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Since its inception in 1908, Harvard Business School simultaneously has studied and participated in evolving business and management practice and theory in America and internationally. This dual role is most commonly apparent in the HBS case method curriculum, in which faculty are encouraged to illustrate business planning and management techniques and philosophies from actual situations and problems, often drawn from personal business experience.
The distinguished tenure of C. Roland Christensen (1919-1999) at HBS and Harvard University serves as a most notable realization of the original mission of the school. Recently, C. Roland Christensen's papers were made available for scholarly use at Baker Library, HBS. Both the content of the individual cases Christensen researched, and their use in the development of case method teaching at HBS, document corporate history and business education in the twentieth century. The collection also sheds light on the human dimensions of the development of teaching and learning at HBS.
Case method proponent and innovator
When Derek Bok appointed Christensen as Robert Walmsley University Professor (only the tenth University Professorship appointment in Harvard's history) in 1984, he noted the far-reaching impact that Christensen's work in developing the case method had on teaching throughout the University and the academic world. Christensen was a consummate teacher, and the case method was a perfect context for his interest in making students focus on the combined experience and creativity of the entire class. Christensen, in a Harvard Gazette interview in 1991, described the ideal classroom experience as being personally transformative for the business student:
"We're trying to impact quality of mind, quality of character…we want [the student] to start thinking about issues…to think about the ethics of someone in a company making 10 million dollars and someone making three thousand dollars a year…about how he or she is going to be dealing with those issues."
Christensen's tenure at HBS began in 1946 as an instructor and assistant and associate professor in business policy. His first decades at HBS were devoted to teaching business policy and researching case methods. As he developed both classroom content and format, he distinguished himself as a humanist and a philosopher of education. In 1958, Christensen was named George F. Baker Jr. Professor of Business Administration, and he continued to focus on business policy and management issues, such as corporate governance. In the classroom, he used his external work on the dynamics and decision-making of corporate boards as the contexts for classroom cases. His simultaneous service on many boards, including Arthur D. Little, Cabot Corporation, and New England Merchant's Bank, provided many corporate-world cases for classes to consider and discuss.
Christensen's research in management and policy remained a primary focus throughout his teaching career. Although his continuing research on the case method over those first several decades at Harvard may have focused on business policy issues and MBA students, the broader value of the method was apparent to other HBS and Harvard colleagues. In 1968, spurred by a series of informal discussions between Christensen and HBS administrators examining the elements of teaching, Christinesen began formal annual seminars on teaching the case method to doctoral candidates in the Business Policy program.
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By the 1980s, Christensen had expanded his teaching beyond the business curriculum. To the annual seminar on teaching for doctoral candidates in the Business Policy program, he added a second annual seminar for Harvard doctoral candidates in the humanities and physical sciences. He participated in the development of Harvard-Danforth Center's (now the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning) programs to train Harvard College instructors and lectures. He worked with Harvard Medical School faculty and administration during the development of the Medical School's New Pathways case method curriculum.
Evolution of the Case Method
Christensen's nearly fifty-year career as an educator reflects his unique energy and insight into the human element of effective teaching as well as of the vitality of the original educational intent of the Harvard Business School. The case method was central to the original vision of Edwin Gay, first Dean of HBS, for the School's curriculum. Gay's prototype was the case method developed at Harvard Law School decades earlier. Gay called it the "problem method," and foresaw its value in educating business students to be able to adjust as necessary to ever-changing business climates.
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| Christensen's nearly fifty-year career as an educator reflects his unique energy and insight into the human element of effective teaching as well as of the vitality of the original educational intent of the Harvard Business School. | |
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| — Tim Driscoll |
HBS recruited early faculty from the business world; and although HBS administration helped them in planning their courses, the quality of the classroom experience was variable, dependent the teaching skills of the faculty. Gay set out to improve classroom quality, and he also believed that the "problem method" could ensure high quality regardless of the instructor's classroom skills. Within ten years of the founding of the school in 1908, Gay's case method model was officially approved for long-term curriculum planning. The University's official concurrence was based on course examinations that revealed students in discussion courses demonstrated greater creativity and understanding of the fundamental issues of business problem solving than did students in traditional lecture courses.
