For real management development think beyond case studies

Peter Drucker & Henry Mintzberg, unarguably the two of the greatest contributors to the discipline of management (not to be confused with functional areas), observe that management is essentially a practice. In the same vein, Nitin Nohria, former dean of Harvard Business School considers action besides rhetoric and identity as the essence of management. No wonder management education and development programmes have been striving hard to include action based learning tools.?

These tools include class room practical assignments, projects, organisational internships, case studies, simulation, management games and action learning in various mode. Of all the pedagogic tools, case studies are most popular in management programmes. Henry Mintzberg, in his book, ‘Managers, Not MBAS’ presents a detailed account of variety of such tools including their advantages and limitations. According to him, management can be best learnt by people with experience and management programs should leverage real life experience of participants rather than case studies. Among several limitations which he points out about cases, the most prominent is that the cases are second hand accounts of a person who himself might not have been part of the real life situation on which the case is based.?

Sometimes management cases are artificially systematised / sanitized / glamourised versions of reality. For instance, Honda’s success with small bikes in USA in late 1950s and early 1960s, had become a topic of Harvard cases. Boston Consulting Group, which was roped in by British government to probe downfall of British motorcycle industry, in the wake of Japanese invasion, presented a long report highlighting role of cost leadership strategy of Japanese companies based on experience curve effect. However, a later investigation by Richard Pascale of Stanford, found that there were contradictions between what the cases claimed and what the four executives, who were in charge of bringing Honda to USA, thought & did.??

This certainly does not mean that cases do not account for reality or they are not useful for management education and development. But it makes sense if the actors involved in the situation write about the case honestly. That is where lived experiences documented by the actor himself are different from cases written by a third party. More than visibility or recency of products and brands, the emphasis should be on situations and issues which are generic and participants are likely to face in real life. Since the actor himself plays the role of learning facilitator, there is a ring of authenticity to it. Authenticity is a very important issue because unlike in medical discipline, where students are a part of a live situation as it unfolds, management cases are records of situation. The cases are generally written by professors who may not have been part of the situation. There is very little chance that the management case writer had experienced the emotions such as joy, distress, fear, anger, surprise or disgust associated with the situation. It needs to be emphasised here that learning is a social process and does involve emotional stirring, rather than a technical process of transfer of information.

For example, in one of associate companies where I was involved as an advisor, original plan was to launch four versions of a product based on regional differences. But subsequent research gave us very different insights and we completely changed our decision, in spite of having gone far ahead. In another situation, based on research insights the advertising agency was briefed to highlight what a product is ‘not’. The agency accordingly did a brilliant creative design of packaging and advertising. However, subsequent research revealed that the ‘not’ aspect was creating new problems which we never thought of. Now that the product is successful, if some outsiders write a case on it, even in consultation with people involved, aforementioned aspects may or may not appear, simply because human beings tend to talk more of what worked and many a times we work backwards in our thought. More importantly how can an outsider capture, leave aside feel, the emotions that the actors underwent. How apprehensive actors were? How they argued, counter argued, doubted and felt tense. And still finally how did they decide saying “let us do it this way and see what happens”. How did they deal with their ‘emotional’ states in the wake of competitive retaliation that followed in first few months of roll out and so on.?

After deliberating on the story of the situation, it is necessary to link the facets of the story and deliberations to theoretical concepts. At this juncture it suffices to understand that concepts are tiny parts of a phenomenon. For instance, different human beings have different needs and wants because each one of them encounters different personal, psychological, social and cultural factors. The tiny commonality which captures this phenomenon is called 'market segmentation.' Once we become familiar with this concept of segmentation, we can use it in other situations as well.

Unfortunately the term theory has been so much abused, even among academia, that it is being used as opposite of being practical. In reality any good theory is good only when it is practicable. The term theory has Greek origin, where it means ‘to see’. Theory simply means systematic explanation of a phenomenon. Education is incomplete if it only deals with 'know – what' & 'know – how', without 'know – why'.?

In order to appreciate importance of concepts it is necessary to understand how human brain works. Information received from five senses is split into tiny pieces and is stored on some 86 billion neurones in the brain. Same piece is used for forming different thoughts. Hence, instead of remembering every situation or event independently the brain breaks the situation into common parts which can be shared among multiple thoughts. In a way this is brain's economisation mechanism. Even for this efficiency, brain needs 86 billion neurones. Just imagine if human beings were required to remember each event or episode in life independently. Its a different matter that we, humans are not consciously aware of it. To make it simpler, let us take example of English language. There are just 26 letters in it. But by combining different letters one can make several words, and several words can make a sentence, several sentences make an essay, several essays make a subject and several subjects make a discipline.

Alphabets —> Words —> Sentences —> Essays —> Subject —> Discipline

What is easier to remember? The subjects and disciplines or alphabets & words? We never realise that without knowing these 26 alphabets and words derived from it, it is impossible to study most disciplines, be it MBBS, B. Tech, BA or MBA. Like concepts, the alphabets & words are the basic building blocks.

The brain stores information in classified form. When information in the stories (the lived experiences) are classified into concepts (ex. segmentation, customer value, service quality, brand equity) two benefits accrue. One, since concepts are shorter versions of stories, the brain can store it with less space. Second, concepts are generalizable and hence one concept can find applications in multiple situations. Both these advantages lead to efficiency.?

The facilitators of lived experience based learning programs need special motivation, knowledge, skills, attitude and values. The motivation has to be to enable the participants apply insights to deal with situations rather than enabling students to pass exams, score grades or even crack interviews. Knowledge required has to be broad based within and across domains because unlike academic set up, real world situations do not come in silos of syllabi and topics. The facilitators need skills to synthesize more than to analyse. Not just breaking things apart, but putting the pieces together to create a picture, that is akin to action. The facilitators need to not just share the story of lived experience, they need skills to enable participants in distilling actionable insights in the form of concepts after the deliberations on individual lived experiences (cases).When it comes to attitude, facilitators need right kind of beliefs and convictions. Most important ones are related to what managers really do, how do managers learn and most importantly what learning is. They need to believe that learning is not memorising or grades in exam. It rather is relatively permanent change in thinking & behaviour. Finally the facilitators need to be honest in acknowledging if they were proven wrong or something just happened without their planned efforts. After all serendipity is an integral part of organisational life. More one accepts it better are his chances of benefitting from it.