Understanding the Case Method with HBS Professor Joshua Margolis | Ep 108

What is the case method, and how does it work at Harvard Business School (HBS)? Plus, what should MBA applicants know before they enroll?

In this episode of The mbaMission Podcast, host Harold Simansky and mbaMission Executive Director Jessica Shklar sit down with HBS professor Joshua Margolis—a member of the program’s Organizational Behavior Unit and a faculty member in the Christensen Center for Teaching and Learning—for a candid, behind-the-scenes discussion of how the case method works at the world’s most case-driven business school.

Professor Margolis, who helps train the next generation of HBS case method teachers, walks listeners through what a “case” is, how the school’s three-step learning model works (individual prep, study group, full class discussion), and how HBS instructs its faculty to write and teach cases. In addition, he breaks down the infamous “cold call,” including how the classroom is laid out and how faculty keep track of which students have contributed (and which have not). He also explains that the goal of the cold call is to establish a foundation for a robust discussion, not to embarrass the student who is picked.

The conversation also gets practical for applicants: how much time a first-year student should expect to spend preparing for each case (two to four hours individually, plus more as part of their study group), the “learning to learn” curve of the first six weeks, and the “warm call”—when Professor Margolis gives a student five minutes’ notice at the end of class to summarize the discussion, identify three themes, and take a position. In his view, this exercise is the most direct thing HBS does to train future leaders.

00:00 What Is the Case Method (and Why Does HBS Use It)?

01:19 The Three Components of the HBS Learning Model: Case, Study Group, Classroom

03:27 How HBS Faculty Are Instructed to Write and Teach Cases

07:56 What Teaching Using the Case Method Is Like

12:53 How Cases Are Revised After Being Taught 

16:10 How the Cold Call Works and How Faculty Pick a Student to Open Class

19:47 Cold Calls in the Middle of Class and the Warm Call at the End

22:30 How HBS Professors Get to Know Their Students

24:42 How Much Time First-Year Students Should Spend Preparing a Case

28:57 Evaluating a Case Class as a Prospective Applicant

36:13 Understanding the First Six Weeks’ “Learning to Learn” Curve

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Transcript

What Is the Case Method (and Why Does HBS Use It)?

Joshua Margolis 0:00

Case is not expose journalism and it's not public relations. It's a learning vehicle.

Jessica Shklar 0:06

How do you as a professor pick who you're going to cold call to open a case?

Joshua Margolis 0:10

We really want the opener to be someone who will set the table for a robust discussion. That's really the objective.

Jessica Shklar 0:17

I think a lot of students, maybe from college, have the impression that they're faceless.

Joshua Margolis 0:22

One of the joys of our um of our role is to get to know the students. This is what leaders are asked to do. You have to listen intently, you have to bring the group together based on what you've heard, and you have to tell them where you came out or where you feel we've come out.

Harold Simansky 1:18

Joshua,

The Three Components of the HBS Learning Model: Case, Study Group, Classroom

Harold Simansky 1:19

thank you very much for being here today. Let me tell you about my first business school experience. So I'm at MIT, right? Case method, not really sold by any means, but we have a lot of professors who teach it. I walk into my first class with a woman named Rebecca Henderson, who I'm thinking you now. She was an HBS professor. She came to MIT for a few years, now is the HBS professor. The craft of case method teaching, she's at the pinnacle. She was amazing. So I walk into class, not knowing what to expect. It just blew me away about just how engaged you are, how engaged the professor is. So, first of all, like what's going on? Let's let's get really basic here. What is the case method? Why does HBS only use the case method? Why does it work and why is it so scary?

Jessica Shklar 2:02

Let's just define the case method. Let's start with defining the case method.

Joshua Margolis 2:05

So I'm going to back up for a second. So you actually had Rebecca Henderson, who is uh a luminary in her field and an outstanding case method teacher. And my Rebecca Henderson story is I had the great privilege of teaching with her in a course, a first-year required course called Leadership in Corporate Accountability. And I distinctly remember also observing an executive education class seated next to her. We were observing the same class. And at about the two-thirds mark, she leaned over to me and said, They're losing a little energy. The instructor should put them into small groups so that they start to talk to each other and boost the energy. And that gives you a sense, just that tiny little comment going behind the scenes of the case method is thinking very deeply about the pedagogy, about the method of educating, so that you elevate the experience of the students in the classroom. Even small things like the timing of when you put students into a small group so that they can engage more deeply in material, boost the energy, and then take the full class discussion to the finish line.

