Life is full of ironies. Or I seem to be experiencing more than my fair share of them. Our B-school follows a mixed way of teaching. What I mean is that we do a lot of theory through the Stanford way of teaching through books and class discussions but almost similar amounts of work using Harvard style case studies where we get to experience the problem as it took place in some organisation and then solve it.

I really dont mind either of them and truthfully feel that both Stanford and Harvard should follow our style of teaching. My current apathy is towards the cases as we discuss them in class. The company in concern has a problem (most likely they have got into one). Among all the things that we will see, there will be the way that things would have been done so as to have avoided the problem alltogether. And mostly, this is the teaching that we are supposed to get from the case. "How could things have been done so that this problem would not have occurred?" Wonderful, right? But a small problem. Dont these companies have managers who have also done their MBA from some b-schools? OF course they do. Then would not they have thought of all these things before going for the step that they did? Of course they would have. Even then they decided to go ahead with this idea. Why dont we discuss that?

e.g. the HLL's merger with Tomco was being discussed in one class. Final decision was that the only person that it benefited was the promoters of HLL. If that was the case, why the hell did eveyone else still go ahead with it? It has been found clearly that they all could have known about this imbalance of synergy before going for the merger. Did they not do the simple valuation calculations that are required to do this? I dont think so. Then why did they go ahead with this? The case is over but we still dont know.