Inside the HBS Case Method

your first approaching a class it's 8:30 in the morning I'm walking off the class I'm about ready to teach the first thing I'm thinking about is where are they what's going to be on the students marked the morning for teaching is an important period for me I have to go through my whole pre-teaching ritual I have my crew teaching trance if you watch professional baseball players most really good baseball players when they come to bat they do the exact same movements as they prepare for the ball I taught here for 22 years and I'm still nervous every day I walk into the classroom I still don't know exactly how the discussion will play out the 10 minutes before class are really fascinating time because you've got about 15 things you want to get done in this 10 minutes just before class I'm usually brushing up on case facts and I just need to be firm in my particular opinion because you know there are 89 other opinions are going to come out during the classroom that I need to either agree with disagree with I might kind of skim through some of my notes or kind of think about you know whether in my learning team somebody brought up an issue that I hadn't thought about before second thing I'm thinking about is how am I going to get started what's the opening question but equally important who's the opening student who's going to be the first person who I ask to lay out the issues and as the second hand passes the 12 on the clock we get going all right good morning our first real taste of competitive dynamics is the case on how and sweetener company in the aspartame business your role is that of Winfred Vermes you're the CEO of Holland sweetener company you're entering the market for aspartame for the first time you're facing NutraSweet with competition and you've got to ask yourself how do I think NutraSweet is going to respond with a price for fourth normal competition what do you say to me the reason that this method is so effective is that it really mirrors what managers do in real life we put the student in the seat of that manager or that employee confronting a problem it's fun right I mean there's a lot of active engagement it's hard in a lot of ways as well though nothing is spoon-fed to you you've got to be prepared and you've got to come ready to play every day the most fulfilling classroom experiences at HBS you can tell come with intense preparation from all sides it's crucial if you aren't prepared for the class you can't engage as much you can't have a kind of friendly dynamic discussion with all your classmates individual preparation is a solo affair you go through the case try to master the details develop the supporting analysis come up with recommendations try to develop a ritual I think getting a bit of an overview at first and then trying to fill in the details is definitely a better way than if starting at the beginning and trying to read all the way through to the end sometimes just working back of envelope number sometimes getting into in-depth detail creating full write-ups that then I bring to my learning team in the morning I really try to really imagine myself as the protagonist and it really does require a concerted effort to do that the day before case you'll find people in Spangler or in Baker or in kind of a dorm lounges saying Oh what was your opinion about that or what did you think about this so it's really kind of an open dialogue we have a folder for for each of you the overview one page summary a board plan and then at least my shot at the Faculty's prepared far more for a case discussion than any individual student I find it takes me five ten times as much time as it typically takes a student there are cases I've taught numerous times and I get as excited about it the tenth time I teach it as as I do the first time maybe more so because I know what the possibilities are and I know I know what the richness is here will be getting students particularly to be better at analyzing individual competitors understand the generic threats to the company's success and will be introduced into tools particularly the two of game theory I usually put them in the position of Wilfred Vermes and try to get you to think about will it be a price war the thing that's always impressed me is the extent to which they're actually debates in teaching groups that here a set of people trained in the same disciplines around the same materials can have very different views about the best way to orchestrate a case or even different answers to the question you know what's this case really about I expect students to give their heart and soul to the case most importantly I expect the students to put themselves in the shoes of the protagonist of the case and asked himself seriously what would I do now I want them to think very seriously what would they do if they really have that situation in your eyes these are questions where there are different perspectives you can marshal the facts in the case and reach very different conclusions so part of what students do is they decide day in and day out and they get in the habit of making decisions nutrasweet patented the use and blend of this sugar replacement The Learning Team experience has been absolutely invaluable to the case method I'm not sure I could have made it through first semester without it's because I assumed that there would be 5% reduction in the u.s. price then it says you will always want to enter and we hold ourselves to pretty high standards as far as being able to come up with our rationale but while we would do what we are going to do I'm still not buying I just don't get the fact that if for Coke and Pepsi a competitive advantage of the stuff that everybody's buying now is with the nutristore label on their can they have no other option to go to anything else unless they completely change off of our product and what we then try and bring to it again is a different perspective a different viewpoint hopefully a different approach to looking at the same information Tish in fact they were neck and neck in the diet industry and use that to really fuel a rivalry that use NutraSweet as we have someone in our learning team who's from Argentina who works in sugar factory in Argentina just like every case it turns out they're someone that has some direct personal