Case Studies – The Backward Way to Learn Leadership

For a century, case studies have played a major role in the development of leaders.

The thinking goes like this: Let’s study what happened to a particular organization and see how they responded – what they did right, what they did wrong, what they learned. Or let’s see what aggressive moves a new CEO made to shake up a company. Then let’s try to squeeze some useful ideas and practices out of their experience and apply it to…everything else.

The problems with this are many. One is ignorance. Do we really even know all of the relevant facts? Do we truly understand their context – economy, market, competition, regulation, etc.? What is their culture really like? Is this the whole picture or just a snapshot? Nothing is more difficult than understanding something fully enough to make pronouncements based on that understanding.

Another problem is applicability. Even in the same line of work, what does the experience of a $50 billion/year company have to do with a $50 million/year company (or the other way around)? If it happened even a short while ago, have times changed enough to render their experience much less than meaningful? What is the effect of a different workforce makeup – more or less technical people, or blend of personalities, or spread of ages?

A third problem is confusion and contradiction. In many situations, there are case studies that prove a point and others that disprove the same point. Faced with a similar challenge, one organization wins by “sticking with their knitting” and another one wins by “breaking out of the box.” So what’s “right?”

The overall problem with this approach is that it approaches leadership from the wrong end. Instead of finding leadership principles that work over time because they are connected to the real world and to what it means to be human in a team environment, they survey a variety of shapshots and then hope to draw something that makes sense out of the pictures.

At Luman, we believe that great leadership consists of having an array of powerful principles that work in all times and places, along with a toolbox of practices that can be applied and modified as necessary to allow leaders to win in specific situations. We’ve learned that examples can illustrate a principle, but can never create one or prove that it works.

Telling a story about how a leader or organization applied a principle and saw it work can be very encouraging. Telling that story to teach leadership is an exercise in wishful – and backward – thinking.

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