No. 6, December 2021.
One hundred years ago, Harvard Business School published its first case, General Shoe Company (1921), a one-page case where plant employees were routinely leaving work up to 45 minutes before the end of the workday. The case ends with two questions: What are the management factors that could be causing the situation, and what should be done to remedy it?
As I read about this story, written by the editors of HBS Publishing, I reflected on another anniversary: fifty years since I completed my first case as an investigator for INCAE. It was San Miguelito (A), the first case in a series of four cases totaling 87 pages and no questions at the end, just a denouement "that left me with my hair standing on end," according to then academic director and last visiting HBS faculty member at INCAE, David Korten.
Two reflections: first, how little the essence of the method has changed. The case is still an objective description of a real and not invented situation, whose causes are seldom evident, which confronts a protagonist who must understand the problem, evaluate the alternative solutions and decide what to do.
Second, how much the case environment had changed in the first fifty years. The manager of the shoe company was in a stable environment, where the behavior of the workers could be explained by motivational factors that are now the classics but which in that year academics were just beginning to understand. The protagonist in San Miguelito, Paulino Salazar, a Panamanian businessman and graduate of the Senior Management Program of INCAE who has just been appointed mayor of the country's first autonomous district, faces a range of economic, social and political challenges in an environment of accelerated change.
As a courtesy to the government of Panama, a member country of INCAE, the then Rector, Ernesto Cruz, asked Guillermo Saint Malo, a member of the National Committee of INCAE in Panama who personally knew Omar Torrijos, President of the country, to give him a copy of the cases before publishing them, as they revealed deep conflicts between his government and the Church. "He doesn't understand English," explained Saint Malo, who ended up simultaneously reading and translating the text of the four cases aloud for several hours. In the end, Torrijos told him that "the facts they describe there are correct," but added that "those of the Church are no saints."
The first use of the San Miguelito series was not at INCAE but at Harvard Law School, where HBS Professor Joseph L. Bower was teaching a course on strategy in public administration. Several students had held high public office, including some who had worked in the New York City mayor's office under the recent administration of John Lindsay (1966-70), a young mayor who, coincidentally, was born in 1921, the same year as the first case.
At the end of the last session on San Miguelito, a former member of Lindsay's team approached me. "These cases are disguised," he told me. "They're not about Panama. These are about New York neighborhoods."
P.S. In 2012, the San Miguelito series appeared in the magazine INCAE to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its first publication.