Jessica Shklar 3:11

Can you bring it back even to the more basics? Because some of our listeners have not been to business school yet. They're most of them have not. They're applying, and they hear the case method, the case method. Darden is case method, Tuck has a lot of case method, Harvard is all case method, and some of them have no idea what it is. So what is different about a case method class from a traditional

How HBS Faculty Are Instructed to Write and Teach Cases

Jessica Shklar 3:27

lecture?

Joshua Margolis 3:27

Aaron Powell So if I were going to break down the case method, I would start with three core components, and we can backtrack and go into depth on any of the three. The first is the case itself, the written document that students have to prepare in advance. The second is what we call the Harvard Business School learning model. Three steps to the learning model, your own individual preparation, a small group discussion that also is designed to prepare you for larger class discussion. And then the third step in all of that is the larger class discussion, typically 90 students in the required first-year courses, somewhere between 60 and 100 students in your second-year elective courses. And then, of course, that third component is the most significant and what everybody associates with the case method, and that is the classroom discussion with 90 of your peers revolving around the written document for which you've prepared individually, and with that smaller group, which is a microcosm of the larger student body. So those three elements: the document, the small, uh, the small group preparation on top of the individual preparation, and then what follows that, the entire class discussion. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Harold Simansky 4:39

That's right. And actually, when you talk about the document, we're talking about essentially a vignette, a story, something that happened in business, and then of course that is the launching point to learning a larger business.

Jessica Shklar 4:50

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Usually a decision point. I always think of it as storytelling, right? You can read an accounting textbook, and it's not very interesting, or you can read a story about how a problem was illuminated through the accounting and you have to figure it out. And it's often from the CEO's perspective or the business leader's perspective, which I'll tell a funny anecdote later about that. But um, yeah, at least when I was at HBS, you get a case, 20, 30 pages, story, graphs, charts, you study it, you work with your study group that night, and then you go to class the next day and discuss it. And so it's a very um, as you say, I you've put the three-step process. I'm like, yep, that's exactly how it worked.

Jeremy Shinewald 5:27

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Jessica Shklar 5:59

Yeah, so in addition to teaching, is writing cases something that you do, and is that an expectation of all faculty?

Joshua Margolis 6:04

Sure. Uh I continue to write cases, and it is an expectation of all faculty. At uh Harvard Business School we really do live the mission to educate leaders who make a difference in the world. And that means our research should educate leaders who make a difference in the world. And part of what we consider an intellectual contribution is both academic research for peer-reviewed journal articles and also developing materials for the classroom, so writing cases. One of our core audiences to whom faculty have to speak are educators. So that means course materials. And so we develop cases based on things we read in the headlines, based on former students, based on folks who come to us and say, I think this might be an interesting situation for you to investigate. So all different uh ways of developing cases. Faculty are expected not just to write the case, but they're really evaluated based on the teaching note. And the teaching note is something that students will never see, but that other instructors get access to. And it explains what the case is about, the learning objectives, um, where it might fit in a course, which courses it might fit, and then the conceptual background to the lessons that are imparted by the case, and also the mechanics of how you might teach the case. And that's a blueprint. Very few faculty are going to follow it in lockstep, but it gives you a blueprint of how to proceed through the case discussion. And then from what arises in the conversation, you have to improvise and adjust so that you actually take the conversation so it hits the learning objective.

Jessica Shklar 7:49

How does HBS teach professors how to write and then teach cases? Because it's an art.

What Teaching Using the Case Method Is Like

Harold Simansky 7:56

It seems very, very hard, if only physically, right? Your professor is dancing around there for for whatever it is, an hour and a half.

Jessica Shklar 8:03

First of all, how they teach you how to write cases, and then let's talk about the classroom experience.

