Management: Theory and Practice, and Cases: Richard L. Nolan
Management: Theory and Practice, and Cases: Richard L. Nolan
Management: Theory and Practice, and Cases: Richard L. Nolan
Working Paper
14-026
Electroniccopy
Electronic copy available
available at:
at:https://ssrn.com/abstract=2326452
http://ssrn.com/abstract=2326452
Management: Theory and Practice, and Cases
Richard L. Nolan
Abstract
This working paper reports on a major Harvard Business School project
designed to enhance MBA and practicing executives in case learning. The work is
built on the foundation of HBS field cases employing the monomyth “hero’s journey”
classic story structure along with the creation of associated fictional case characters
designed to engage readers in the dimensions of human behavior, decision‐making,
and judgments in carrying out the work of the modern corporation.
A most fortuitous event in starting the project was the engagement of our
research assistant with a theater academic background, and experience as a
scriptwriter and director at a repertory theater. Shannon O’Connell noted that our
collection of field cases on learning to become a successful functional manager had
the potential to be organized into an executive’s “hero’s journey.” This setoff a
process: (1) completing our field cases to encompass the issue domain of an IT
functional manager; (2) recrafting the cases from multiple industries to include one
industry; (3) integrating the key characters of monomyth hero’s journey, and (4)
writing the case dialogue for the protagonist’s, Jim Barton, hero’s journey. The
result was our novel‐based Harvard Business Press book: Adventures of an IT Leader
(2009).
In our Adventures book, we experimented with mechanisms to facilitate
active learning such as Jim Barton’s “living whiteboard,” whereby Barton kept a
running list of ideas associated with a set of evolving principles of IT management.
Another mechanism we used to facilitate reader/student introspection was end‐of‐
chapter/cases Reflections. Also, we experimented with audio versions of book
chapters in the classroom.
We went onto continue Jim Barton’s hero’s journey in a second Harvard
Business Press book using the same novel format, but a different industry and
executive context: Harder Than I Thought: Adventures of a twenty‐first century leader
(2013). Harder focuses on CEO leadership in the global economy and the fast‐
changing IT‐enabled pace of business. We extended the mechanism of Barton’s
living white board to interludes in the book of simulations and avatars to explore
CEO decision‐making.
Keywords: cases, innovation, management, CIO, CEO, hero’s journey, monomyth
Electroniccopy
Electronic copy available
available at:
at:https://ssrn.com/abstract=2326452
http://ssrn.com/abstract=2326452
Richard L. Nolan
Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck was established in 1900 as the first graduate school of
management. The Harvard Business School was established in 1908 and awarded the
first MBA (Master of Business Administration). While Tuck was the first graduate
school of management, the Harvard Business School is noted and famous for being the
business school that pioneered the case method—arguably, the dominant methodology
management had similarities to other professional schools like Medical and Law Schools.
This similarity in learning from practice is reflected in the footnote of every Harvard
Business School case: “Cases are not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of
cautions that similar to other professions like medicine and the law, there are rarely pat
answers to complex decisions in the disciplines of continuously changing fields and those
that are imbued in highly complex human situations. Experience and judgment are
practicing managers, and as a basis for discussing these issues in context, determining
alternative courses of actions for analyzing and deciding on these issues, and facilitating a
operate as an effective management leader. The MBA degree is intended to certify that a
embodies analyzing the key set of management issues of practicing executives and
techniques for executing alternative courses of actions for addressing the issues. As
including publishing teaching cases and the Harvard Business School Review, providing
While cases persist in the curricula of virtually every business school, cases and
the case method as developed and used at the Harvard Business School are not without
arts and sciences faculties exerted strong influence and control in the university and
faculty promotion processes. Faculty promotions were submitted to the President and a
senior university faculty committee (without senior business school faculty members) for
final review. In the final oversight review, published articles in what are called “first-tier
academic journals”1 were heavily weighted in the final tenured promotion decisions.
Cases and case teaching were given secondary consideration, if any consideration at all.
during my business school studies. And what exposures I did have with cases in the
classroom were more lectures about the case than class discussion of the case issues.
1
“First tier” journals were heavily biased towards established academic fields such as Administrative
Science Quarterly for business school faculty specializing in organizational behavior, or Communications
of the ACM for business school faculty members specializing in IT strategy and management. Only
recently were established business journals such as the Harvard Business Review or MIT Sloan
Management Review given more weight in the academic review process for promotion and tenure.
