CASE-BASED LEARNING AT HBS
There’s only one way to learn the demanding art of leadership – and that’s by leading. That’s why a Harvard Business School education has been, and continues to be, rooted in the practical lessons of the case method.
By engaging students in business conflicts developed from real events, cases immerse students in the challenges they are expected to face. Challenges that require thoughtful analyses with limited or even insufficient information. That require effective responses within ambiguous circumstances or complex economic and political contexts. That, most of all, demand decisive action that must be articulated – and even defended – among other talented, ambitious individuals.
Today, the case method has evolved into a sophisticated instrument, under the watchful guidance of carefully trained faculty, for transforming a student’s potential talent into a powerful capacity for effective decision making. HBS faculty continue to lead the world in case practice, creating more than eighty percent of the case materials used in business schools across the globe.
STIMULATING PERSONAL GROWTH BY ENCOURAGING INTERACTION
In addition to maintaining a self-contained and easily-navigable campus, HBS reinforces its learning model through:
- A first year section experience in which MBA students participate in a shared curriculum with eighty-nine peers. The intensity of section life builds a foundation of trust that enables students to take risks and develop greater confidence. Many of the friendships formed within the section are sustained for life, and students routinely report that section life is one of the most rewarding aspects of the HBS MBA.
- Small, cross-section learning teams that help students prepare for their cases through collaborative study and opportunities to test their ideas.
- Sophisticated and specially-designed classrooms that reinforce case method instruction through amphitheatre seating, outstanding acoustics and advanced multimedia technologies for audio, video, Internet and real-time class surveys.
