No. 9, March 2022.
A frequent complaint among students is the use of old cases: they consider them irrelevant given the pace of social and technological change, and they are often right. But "relevance" has several dimensions, as John Lafkas, senior editor at Harvard Business Publishing, points out in an article entitled Why it's OK to keep old cases in your syllabus: there can be relevant concepts, relevant skills and relevant situations. I give some examples from my own experience.
A concept in the field of human behavior is the distinction between factors that truly motivate and those that only prevent dissatisfaction ("hygiene" factors), developed by Frederick Herzberg. In a chance encounter with a rancher on a flight between Nicaragua and Costa Rica in the early 1970s, the then academic director of INCAE, David Korten, heard this comment from the rancher: "There are two types of employee on the farm," he said. "The sabaneros and the peones, with totally different behaviors." It was the origin of a series of cases with the same name, written in 1972, which were still being used decades later for discussion and understanding of this theory, which has not lost its relevance.
There are management skills that are also still relevant, as well as the analysis and design of production lines in companies with diverse products. The Reframex series, also written in the early 1970s, describes in detail the processes used by a refractory brick and mortar company, which forces students to find opportunities to eliminate bottlenecks and increase the capacity of the plant, whose technology has not undergone substantial changes.
Third, there are unique situations that sometimes repeat themselves and, for this reason, can be very relevant. In a conference I gave to executives in Cochabamba, Bolivia, shortly after the election of Evo Morales, one of them asked me how the business chambers should react to the new government of the first indigenous president.
I immediately thought of the NAFCOC(National African Federated Chamber of Commerce and Industry) case I wrote about in South Africa fifteen years earlier. Nelson Mandela was about to be elected as the first black president of that country, and the South African business community, both black and white, was facing a historical juncture not so different from that of Bolivia, between expectations and fears.
To the businessman who asked me the question, I replied that it would be illustrative to study the case of South Africa to see how Mandela and the businessmen found common goals for the future prosperity of the country. I imagined what a meeting between public and private sector leaders in Bolivia would be like,
In conclusion, there are three reasons to keep some old cases in your course design: because of the relevance of the concept, the management skill needed or the contextual situation it presents.