The creation of the Bureau of Business Research in 1911 as the research arm of the HBS faculty and the 1920 publication of a case textbook, Marketing Problems, by Melvin Copeland of HBS, were key achievements in institutionalizing the case method at HBS. These developments also reveal how the case method had consequences beyond what happened in the classroom. The case method shaped what was taught and helped to move HBS away from being a professional school for applied economics. It enabled HBS to move into new fields of management, particularly human relations. During the WWII era, near the time that Christensen joined HBS as a student, the role of human relations in the workplace became a new focus of management courses, and the case method enabled students and instructors to bring real experiences to the classroom.
Christensen, with a 1943 MBA from HBS and a subsequent career of nearly fifty years at the School, can be viewed as a personal bridge from the contemporary HBS environment back to the early years of the case method and the origins of human relations study at HBS. His papers, now part of the HBS Archives, help to make it possible to study that continuity.
The Christensen papers
Christensen's papers, like many faculty collections at Baker, consist of teaching materials; some correspondence with HBS, Harvard, academic, and business colleagues; texts of speeches and articles; records relating to his administrative work at HBS; and some audiovisual formats. The bulk of the collection pertains to his classroom presentations and his development of cases for classroom discussion. Curriculum records include annotated cases, handwritten notes, and research data for case studies as well as course outlines, reading lists, discussion readings, presentation transcripts, and (for field studies courses) instructions on interviewing and observational techniques.
The several hundred cases used in Christensen's Business Policy courses focus on real-life management issues faced by more than one hundred individual corporations and industries during the last half century. Case records include Christensen's problem narrative and supporting raw data gathered from his external corporate work. The corporations whose experience was drawn on range from the television industry to banking, aviation, automotive manufacturing, dairy and agriculture, petroleum, pharmaceuticals, and retail industries, as well as cultural organizations. A wide variety of issues underlie the cases: even the role of religious faith is examined.
Christensen's work as an administrative and academic leader at HBS is documented by correspondence, personal notes, and memos about programs and strategic planning; draft writings and speeches; course outlines; reports; exams; course evaluations; and occasionally audio-visual records regarding the philosophical foundations, discussion, and development of the case method at HBS. A portion of these records—relating to HBS administrative actions or relating to student performance—are restricted by Harvard University policy and not yet open for research.
Christensen once stated his appreciation of Baker Library's role in helping "HBS remember its past so as to save its future." It is appropriate then to spotlight his papers, both because of their inherent importance and because they exemplify the type of material relating to HBS that Baker Library continues to add, preserve, and make available to business scholars and educators.
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In the third, and final, edition of his classic work, "Teaching and the Case Method," Professor Christensen presents the virtues of the discussion form of teaching both for the instructor and the student.
The case method enables students to discover and develop their own unique framework for approaching, understanding, and dealing with business problems. To the extent that one can learn business practice in a classroom, and the limits are substantial, it achieves its goal efficiently.
Equally important, case method teaching is intellectually stimulating for the faculty. In current jargon, it is teacher friendly, affording the instructor opportunities for continuous self-education. In this respect, what's good for the faculty is good for the students. As John Dewey observed, "If teaching becomes neither terribly interesting nor exciting to teachers, how can one expect teachers to make learning terribly exciting to students!"
Every class provides opportunity for new intellectual adventure, for risk taking, for new learning. One may have taught the case before, but last year's notes have limited current value. With a new group of students, the unfolding dynamic of a unique section, and different time circumstances, familiar material is revitalized. Class discussions typically leave the instructor with new questions about old challenges.
The case method also meets a faculty's teaching and research needs. The development of new field cases links instructors to the world of practice. It encourages them to be in touch with their professional counterparts, maintaining a dialogue that explores current problems and anticipates future issues. Clinical field work provides a faculty with rich data from which to extract new hypotheses and modify current working generalizations.
Also, the case method is supportive of a culture that places high value on review and innovation. Too often, faculties teach change and practice the status quo. Individual course and overall curriculum reviews often depend on the personal initiative of an instructor or the work of faculty committees. But when faculty must prepare teaching cases, their continuing contact with the world of practice provides the institution with an external force for change. Suggestions that a familiar framework be reviewed or new concepts developed are often received more sympathetically when they derive from the impersonal demands of practice rather than from colleagues or departments, with their personal agendas. The case method encourages an adaptive culture.