And there were failed attempts by some faculty to throw together a 1 or 2 page “arm-
chaired” written case to spice up dry lectures. These attempts further undermined the
case method and the development of quality field cases as important academic learning
experiences.2
However, there were some exceptions in that our business school faculty did
have two tenured professors with DBA’s from Harvard, and teaching experience at HBS.
These professors did incorporate cases and case teaching in their classrooms, and also
were among the most popular instructors. Nevertheless, both professors did not come
university. Both came to the faculty as senior professors with tenure. While this
situation still persists at many business schools, researching and case writing has
continued to broaden beyond the Harvard Business School in many ways such as at the
University of Virginia business school, the Ivey business school, and the NACRA (North
Learning the case method requires an infrastructure, takes time and is continuous.
After a three-year whirlwind career after graduating from the University of Washington
with my PhD in Business in 1966, a year and half at the Boeing Corporations as a
simulation software engineer then manager in the Boeing 737 program, a year as an
2 Quality business cases do not come easily or cheap. The HBS full cost estimate for a quality case that
becomes part of the HBS MBA curriculum is approximately $100,000.
3 NACRA holds annual case writing conferences, publishes their Quarterly Case Research Journal, and
partners with Harvard, McGraw‐Hill and others in making teaching cases and case method research
and teaching widely accessible to other academic institutions and management professionals. For
further information:
http://www.nacra.net/nacra/index.php5
Accessed by author, September 1, 2013.
School as an Associate Professor, and was quickly overwhelmed by being immersed into
a total case teaching environment. My first-year involved a steep learning curve about
the HBS culture; and my first-year MBA classroom case teaching experience almost did
me in—which even today when I think about it, is a vast understatement. The experience
set me off on a life’s journey in learning how to teach and create effective business cases.
I was lucky too. During my first two years at HBS, I was in a first-year teaching
group with Professor Bill Bruns. Every HBS MBA first-year required class has a 4-6
member teaching group faculty plus a doctoral student course assistant, who meet for at
least an hour before teaching each classroom case. This is a required meeting no matter
how many times a professor has taught the case. During the teaching group meeting, the
case approach is discussed, and teaching notes shared. In effect, the teaching group is not
only intended to maintain high quality MBA teaching, but also is intended to develop
new faculty as effective case teachers, and keeps those that are experienced case teachers
Professor Bill Bruns was a MBA graduate of HBS, and was visiting HBS from
understanding of my plight, and was especially helpful to me in both learning the HBS
culture and learning to become a competent case method teacher.4 Bill’s first advice to
me was the best advice on case teaching that I ever received: “When you get in trouble
during a class, just stop, and trust the class; inevitably, the class will come to your rescue,
but you have to stop, wait, and be patient.” Is that hard to do! But it works.
4 After Bill Brun’s two years visit to HBS, he was invited to join the permanent faculty. Bill remained at
HBS until his retirement, and appointment as an emeritus Harvard professor. He still travels the globe on
behalf of HBS teaching other faculty the case method of teaching and art of writing business cases.
I got into a lot of trouble in case discussions during my first year: talking too
much, cutting off students’ comments that I did not fully understand, and the list goes on.
I still get in trouble, but Bill’s advice rarely fails me. It is when I try to wing it, when I
got into deep trouble, and risk losing the confidence and trust of the class. Once trust is
lost with a class that you expect high performance from, it is extremely hard to regain
credibility.
I learned other lessons too about crafting a case. It is dangerous and often
business cases are generally complex with a lot of things implied rather than explicit.
Most cases involve underlying good stories, but the real stories are often opaque, and
need to be discovered through discussions with class groups with diverse experiences—
having a large class of 80 to 90 students means that on almost any subject a class member
will know more than you and likely had a relevant personal experience on the subject
under discussion. Too much personal interpretation by the professor on writing and
teaching cases tends to inhibit discovery by both students and the instructor.
In writing cases, it’s important to get the facts right, talk to the right sources, and
accurately describe key events, and context. The stories and characters of a case are the
mechanisms enabling students to long remember management lessons after case facts
have faded away from their memories. Maintaining Case Teaching Note files and
networking with others that teach theirs and others’ cases keeps your case teaching
I have also learned that some really good cases seemingly last forever. For
example, I was gone from the Harvard Business School for 14 years while building our
consulting firm, and then returned to HBS to teach the first-year MBA Accounting and
Control case course that I had taught during my first years at HBS. Upon returning to the
HBS faculty, I saw new case names with more modern business contexts and numbers.
