Harvard Business School

"Cases should be used with the clear consciousness that the purpose of business education is not to teach truths—leaving aside for a moment a discussion of whether there are or are not such things as truths—but to teach men to think in the presence of new situations," Arthur Stone Dewing wrote in 1931.  

"There should not be a single problem in use which is not capable of at least two intelligent solutions, and it would be surprising if any group of experienced businessmen could offer an unequivocal solution with unanimous accord to any of them.   They do, however, have this outstanding value.   They are analogues of exactly the kind of problem that is confronting the businessman at the present time.   …

"Teaching by the case method is class discussion of possibilities, probabilities, and expedients—the possibilities of the combinations of very intricate facts, the probabilities of human reactions, and the expedients most likely to bring about the responses in others that lead to a definite end.   Such discussion rests on the nice balancing of probable results, and in this balancing a teacher has little to contribute except a broader appreciation of the springs of human action than his pupils are likely to have developed and perhaps a greater knowledge of economic theory and its applications to contemporary business.   … "