Joshua Margolis 8:08

And on the classroom experience, and then I'll come back to writing, I always say to folks, the one thing no one ever told me was um how physically exhausting teaching is. And I I think that's uniform, not just case method teaching, but that it's actually physically exhausting to be on, um, really listening intently and orchestrating a conversation, but we can return to that. How we learn to teach the case method, how we learn to write cases is truly the apprenticeship model. I I to this day remember when our former dean Nathan Norria, who at the time uh was a uh tenured faculty member in the organizational behavior unit when I was just starting up, and he said, Um, I want you to go write a case with Dwight Crane, who is a finance professor. Um and he just had an intuition that it would be really constructive for me to learn from someone who was that seasoned, who was in a different unit, studied finance, had a case that was about the dynamics of a merger and the organizational ramification. So a lot of it is around apprenticeship model, which is you learn by working with someone who's more seasoned. We have a center called the Christensen Center for Teaching and Learning, named after C. Roland Christensen, who was mentor, who is a renowned case method teacher, a beloved case method teacher. That center is focused on developmental feedback and coaching for faculty at all stages of their careers. So they will observe you and give you feedback. They'll help you synthesize the student feedback that you get. They can record and help you walk through the video with them. So we have both informal ways, apprenticeship, and we have a formal center focused on it. And I would say the single most significant way that you learn, in addition from just doing it, is that your more seasoned colleagues sit in and observe your classes and will then walk through them with you, uh, listen to what you were trying to accomplish, give you their feedback and their coaching on it. Um, and in fact, that that's an expectation of tenured faculty that we will do that. That's part of our role. And it's an expectation that we also will invite uh colleagues of any level to observe us, whether it's, and it's always bi-directional for whoever's observing to learn from watching someone else, and for the person who's being observed to actually learn from the feedback and coaching they get from those who are sitting in. So a number of different ways, but it is central to what we do. To reassure folks who probably hear a lot about, you know, how incentive systems drive organizational conduct. Um, obviously, promotion in an academic institution is the core incentive, if you want to call it that for sure. And and the expectation at Harvard Business School is that you'll make an intellectual contribution that speaks to one audience and has an impact and has the potential to influence a second uh audience, to have an impact on a second audience, that you will be a good colleague. That's our our second criterion, and the third, and that's really important, is teaching. And teaching means two things: your capability in the classroom and your contribution to your fellow colleagues in their ability to teach the material and sustain the courses that there are actually metrics associated with that. And every promotion discussion, every promotion review will always follow intellectual contribution, teaching, colleagues. Right. So it's built into the way we operate.

Harold Simansky 11:43

Right, right. It seems so exhausting to teach one of those courses. So even before we get to how students their own roles in this, but what is it to teach something like this?

Joshua Margolis 11:52

Oh, it's a it's exhilarating and it's exhausting. I mean, it it I can't ever imagine going back to teaching a lecture method. Um and so what it's like is you have to reverse engineer the kinds of conversations you want students to have so that they will learn from each other and building insight together. And so it's all about building the process rather than writing out the content you want to convey. So you have to know the content, know the content you would like to impart or would like students to impart through the discussion, and then build the set of questions that will provoke a conversation where insights around those key learning objectives will emerge. And so it's a um that's the craft part of it. And to do that, especially in our first-year required courses, there are what we call teaching groups. So there are 10 sections of the first year students, and each

How Cases Are Revised After Being Taught

Joshua Margolis 12:53

of those courses in the first year will be taught comparably. So the instructors for each of those 10 sections will meet once or twice a week. They will debrief what happened in the prior week's cases. So that's how we ensure ongoing learning. You talk about what worked, what didn't work, what might we do differently next year, and then you talk about the upcoming cases, and someone in the teaching group will walk through a plan. There will be discussion of that plan, what might people do differently for the newcomers to the teaching group. So new professors or folks who come from executive roles at companies who are joining the teaching group, they get to ask questions from the most basic to the most advanced. Where should you watch out? What are things that might arise? So that all comes up in the teaching group conversation, both the debrief and the preparation for the coming week, and then your responsibility as an individual instructor is you come to that meeting prepared, having read the case, having read the teaching plan that got circulated, and then afterward, you figure out how you are in fact going to implement that teaching plan in class, how to make it your own and staying consistent with the core learning objectives and the core plan that the whole group is going to use.

Jessica Shklar 14:10

Are cases ever revised after they've been taught for a year to based on that feedback?

