Back to business school: the new case study

Almost every form of school and education is getting questioned, queried, unbundled, and rethought.

The same is happening in business — people are starting to ask:

What is it for?

What does purpose really mean?

What’s sustainable?

What’s right?

What are the 2nd and 3rd order effects of what this does?

Take the two together — business and school. Business School.

That’s changing in lots of ways too. Here’s one.

A key tenet of just about any business school curriculum is the case study.

The old case studies were focused on the big corporate names who either went out and played, became remade, or got gruesomely slayed.

The new case studies are going to be different.

Some of the new case studies will focus on the small giants — the successes that fly just the radar, not quite in the consciousness of the masses.

But more likely the new case studies will be on organizations smaller still. Not the elephants, the hippos, or the lions. Not even the deers or the rabbits. They’ll be about the mosquitos, the tree frogs, and the hummingbirds.

The new case studies will be about those people and organizations taking steps just a couple of paces away from where the rest of us — those of us who have enrolled and invested —…