Methods and Methodology for Enhanced Learning

Case - Methods and Methodology for Enhanced Learning*

This write up is prepared for analyzing strategic management cases. With some variations, this can be useful for cases in other areas as well.

A strategic management case presents an organization’s external and internal conditions and highlights issues concerning the firm’s mission, strategies, objectives, and policies. Most of the information provided is established fact. Some of the written material may be information but not necessarily a verifiable fact. These may be opinions of players, protagonists and outsiders. These may also be verdicts, expectations and beliefs. Generally, cases in Strategic Management shall be comprehensive than cases in other courses. Strategy, being a capstone course, inter alia includes other functional areas such as finance and accounting, organizational behaviour and human resource management, marketing, operations and production, MIS, entrepreneurship, innovation and globalization. A strategic management case depicts and delineates an organization’s situation at a given point in time. These situations are explained in detail so that it becomes possible to apply the concepts, not only of the strategic management but of all the functional areas that have been studied during earlier terms. This method for studying the strategic management is “learning by doing”.

It must be remembered, no case will ever provide all the information required to analyze and state recommendations. This is replica of real life - bringing the real life to classroom. In the real world of corporations, competitions and collaborations, the strategists as decision-makers never have the luxury of having all the information required to make a decision. The information required may just not be available; it may be too costly to get or may require more time, rendering the decision irrelevant or obsolete. There is a simple solution - since the purpose is to bring the corporations to class therefore in preparing the case, one should do what strategists do as routine - make assumptions about the unknown that are reasonable. These assumptions must be stated clearly. Should be followed up by doing the necessary analysis and by making decisions. The analyst must always be practical and assumptions should not be plucked from thin air. The analyst should be able to defend assumptions if required inside the class room.

Fulfill the Requirement of Whys

While analyzing a case, more important than the strategies recommended are the supports   that are built in the presentation and discussion for that strategy, followed by how they will be implemented.

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*Compiled from many sources.

Except for medical cases, no case has one single, best solution. Even legal cases have more than one perspective. Denial of one single, best solution for a case demands justifiable justifications for what is recommended. In the business world many decisions go wrong despite best analysis and justifications. That does not matter so long as the analysis and interpretation is done properly. Once an organization has taken a decision, implemented it by resource deployment, it is generally too late with hardly any possibility of salvaging the investment, should the organization decide to reverse the decision. This needs amalgamation of intuition and analysis while preparing a case.