Joshua Margolis 14:15

For sure. They are um and in one of my um mentors, the late Jack Gabaro, was famous for saying that you don't really learn how to teach a new case until you've taught it. That you think it's about this, you think this is where there will be great discussion, you feel this is the idea and the concepts that will emerge, and then you go into the classroom and teach it, and you're usually somewhere between 25% and 75% right. And and that sometimes you discover uh an angle to how to teach it or what students are most interested in from having taught it. And we've got some legendary cases. There's a famous case that our students will have uh who come to Harvard Business School called the Rob Parson case. And and there's a uh there's there's lore around that case, around another famous case, the Wolfgang Keller case, that people really discovered how to teach these cases only after they were taught for the first and second time in class.

Jessica Shklar 15:14

And the case itself was revised?

Joshua Margolis 15:16

The case some in some instances cases are revised. We will sometimes update them with uh with information that we learn from the case method discussion. You're teaching these cases to people who actually have industry experience, who may have heard about a detail that you don't have in the case. And and sometimes um we are fortunate enough to have the case protagonist come to class, and they will realize there's a part of the story that needs to be in the case, or there's a detail that isn't quite uh accurate and needs to be revised, or that there are other pieces of the story that together with that detail make it come to life.

Harold Simansky 15:53

No. Now I remember I took a couple of courses over at Harvard Business School again, MIT Sloan students, so there were certainly a number of times when they finished the case, and there's this stranger in the back, and here's Mr. Smith, and Mr. Smith and then usually, if I remember correctly, then Mr. Smith asks is able to answer some questions that the students have.

How the Cold Call Works and How Faculty Pick a Student to Open Class

Jessica Shklar 16:10

So here's a question that I bet all HBS students want to know the answer to. How do you as a professor pick who you're going to cold call to open a case? And maybe define a cold call first.

Joshua Margolis 16:21

A cold call is typically associated with when we open class and we will pick a student to answer the opening question without any warning. And they they don't volunteer, we volunteer them. So so that is the legendary cold call. And there is um there are different reputations for how long the opener, which is the term we would use for the first person cold call, cold called, how long the opener is going to be asked to speak, and how many follow-up questions they will ask, be asked by the faculty member. And I would say there is a range amongst faculty. Some faculty members will um have quite a scientific method of their own for how they identify the person. Is it based on regional similarities, in industry similarities, um to the case? To the case itself, right? Is there something in the case that is echoed in the student's background? Sometimes they'll do it for exactly the opposite reason. Let's take someone who is furthest from that industry. There are other folks who it's totally random. I have some colleagues who used a who use a random number generator because they're worried about bias and they just want to pick. Once you get into the thick of a class, um as a faculty member, we also keep um quite precise records of who has spoken and how many times, and then it's broken down by which part of the room they're in, um by different uh because it's assigned seats still. Yeah, in assigned seats still, so that we can catch any biases we have. Um again, I'll go back to my colleague, uh late colleague Jack Gabarro, and he noted that if you are a righty, after you've written on the board, you come off to your right, so you are more likely to call on students on this side. So therefore you need to compensate for that and make sure you're scanning the whole room. But back to cold calls. Um, so some folks just use a random number generator. Um, and then towards the middle of a course, you start to have a record of who has spoken. And we will start to balance um any related characteristics to the case of a student with who hasn't spoken in the last few cases, who hasn't had an opportunity to get called on for one reason or another. And so it's a it's a mix of factors that goes into cold calling. My own impression is that students think that it is um far more engineered than than it is. I think a lot of it is our trying to be in the neighborhood of somebody who will open really well for a variety of reasons, and what would constitute opening the class well for that session will vary. Um, and we're mixing that with making sure we're taking into account a lot of different factors who hasn't spoken, who who would be good uh on on a given day. Um, we really want the opener to be someone who will set the table for a robust discussion. That's really the objective is how do you get someone who's gonna set the table well for the rest of the students to be able to have a robust conversation about the case?

Jessica Shklar 19:35

And yet everybody has to open at some point because we're uh you're graded on participation, students are graded on participation. So you can't just always pick the people who are gonna set the table well. At some point you have to pick the people who haven't spoken.

