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The Case and the Corporate
Anil Gupta, Joint Managing Director of Havells India Ltd, is the case protagonist of an ISB-Ivey case study named Havells India: The Sylvania Acquisition Decision. A graduate from Charles H Babcock Graduate School of Management, Wake Forest University, Gupta is at the helm of one of the largest and India's fastest growing electrical and power distribution equipment.
The excerpts below include views shared by Gupta during an ISB panel discussion on ‘Teaching and Learning through Cases’, conducted on 28 August 2010 at the AIMS Convention. Gupta talked about the relevance of the case study method inside management classrooms today - first as a student of management himself, second as a recruiter of fresh MBAs, and finally as a corporate lending name to a case. He concluded by suggesting that it is essential to establish a symbiotic relationship between the corporate and academic world.
As a student of MBA
As a young student, I used to hate History till someone showed me how I could you actually read history like a story rather than memorizing dates and names of kings. It was then that things started falling in place. The dates became very easy to remember. Some I remember till today!
Similarly, I did manage to remember the theory taught to me during my MBA to some extent, maybe recalled it for the next two or three years. But whenever I have needed to reflect on how to effectively find a solution to a business issue, one case or the other has come to mind - the discussions around the case, some decision moment. This intertwining of theory with case study in management education is a beautiful concept; for the student it provides a refreshing learning environment and it puts him into a sort of a dream world, about all that he is going to deal with when he goes out into the real corporate world. The real challenge is actually for the teaching world. They need to effectively bring out the relevance of the theory onto the case study.
As a recruiter of MBA students
The old corporate school of thought was that the person you are hiring is a fresher while you are experienced , that he/she needs to go into the ground and learn the tricks of the trade, and maybe only after five or seven years will he/she have the necessary capabilities need to talk to you. As recruiters, we can ill afford to think like that, when we realise that we are talking to students who have discussed with their teachers and peers about real, on-the-ground situations, have been placed in various business situations, and have had the benefit of a case discussion with about thirty or forty students.
We have seen great benefits when we recruit students who have actually been through the case study learning method, because cases provide real-world situations for them. To add to it , the students bring fresh inputs which come in because of the case related discussions which they had been a part of; they come up with certain solutions to a particular problem in a real business situation.
Being Part of a Case Study
When a business school approaches us to provide material to develop a case study, the first question we ask is - ‘what benefit is it to me ultimately?’ This was my initial reaction when the Indian School of Business and Richard Ivey School approached us for a case study. But as soon as we started discussing the case study, tangible benefits were evident. When the case gets discussed in a classroom, fresh point of views emerges, and also puts the corporate in perspective of what the contemporary world is thinking about a particular situation. It completely opens up your mind to various possibilities regarding a single issue.
.jpg) Also, as a corporate it becomes a social responsibility to provide such material to business schools. If the Indian industry works in partnership with business schools, they can provide ‘real’ Indian situations for case studies.
One thing however needs to be kept in mind that business situations change over a period of time. Hence, relevance is extremely important for case studies, because in the last twenty years the competitive landscape has changed drastically. Case studies need not have one particular solution, the solutions keep changing and hence the academia world needs to constantly discuss with the corporate world about how situations have changed, how new technology is being integrated into business, and how the same solutions which were used twenty years ago would not be, even for a same situation and the same case study, similar. So, in a way cases need to be constantly evolving – a sort of public-private partnership between the corporate and the business schools.
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