a problem or a decision early on, but sometimes it does not offer even that.  Therefore, reading a case must be an active process. You, the reader, cannot sit back and let the text tell you what to think. If you do, your brain will fill with a mass of seemingly unrelated particulars. A passive reading of a case usually encourages the belief that the whole is less than the sum of the parts. The outcome is like a jigsaw that has too many pieces.

If you are going to analyze a case, you must be an active reader because you make the meaning of a case. You can read a case a hundred times, and it won’t tell you what it means. You have to shift your approach from reading to receive or find a meaning to reading to build a meaning.

Next: How to analyze a case.