Joshua Margolis 19:46

Well,

Cold Calls in the Middle of Class and the Warm Call at the End

Joshua Margolis 19:47

and and you asked about cold calls, and people tend to associate cold calls with the opening of class. But we cold call in the middle of class. So we mix folks who have their hands up with just cold calling people because we have to get folks in. We want to make sure we're hearing from a variety of voices. And um, one of the things that I learned to do when I was teaching in the second semester of the first year, the second semester of the required curriculum, um, is that I would cold call someone to open, cold call during class. And with about 10 minutes left in class, I would do what work what's called a warm call, which I would say, so Jessica, in about five minutes, I'm gonna turn to you and I'm gonna ask you to summarize class. And here's what I'd like you to do: I'd like you to identify three core themes that you've heard today. And then what I'd like you to do is tell me about one key decision we've debated and where you come out on it. And the reason we're gonna do this is because this is what leaders are asked to do. You have to listen intently, you have to bring the group together based on what you've heard, and you have to tell them where you came out or where you feel we've come out. And so there are a variety of different um ways to use a cold call. Again, the most famous is to open, but faculty use them throughout a session.

Jessica Shklar 21:02

You referred obliquely to something that I think is actually really worth highlighting, where you said that sometimes faculty will look at a student's background to figure out what it is. And I think a lot of students, maybe from college, have the impression that you know they're faceless. They maybe have a name, but the professor knows their name only if that, or at least can point to them. But what you implied is that the professors really know the student's background. And how is that done?

Joshua Margolis 21:24

Well, the students are asked to fill out uh some biographical information and the faculty get access to whatever students agree to make available. So some of it they say is private, and that is not that's not shared with with faculty. But we will typically know um where you grew up, where you've worked, um, what industries you've been in, what sorts of roles you've had. Some students are savvy about this so that they will not necessarily disclose so that it it's harder. But over time, um, what we also like one of the joys of our um of our role. Is to get to know the students. I mean, that is like the delight of being a professor, is really getting to know your students as people. And so faculty have office hours for one-on-one meetings, and we will have lunches and coffees where students will sign up and eight to ten at a time will meet with us, and we'll just go around the table and ask people to talk about themselves and answer some questions that we have for them. So that's how we um that's how we get to know our students and something about their background.

Harold Simansky 22:29

At this

How HBS Professors Get to Know Their Students

Harold Simansky 22:30

point, so how does a student actually prepare for this? What what's the steps to it to the point that they could even they're even capable of opening?

Joshua Margolis 22:37

Sure. So I'll go back to the Harvard Business School learning model, what we call the learning model. And the the first step is to read the case. And um reading And I guess we can't take that for granted. No, you have to read the case. We always say that uh preparation is a need to have, not a nice to have. Right, right. And um and as Jessica can relate, um in the first six weeks of your first year of the MBA, it can feel like it takes forever to prepare. And I always say that those first six weeks of any MBA program, and maybe in particular a case method-driven program, you're learning to learn. Like you're learning to learn in a new way. So of course it's going to be slower. But step one, you read the case, and in some courses you're given preparation questions. Um, with the uh, well, let's say the emergence of generative AI, uh, some courses are now choosing not to give preparation questions, but you're you're given preparation questions, and those guide your reading of the case, your analysis of the case. And the idea is that those give you the basic foundation that if you think about those questions or if you've read the case and analyzed key exhibits, you're ready to then go to your what's sometimes called a study group, what's sometimes called a learning group, the small team that is put together that is designed to be a microcosm of the larger first-year cohort. So you will have a diversity of industry backgrounds, geographical backgrounds, different types of experience, demographic characteristics, so that you actually look at these cases from different lenses and angles. So you're both learning from each other and you're preparing one another for class. And the goal isn't to reach consensus, the goal is to hear these different views and feel as though, okay, between my individual preparation, now coming together with this group, and I can get, if it's a subject area where I'm uh less comfortable, less familiar, typically in my study group and my learning group, there are people who also have a depth in that area, just as I have a depth in an area they might not have. So we're learning from each other.

How Much Time First-Year Students Should Spend Preparing a Case

Harold Simansky 24:42

And you're assigned to these groups.

Joshua Margolis 24:44

They are assigned.

Jessica Shklar 24:44

They weren't, that's interesting. They were not when I was in school.

