Harvard Business School

In the first week of May 1925, Professor Donald K. David and two of his HBS colleagues traveled to Columbus, Ohio, to the annual meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Business. Their mission: to argue in favor of the case method—a pedagogy that was then generating a great deal of interest in departments and schools of business.

"We believe the case system is a method which promotes activity on the part of the student most nearly analogous to the task of the business executive," David told the assembled ACSB delegates. The best possible business education, David admitted, might be to serve as assistant to a top-level businessman and observe "the way the executive mind works." But there were few such positions available to students of business, David pointed out; therefore, teaching techniques like the case method were critically important.

Upon his return to Boston, David reported to the HBS faculty. "It was the impression of those attending the meeting," according to the faculty minutes, "that other schools of business were looking to this institution to assume a leadership role in developing methods of teaching business."

In response, Dean Donham proposed that HBS organize a summer school for teachers, designed to give professors from other schools "a true appreciation of the case method," and to teach them how to use it. Although this particular program never got off the ground, the HBS faculty's impulse to share what it was learning remained strong.