Between a rock and a hard place

When I was young I refused to learn my multiplication tables. I said that now that humans have invented a handheld calculator, there was no reason for us to to Arithmetic manually. I only wish school kept up with the pace of modern inventions. In schools they didnt let us use the calculator and soon enough I found myself lagging behind in Arithmetic. Then they invented the computer, something that could do even more complicated sums without blinking a.....diode?

In academics today, one way of proving yourself is to do some complicated statistics. The more complicated it is, the more smart you appear to be. Soon enough every paper was more concerned about the "RIGOUR" of the method than its conclusions. This led us to the absurdity of having more and more "Significant" relationships among "Insignificant" variables. In faculty meetings, people swore that increasingly the new models of Finance and OR were complicated mathematical formulae. Entrance tests measured quantitative skills and analytic reasoning, some people dropped General Knowledge from the entrance tests because "people scored very poorly on it anyway".

What about the rest of us that don't dream by visualizing a green screen and a string of numbers going from top to bottom? (Never mind that was a screen saver that found its way into the the movie MATRIX)

Our salvation is offered by Harvard Business School and its Indian arm, IIM Ahmedabad by way of the case study. At a conference, an IIM(A) faculty explained to us that the case study is the education tool of the future. A case study helps students develop their analytic skills by examining what actually happened on the field. He went on to say that a real case study is FACTUAL first and foremost and has extensive discussion along with facts and figures.

Of course most of us teaching in India cannot afford the $6.50 (Rs. 302.23), charged by Harvard per student cost for each case... oh yes, its cheaper if you make your own copies, they dont ship you any hard copies and it costs only....$6.00 !!! If you would like some, you are welcome to have them at http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/academic/edu_teachres_case_based_courses.jhtml

So like most educators in India, I am caught between the positivistic method and Intellectual Property Rights! Some people take take the war to the streets, by downloading the HBS cases and skillfully erasing the "DO NOT COPY" printed across it before making copies for their whole class.

Yet, how valuable is the case method? How important are these "live cases"? A snippet that has been edited, sanitized and repackaged for classroom consumption? How often is the goings on of some company somewhere relevant to the situations I face in my company?