experience we have people from different backgrounds so there are a couple finance guys I'm a marketing person there's somebody from a tech background so it's very helpful to kind of bounce ideas off of each other in the mornings and we're really prepared to have a debate and have a discussion in class you could also think about a signal signaling effect if you don't send a right signal to the market to this new entrant then you probably have many new small entrants in the future so it's not uncommon that someone will say in class when I first read the case I thought X but after talking to people some people in my learning team I've actually evolved my thinking to the following so I think in the learning teams we want students to engage some of the same muscles that they will in the classroom to say here's an opportunity for me to to go out in the wind all right I have this idea and I'd like your feedback as one for Vermes looking at your competitor looking at NutraSweet how do you expect they will respond with a price for or with normal competition what do you say jalisa I actually think that they will respond to the price war okay why um particularly well if you look at Europe and Canada in vacuum you would think that they're gonna lose money I have the case in front of me I have the right up in front of me and I'm really looking at what are the key points I mean in my head I'm already thinking like all right top three things that I want to get across in my 30 seconds and exactly how the price were going to accomplish that end the knowledge that he might be called upon to make an intelligent cogent argument in front of people whose opinion you care about does motivate you in those off hours who sees it very differently this mark what's swirling I think they're very confident in their own their branded strategy or they don't want to turn this into a commodity butter we accept everyone's backgrounds and everyone's perspectives to the point where we can actually hear them out and I feel like everyone does a really good job of listening to the point where they can think about it and say whether they agree or disagree and then coming up with a compelling reason as to why they agree or disagree Keira in or out this is where I think the behavioral issues are overwhelming they're gonna continue to fight because they've already invested in this so I think they're going to just kind of keep throwing good money after bad I know I cannot compete with NutraSweet on price but I might be able to compete with them on brand so what I'll try to do is try to do some like customer research and try to really get the HSC product out there and really get it to the point where there's some critical mass as far as brand recognition and then approach Pepsi and say hey Pepsi here's an additional level of aspartame that you can have to compete with Coke was using the NutraSweet Cara well you roleplay Pepsi what do you respond to Phil I have a couple of problems everyone your product is branded yet and it takes quite a bit of I see that you're trying to give me a point of differentiation to go after my competitor but to be honest I just don't have the faith in your head to be willing to take a gamble I think one is one of the most underrated aspects of the case method and learning shouldn't always be difficult learning shouldn't be painful a certain element of joy that comes with learning June yet another proposal yeah so I'm gonna go to Pepsi MSA I'm only going to work with you if you just work with me then I'll lower your price and you're going to get the competitive advantage from working with me whereas the Nutri Suites not going to have to match that because they're just working with code that sounds a little bit better I've found that I learn a ton from my professors but I really learned the most from my fellow section mates you never ever ever ever enter a price war if you don't have credible low-cost position if you ever do that and I worry about it I will deny that I ever knew your Harvard Business School okay ever ever and very important smear saying they enter that any advantage there was not a superior gap between cost and was to pay that was a major lesson of the case and in addition it drew on concepts we had built up over the previous half-dozen cases that show that things that kind of come together for a set of people will continue to look at competitive dynamics on Thursday when we look at the fascinating battle between British satellite broadcasting and sky television thanks my favorite glasses are those where the debate is still raging 20 minutes after class and we can't stop it they really give a lot in those 80 minutes as far as listening and vocalizing your perspective you know you really start to see why the case method works so well because you're surprised with how much you remember from the case but also from what people's responses were to the case there are very specific situations that any manager is going to experience at some point in their career we teach people in many ways the courage to act under uncertainty the facts in a case are always limited the amount of information you have at hand is by design quite compressed you're working under great time pressure we're asking people to learn how to take a stand it's not a passive process and frankly management's not a passive process they get to try out many of the component processes that management in the classroom and even build muscles around things like judgment the answer to most questions is it depends if one can leave here understanding under what circumstances you would go left and under what circumstances you would go right then you've got a depth of knowledge and you've got it kind of in your gut as well as in your your head I think Harvard Business School is the finest teaching institution in the world I don't just mean among business schools teaching is in the fabric of the culture we go back in a long tradition started probably even before Socrates but we can certainly go back to there we want to continue in that tradition some things never get old you

Channel: Harvard Business School

Views: 1,172,664

Keywords: Case Method, Students, Faculty, HBS, Harvard, Harvard Business School

Id: eA5R41F7d9Q

Length: 13min 35sec (815 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 10 2009