How to Study Case

For the exclusive use of B. Peng, 2016.

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NOTE TO THE STUDENT: HOW TO STUDY AND DISCUSS CASES

Get a good idea and stay with it. Dog it and work at it until it’s done, and done right.

—Walt Disney

You enroll in a “case-method” course, pick up the book of case studies or the stack of

loose-leaf cases, and get ready for the first class meeting. If this is your first experience with case

discussions, the odds are that you are clueless and a little anxious about how to prepare for this

course. That is fairly normal, but something you should try to break through quickly in order to

gain the maximum benefit from your studies. Quick breakthroughs come from a combination of

good attitude, good “infrastructure,” and good execution—this note offers some tips.

Good Attitude

Students learn best that which they teach themselves. Passive and mindless learning is

ephemeral. Active, mindful learning simply sticks. The case method makes learning sticky by

placing you in situations that require the invention of tools and concepts in your own terms. The

most successful case-method students share a set of characteristics that drive self-teaching:

1. Personal initiative, self-reliance: Case studies rarely suggest how to proceed. Professors

are more like guides on a long hike: they can’t carry you, but they can show you the way.

You must arrive at the destination under your own power. You must figure out the case

on your own. To teach yourself means that you must sort ideas out in ways that make

sense to you personally. To teach yourself is to give yourself two gifts: the idea you are

trying to learn and greater self-confidence in your own ability to master the world.

2. Curiosity, a zest for exploration as an end in itself: Richard P. Feynman, who won the

Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, was once asked whether his key discovery was worth it.

He replied, “[The Nobel Prize is] a pain in the.… I don’t like honors.… The prize is the

pleasure...