Finding the Answers with Cases


Rajesh Chakrabarti, Assistant Professor of Finance at the Indian School of Business, advocates the use of country- specific cases inside B- School classrooms. Cases, he says, prompt learners to ‘find answers’ rather than being ‘told’ what they should be.

A PhD holder from the University of California, Los Angeles, Rajesh also has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. His areas of teaching and research interests include international financial markets, exchange rate movements and informational issues in financial markets.
Rajesh has published several scholarly papers in international journals, has authoredand edited several books and writes a fortnightly column at the Financial Express. He is regularly quoted in the media, both in India and abroad.


Case studies are perhaps the single most important pedagogical innovation that business education has made. Situated within the triangle of theory, example and exercise, case studies create learning in a unique participative way. Developed largely in US business schools, they are now being adopted well outside B-School campuses – consultants use it to recruit and train people, executive retreats use them as brainstorming tools.

The secret behind the success of a case study in a B-school classroom lies in its situational setting and emergent collective learning – ‘finding’ the answers rather than being ‘told’ what they should be. Cases have a far higher recall than abstract theory or statistical evidence. It is not uncommon to hear of an executive bringing to mind a case five or ten years after graduation, generally in connection with a real-life decision problem.

Commensurate with the benefits, cases studies require a whole different class preparation for the faculty, as compared to usual lectures. While preparations vary depending upon individual faculty styles in delivering cases, broadly speaking, cases are best delivered when the class is well planned to a very detailed level. This often means planning 5 -10 minute intervals of class discussion, as well as the board structure in terms of what will follow what and where on the board. While the learnings and observations are best drawn out of class participation rather than lectures, most faculty members believe that they should be in charge of directing the discussion closely to reach the desired conclusions, rather than meander away in a time-wasting detour, away from the desired learning points.

Precisely because the situational setting is so important, that there is a strong need for developing country-specific case studies. While at an abstract level the fundamental issues of a decision in a US firm may be very similar to that in an Indian company, the latter is likely to have a much greater effect on Indian managers. Case studies aid synthesis of issues as much as they drive analysis, and the mix of factors is frequently unique to particular settings. It is therefore heartening to see a focus on case development in the increasingly important emerging market countries that are likely to throw up issues and settings distinct from those in developed countries.

That said, developing cases in an emerging market country like India also has its challenges. Often the purpose of a case is not clear to executives of the subject organisations and they are reluctant to share information that they fear may present the organisation in poor light. Cases are not publicity material for organisations and the maturity to realize that is arguably less common in emerging market countries than in developed countries. However, with a generation of business school graduates getting at the helm of affairs, this situation is likely to improve over time. As cases become even more widely used in B-school classrooms, as well as in other settings, the awareness and use of cases in India are set to increase sharply over time.