Joshua Margolis 24:46

Right. They and so that that has changed over time. And then when you get to class, um what I like to say to students is if you've done your individual preparation and you've gone to your learning group uh for the preparation discussion, you are as ready as anyone to walk through the doors of the classroom and be able to jump into conversation wherever it goes. So it's going to cover the fundamentals that you probably prepared on your own and discussed as a group, but it's going to go much further than that, but you're ready for it because you've done those prior two steps.

Jessica Shklar 25:21

What should the expectations be for students, at least at the beginning of how many hours per case are they preparing on their own?

Joshua Margolis 25:27

I would suggest to any student who's applying to ask students who are in their first eight weeks or have memory of their first eight weeks. And I mean this in part tongue-in-cheek, but in part uh realistically. Second year students at any MBA program are not the best sources of factual information about what the first year is like, because they have romantically glossed over that first year. But I think that if you ask um first year students, they're the best. I I think that somewhere, depending on the subject area and depending on your knowledge of the subject area, you're spending somewhere between two and four hours on every case.

Jessica Shklar 26:13

Before you study group.

Joshua Margolis 26:15

Before you start the group.

Jessica Shklar 26:16

And on days that you have three cases to prepare, that's a lot of work.

Joshua Margolis 26:19

So some folks like to get a jump on it and do an extra case over the weekend and and they plan out their week so that they know that on a three-case day they've allotted extra time. Obviously, on a three-case day, it's preceded by a two-case day, so they have a shorter class time and then can prepare.

Jessica Shklar 26:36

I remember being told when I started that one of the things HBS tries to do is teach you key skills simply by the nature of the teaching. For example, learning how to disagree politely and vociferously within a classroom discussion with the case method. And that one of those skills was not having time to prepare and still being able to absorb information. So the the methodology behind a three-case day is not like don't sleep the night before because you need to be working all day. It's learn through that work how to absorb information quickly, synthesize it, make decisions with ambiguity, make decisions without complete information, know when to rely on others. Is that part of the pedagogy?

Joshua Margolis 27:16

Well, I think there's two parts to it. One is to give you the experience of being thrown in to having to learn how to learn. Because that is exactly what you're going to do in each stage of your career. You're going to be the newcomer once you graduate and go into a job as you get promoted or move to a different industry. You're going to have that experience of being overwhelmed and asking yourself, wait, how am I going to master this area? Like, how am I going to figure this out? And so you get that in the first six weeks. And then you learn how to be judicious. You learn how, okay, how can I read this in a way where I can really extract the core material? I know what I have to go analyze. And I really can't boil the ocean on every case. I do actually have to be more discerning in how I devote my time. Yes, we're definitely trying to equip you to be able to do that.

Jessica Shklar 28:07

And I think also they say we won't give you all the cases in advance because you don't have all that. You have two days to you find out your case as you leave class, you go pick up your new case. I'm sure it's all down online, but you pick it up because you don't, you can't anticipate in the real working world. So I always thought it was fascinating that the pedagogy itself tried to model the skills. It's trying so it's not just classroom learning, it's an immersion.

Joshua Margolis 28:29

And and I think that we do that even better when we present videos in class or B and C cases that there's no way you knew in advance what was going to happen. And then and you asked earlier about do we ever revise cases? Well, of course, we will update cases with sometimes with what happened, and then there's a subsequent decision. And so what would you what what would you do in the wake of now learning this new information and what happened next?

Evaluating a Case Class as a Prospective Applicant

Harold Simansky 28:57

Now, how about if I'm one of those students who even I do all the prep, I do everything, and then I feel like I'm going into that classroom like a lamb to the slaughter. To be honest with you, part of this sounds frightening. And I've I uh honestly lived through some of it, but it definitely sounds frightening to be cold-called. In fact, I think one of the advantages of me being an MIT student in HBS class was I would I at least I knew they weren't gonna call on me.

Jessica Shklar 29:18

And I think one of the challenges, and you kind of mentioned this when you talked about students not sharing information, is when we read cases, I knew there were things I was familiar with that I thought the professor might know, but I wasn't sure if they would know. So I saw commonalities and I said, Oh, I bet I'm gonna be cold called for this because that. But in fact, the professor had no idea that I would know that. So what we know ourselves that our experience is so much better.

