At point blank range | INCAE

"Point blank"It is a firearm shot at such close range that it burns clothing, or"something that is done suddenly, without warning"In case method teaching, it is when the teacher makes a direct and surprising call,"cold"or"point blank", to a student, with a challenging question about the decision facing the protagonist of the case.

Most recent posts

How important is “style” in teaching cases?

November 29 2022

No. 18, December 2022. When speaking of “style,” what comes to mind is the theatrical part of the teaching and not the substantive part. But if we're not connecting with students, all of our efforts in preparation, in designing the pastures of discussion, in transitions from one pasture to another, can fall into awkward silences. What are the signs that our style is failing?

If you teach with cases, write some

November 01 2022

No. 17, November 2022. “Nice detail,” the supervisor told me after reading the draft of my first case as an INCAE investigator. "But it's not teachable." Too long, with many “interesting” but not essential annexes.

MBA programs at schools like INCAE and Harvard teach their students how to analyze cases, not write them. And the opposite is also true: some professors with several years of teaching with cases have not written any.

Preparing a case is more than mastering the content

29 2022 September

 No. 16, October 2022. “Forty hours,” Professor C. Roland Christensen replied when asked by a member of the doctoral seminar how much time was spent preparing a new case. Outside, snow was falling on the fields of Harvard Business School, but the discussion in the Ph.D. Program room at Cotting House was sometimes heated. Some of us thought that the great teacher was kidding us.

About the Author

John C Ickis

John C. Ickis (MBA, DBA Harvard University) is Emeritus Professor of Organization and Strategy at INCAE Business School. He is co-author of the book The Octagon: a Model to Align CSR with Strategy among others, and from articles in World Development and The Harvard Business Review. He has written over a hundred teaching cases, many of which have been published in textbooks and cases or distributed by HBS Publishing. He has led workshops on teaching and writing cases in more than a dozen countries in Latin America, Asia, Western and Central Europe, and North America.

He was selected as an instructor in the first Harvard Business School Colloquium for Participant-Centered Learning (CPCL I) and invited by the World Bank to present alternatives for teaching business administration to the Government of China in a high-level symposium, documented in the Bank's publication, Educating Managers for Business and Government: A Review of International Experience. As a consultant, Dr. Ickis advanced competitiveness initiatives at the national level in Croatia and at the provincial level in South Africa.