Starting tomorrow, I’m going to be doing a series of entries on my (attempted) usual MWF update schedule: Mini-Cases.
In school, virtually every class used the “case method” of instruction, where we would use short narratives about business situations as the basis for discussion. Some were only a page, and some were much longer, containing spreadsheets, exhibits and graphs; they involved everything from technical questions about marketing budgets to hiring and firing decisions, to deciding on the overall strategy of an entire corporation. Through them, we lived vicariously through the CEOs and consultants and worker bees of everybody from Ducati to Johnsonville Sausages, seeing the world through their eyes, confronted with the same ambiguity and (oftentimes, lack of) data that they used to make their own decisions.
Usually, the implicit question in each case was, “what should this company do next?” Sometimes, we’d get a follow-up case that talked about what the company actually did, and what the real results were, and sometimes we were left to wonder. But most importantly, we always took away “lessons learned,” so that, placed in a similar situation, we could at least have some basis for making our own decisions.
So what I’ve done is taken a number of experiences from my own career and turned them into “mini-cases.” Some were specific projects I ran or was a part of, and some are more general looks at the strategic choices of a business. Some efforts were successful, some not, and many were actually pretty ambiguous. All were excellent opportunities for learning.
Now, obviously, I’m not going to name names and include direct quotes from former employers or coworkers, and neither am I using this as an opportunity to unfairly disparage or condemn any actions taken or not taken. So I’ll be a little vague in some of the cases as far as specific technologies, industries or approaches in the interests of protecting privacy.
But with luck, the lessons learned will remain intact, and just as useful as if you knew every last detail. I hope you’ll learn as much from reading about them as I did from living them, and I’ll be curious to know, what would you have done in the same situation?