Joshua Margolis 29:41

And that's why it's so important that if you do feel you've got special insight to raise your hand. And I'm an introvert. So it doesn't come naturally to me to run a case method discussion. I don't eat before I teach. Um, it is a to this day, it is an anxiety-provoking experience. And I imagine that's exactly what it is, especially for our more introverted students or for students for whom English is not a primary language. And what I always try to share with folks is everybody in the Harvard Business School classroom is working on something in their own personal development. So the extrovert is probably learning how, as eager and energized as they are to raise their hand in response to every question, to actually pause and listen. And the person who seems so nimble speaking about a strategy case may struggle with the quantitative analysis. The introvert who is just like it goes against their nature to just have to even put their hand in the air, let alone hear their own voice, is probably really good at maybe it's the quantitative analysis, maybe it's listening and synthesizing what everybody in class is saying. We've got so many different diverse talents uh encapsulated in each of our students and figuring out what your learning edge is, what does intimidate you, that's part of coming to Harvard Business School is stretching yourself so that you confront that. And what impressed me so much when I would meet one-on-one with uh students as they were going through the first year is the ones who would say to me, Well, I came to Harvard Business School because I know that speaking is a challenge for me. And I really wanted to challenge myself. And and I I really admired that. And I think that that first understand that every faculty member and every section of students is rooting for you. They really are rooting for you. And and the reason they're rooting for you is they want to learn from you. And so rather than seeing it as a performance, which I can totally understand why that would be intimidating, seeing it as I am contributing an essential piece to a puzzle that we're assembling together. And without my piece, we can't understand that whole. And at the same time, I may put the piece in the wrong place, or it may be the wrong piece, but then we're all learning because everybody sees that. And the next person can say, well, here's how I would adjust that, or I think that goes over here. So I think just just seeing that this it can feel when you visit class, like, oh my gosh, this is performance, this is this is public speaking. And for sure, you're building that skill and you're building the capacity to address whatever anxiety you have and thinking how to distill what you want to say uh into short, concise statements. But if you can approach class as I am deriving benefit from the learning I get from my fellow students and I'm contributing to their learning, your contribution to their learning is so valuable. And showing up and saying, I'm going to, I'm going to participate in that joint activity to grow our mutual learning, I think that's the key for folks. And I personally love it when we get introverts and folks who are a little hesitant because it means that they're thinking deeply about what they're doing. They really want to stretch themselves and grow.

Jessica Shklar 33:00

How do you rebut the argument that, well, you know, a case method is fine for organizational behavior cases or marketing cases, but you really can't teach finance or accounting that way?

Joshua Margolis 33:11

So you would need to speak to my finance colleagues who would be the best equipped to respond to it. But in speaking to colleagues like Malcolm Baker, who's in charge of our first year of uh Finance One course, my colleague uh Mahir Desai, who teaches about tax at the law school and teaches Finance One at Harvard Business School, what they'll say is that what they're trying to do is build a financial literacy and they're trying to demystify finance. No better way to demystify finance than to see it in the context of real organizations and real problems and people trying to run businesses. And so they want to help folks, especially those without the experience on Wall Street, to see how powerful understanding finance can be for being a general manager and a leader. And for the folks who are at the high end who have like lots of experience, they're going to press and probe so that you understand more deeply like what's behind all of the practical tools you learned in your experience in finance. It's like, okay, so why do we do this and why might that work in this place but not in this place? And so I think they're quite adept at bridging the gap between the people who might be a little finance phobic and the folks who are finance experts. And the case method is well designed to help one learn from the other. And when I say one learn from the other, both directions, if you're great at finance, most of your career as you leave business school, yes, you're gonna you may spend it with other finance specialists, but you're going to have to speak to people who aren't finance specialists, who are running companies. So you've got to learn how to truly explain what may now be intuitive to you or you've learned over a number of years. And if you're new to finance, you're going to ask a set of questions and you're going to want to understand things from the rudiments that will help the folks who are more advanced actually think differently about what they're doing. But the direct answer is: well, in the context of a real problem with a real manager facing that problem and an organization whose future performance depends on how you resolve that financial question or that financial puzzle, that that can get people up the learning curve to learn finance as well as they would learn it through some other method.

