How to Study and Discuss Cases
The case study is a powerful learning tool for a business major student. We may find interpreting and writing about cases mystifying, challenging, or downright frustrating. First of all, we should have good attitude, such as personal initiative, self-reliance, curiosity, taking risk and patience.. We should be initiative to study, and to have confidence in ourselves, but also to think independently and find the solutions. Curiosity is necessary to mobilize us to observe and discover all stuff that related to the cases.
Dare to take risks, because failure is the mother of success. To have enough patience to think about the case solution. Second, good infrastructure is also important to our case study. The infrastructure includes study environment, tool, other relative context for business case study. Studying in the right place is necessary to us to ensure the quality of learning and thinking because noisy environment diverse out attention from the cases.
We also need enough time to read and analyze a case, and spend at least 90 minutes there for each case study. Business dictionary is an important tool for us to analysis cases because many people are not English speaker, and business dictionary helps those people understand all the terms in cases; it is a prerequisite for understanding the case. Expanding the amount of reading is another tool to understand and solve cases, especially business newspaper, magazine, and business-news Web site on the Internet.
Those business reading materials not only help us build a context for the case study you are trying to solve at the moment and make connections between the case study and current events, but also helps us know recent market dynamics. Learning to use software such as Microsoft Excel to analyze the data in the case. We should form a study group and meets frequently because we will learn more and perform better in class participation by discussing the cases together in a learning team. We also need to know out professor because the professor is part of the learning infrastructure.
Finally, we should keep good execution as well. Read the cases really quickly in the first reading, but do not take notes on the first reading, and read the first few paragraphs that usually say a well-constructed about the problem. Then, go through the exhibits and the data to analysis them. Focus on some basis questions, such as ” Who are the protagonists in the case? “, “Who must take action on the problem? ” and so on. Getting answers for those basis questions is the first step of understand entire cases. Finally, we should define the problem based on the concepts, principal and theorem.
After defining, we need to think about the solution of the case. When we make solution decision, we keep self-confidence and trust ourselves. In conclusion, analysis business case study is a comprehensive progress. Because there is no right answer to these cases. When we are in the class, we participate actively in support of our conclusions, but still be open to new insights since there is no an exact solution to such cases. Business case studying is a good way of thinking about business situation that we can carry from one job to the future. It is also to lead us to win in the future.
