The HBS Club of Charlotte recently marked 100 Years of Case Method Teaching and Learning at HBS by hosting a virtual conversation with two of the School’s most prolific case writers. The January 19 event, which attracted 170 alumni, featured Joseph L. Bower, Donald K. David Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus; and F. Warren McFarlan, Albert H. Gordon Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus, who have produced hundreds of cases over their long careers at HBS.

“This was an educational opportunity for alumni to get an understanding of how cases are developed,” says Vin Vera (TGMP9, 2002), the incoming president of the HBS Club of Charlotte, and the event’s organizer. “I think there’s also a sentimental aspect for alumni to come back and listen and remember their time as students. And most importantly, having these two thoroughbreds in Professors Bower and McFarlan was a big draw.”

Vera and the HBS Club of Charlotte were inspired to present this talk as a way to encourage more alumni engagement with the club. But he quickly realized that all alumni might be interested, and expanded the invitation. The event was part of a larger series of centennial celebrations across HBS that started in 2021.

“The goal of the HBS Case Method 100 celebration is to create awareness of this exciting milestone and to encourage alumni, students, staff, and faculty to reflect on the lasting impact of the case discussion,” says Cara Sterling, managing director of administrative and educational affairs at HBS. “I’m thrilled that the HBS Club of Charlotte—and many other clubs—have chosen to mark this occasion with events and conversations that bring alumni together.”

After Vera’s introduction, Bower and McFarlan each shared some of the history of the case method at HBS, which dates back to the School’s opening in 1908. While there were no written cases then, Bower said local business leaders would come to Professor Art Shaw’s class and present oral cases. Students then had to go home, write the cases and present conclusions to the class the next day. The first written case, a one-page narrative about management challenges at General Shoe Company, was taught in 1921 and marks the beginning of a century of case teaching.

“Over time, as we would develop a series of cases in a field, we began to understand that field better, and out of that we really developed our courses,” said Bower. “The field of marketing developed around case writing in retail and consumer goods companies. The field of management accounting developed from cases on the use of numbers for managers to use for control. And the whole field of human relations developed as we wrote more cases on human behavior and organization. So cases were introduced as a way of helping students solve problems and develop their critical thinking and ability to make decisions, but also as a way for the School to stay current with the development of business.”

Ultimately, the case method at HBS, said Bower, is about the notion that “what we teach is how we teach. Cases mean that you have to prepare. Cases mean you work in study groups, cases mean you have to learn how to listen,” he said.

McFarlan, who was Bower’s classmate at HBS, shared his memory of his first case as a first-year MBA student.

“On my first day, in the first-year marketing class, we had a complicated 70-page case on a silverware company, and we couldn’t make heads or tails of it,” he said.

In class the next day, McFarlan watched the professor cold call one of his roommates, two seats away, who stumbled with his response. The professor moved on to the student beside McFarlan, and that’s when he realized he was next.

“I had not been there for more than 10 minutes before I understood HBS was like no other educational experience I had ever had before,” McFarlan said. “I was going to be forced to think, analyze, deal with changing assumptions, and defend my views in front of my peers in a graded environment. That’s how students see the case method. Faculty see the case as a source of education, innovation, and change. It’s the heart of our research efforts and, repeatedly, we go back into the field.”

While the case method forces students to think on their feet and engage with complex ideas and data, McFarlan said it is also “a remarkable discipline for forcing faculty to understand and deal with real world situations.”

The professors talked about the teaching opportunities that come with longitudinal cases, where single companies like Nike and General Electric are followed over several decades. This allows students to see how the issues facing the company have evolved over 30 or 40 years, and understand how past decisions may have impacted the company in the present.

“Our longitudinal case series is a very powerful thing,” said Bower. “A single case is about a decision at a particular point of time. But organizations are made up of people and sequential decisions over long periods of time.”

Considering the future of the case method, McFarlan pointed to the recent 30-page case on Moderna, which was taught entirely online last fall by Professor Karim Lakhani, the Dorothy & Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration, to more than 5,000 alumni around the world.

“It was a virtual case discussion, where 30 alumni were able to participate directly, while the other 5,000 were able to watch and send in questions,” said McFarlan. “I see the School really reinventing itself through today’s digital technology, which will allow us to reach out to our alumni base in very different ways in the future.”

Following their talk, Vera says several alumni submitted comments and questions, with many expressing gratitude to the professors for their experience at HBS and for how impactful the case method has been for their careers.

The event closed with video comments by Dean Srikant Datar about the power of the case method in making HBS a leader in business education, and his excitement for what the next 100 years of the case may hold for HBS.

Vera says the club is planning to repeat the event for alumni clubs overseas to accommodate various time zones. The technical logistics for the event were handled by the HBS Alumni Association of Boston.

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