Jessica Shklar 35:41

It's very intimidating as a student to feel like you're in first-year accounting with no finance background with a CPA sitting next to you. But we got through it. We did, and it was a really interesting way to learn. Because I remember someone saying to me when I started, what you have to realize is just because a class is in the accounting department, it's labeled accounting, doesn't mean the problem's an accounting problem. It might be an HR problem, and you have to understand the numbers enough to identify that it's actually a problem over here and then synthesize it, which I think is a really interesting way to think about it. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Understanding the First Six Weeks’ “Learning to Learn” Curve

Harold Simansky 36:13

So Joshua, obviously Harvard Business School is known for the case method. A lot of other schools do the case method. Did any come to mind, and again, without necessarily putting any school on the spot, that they do it really well? Because it strikes me the difference between teaching a case a case class really well is one thing, but it's probably easy to do really poorly as well.

Joshua Margolis 36:31

Aaron Ross Powell What differentiates Harvard Business School is that all of our courses are taught using the case method, which does not mean we don't use other methods. So the term we use is uh we're dedicated to participant-centered learning. The student is at the center. And for decades, the focus was almost um almost universally on the case method. Like that's what was used. Increasingly, we've added experiential learning, so sending students out into the field to do projects, workshops where there's hands-on application of skills, or you're working on a particular project, but it's all participant focused, and the case method is still the predominant method. And the advantage of that is that all students learn that method of learning. They are all in that routine. You can just hit the ground running when you step into class, and you kind of know that there's going to be debate, there's going to be disagreement, there's going to be probing from the faculty member. They're going to press you hard to get you to think more deeply because that's equipping you for what you're going to face in the real world when no one's handing you a case and you've kind of got to ask yourself the questions and keep asking the why and the how and the what. But I think what differentiates us is that all faculty are doing it. All students are comparably trained in how to learn from the case method. And then you get these, you kind of get these positive externalities because we are all engaged in that same activity, that the learning is not just about the content of any one course. The learning comes from having this discipline of case method learning, of asking questions, of scrutinizing and cross-examining your own and others' thinking so that you get to the root causes of a problem, or you identify the real route to capitalizing on an opportunity, and you think rigorously about the course of action you will take in response to the problem or in order to pursue the opportunity. So strategies for sitting in uh on your first case class, I would say, first of all, um watch for when the faculty member um sparks debate among students who are situated in different parts of the classroom. Okay, so one of the things we're taught early is that when you have uh, we call them pastures of discussion that revolve around a question around which reasonable people will disagree, you're looking for people who will disagree with each other who are in different parts of the classroom so that the conversation involves the whole class, right? So there's sort of the physical element. So watch for how kind of the physical element of the classroom embodies the learning. So I would say that's one second. Watch for when the instructor really presses on someone. Like listen for, oh, like what's the second order question that a faculty member is asking that's getting me to think more deeply? Uh and the third I would say is um read the case and and um ask yourself, like, how am I thinking differently as the as some person in class speaks and it's different from what I thought, or as the instructor asks a follow-up question, how do I think differently? Um the the the key of the case method is is like really two pieces. One is the probing of the faculty member beyond what someone prepared. So when they ask you a question that's two, the second question they ask you in follow-up, or the third question they ask you in follow-up to really press your thinking. So you have to build sort of that that discipline and you're questioning your own assumptions. And the second is you come in with a perspective on what's going on and what would I do about it. And then you hear someone speak and they look at it differently from you. And you're like, well, I disagree with that. But then as it comes out, not only do you start to see the world in more complexity, you start to ask yourself, wait, like which assumptions did I have right, which did I have wrong? And I think that those two, the probing of the faculty member and hearing this diversity of perspectives from people who have had a variety of experiences prior to business school. And now they're looking at the same problem where you knew you had the right answer. You knew you had the right diagnosis, the right action plan, and it's not what that person said. And so if you are visiting a class, I would say watch for how the uh how the students learn from each other by surfacing these very different points of view and watch how the instructor creates that conversation with things like physical placement in the classroom of a disagreement and through probing.

Harold Simansky 41:28

Very interesting. It's really interesting, really interesting. Thank you so much. Fascinating. And if you want to talk to me, Jessica, or one of the other consultants at MBA Mission, sign up for a free 30-minute consultation.

Jeremy Shinewald 41:38

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