But some of these cases were eerily familiar—that is, many of the key case issue were the
same. When I read the new case teaching note, I learned that the “new” case was the old
case, but had simply been artfully updated with the changed environment and numbers.
The case discussion strategy was fundamentally the same—the issue of one of these cases
was a short case on transfer pricing policies and overhead allocations. The case over time
had its exhibits boiled down to just a few numbers, but with an associated issue that
defied resolution through rigorous analysis. The art of this case involved reducing the
quantitative analysis required making room for more class discussion of the far more
important human judgments, which were required to make the transfer pricing system
work. The 1-¼ pages case generated class discussion that could barely be contained in
I was fortunate to have another experience that was associated with the power of
the case method. In 1974, I left HBS with my research assistant and graduate of the HBS
doctoral program, David Norton. Dave and I founded Nolan, Norton & Co., a
interaction and discussions, along with 4 small group discussion rooms. Our consulting
methodology included writing cases on our clients’ issues, and bring the client
management team to Lexington to discuss their cases along with other associated HBS
cases to facilitate learning and analysis of alternatives for the issues that the company was
facing. We also extended this into multiple client company programs whereby we
conducted multi-client case research and included guru faculty from HBS and other
business schools to jointly discuss management issues. The companies that worked with
us in this capacity included IBM, AT&T, GE, Cisco, Shell, BP, DuPont, Phillips, Boeing,
One of the more familiar NNC research projects that came out of this multi-client
research was the balanced-score card methodology whereby David Norton worked with
HBS Professor Robert Kaplan in case research in going beyond financial performance
metrics. Both Dave and Bob went onto publish a series of field cases, HBR articles, and
As important as the case method lessons that I have learned, is that like business
itself to remain vital and relevant, cases and case teaching must change with the
environment and times. And, now is a most exciting and challenging time for creating
effective business cases due to breakthrough innovations that are proliferating in digital
media, and global possibilities for expanding the form and use of cases.5 So it is my
privilege to share some of the work that my colleagues and I have being doing here with
the hope that some of the ideas might be useful to each of you as you endeavor with your
own continuous learning curves on creating effective business cases. Here, I would like
to share with you some of our recent work on the idea of a fictional, or novel case format,
digitization of case media, and coping with some of the challenges in multi-media mixed
5 Review of the NACRA 2013 case précis’ for this conference is impressive evidence of the diversity in
use, techniques, and global scope of business cases, and the coming together of case method professors in
learning from each other.
format cases. This is not about writing arm-chaired cases; it is a process that is built on a
foundation of field case development, and then going beyond the individual set of field
cases, by crafting elements to extend the case method into a set of integrated cases and
coherent story.
Our journey in creating a novel based on an integrated set of field cases began
with the scenario whereby a promising functional line manager of a corporation is asked
the top executive position of Chief Operating Officer or Chief Executive Officer. In this
successful Loan Officer of a financial institution, being asked by the CEO to become the
With the classroom success of Adventures, we continued the saga of Jim Barton
becoming a Twenty-first Century CEO in a different corporation with our second book:
Harder Than I Thought. Harder employs the same format of creating a set of case based
chapters, and then integrating the cases into an extended case study of 20 chapters on
dealing with the issues of becoming a successful CEO. These issues and chapters include
Partially as a result of our research for Harder and partially from our experiences
on board of directors, we expanded our author team and we are currently working on a
third novel book continuing Jim Barton’s corporate leadership challenges into reinventing
Use and advantages of a “novel” case format: IVK Case Series and Adventures of an
IT Leader
Upon returning to the HBS faculty in 1991, we hired Professor Rob Austin, who
joined the HBS faculty after a 10-year stint as a CIO at Ford Motor Company. Rob and I
began a case writing program to capture the breadth of issues facing practicing CIO’s
with our objective of compiling the cases into a book for teaching the emerging body of
as our research assistant, Shannon O’Donnell. Rob holds a master’s degree in Theater,
and earlier had met Shannon, who had been a scriptwriter and director at the Philadelphia
Repertory Theater.6
During our case writing, Shannon was instrumental in addressing two problems
that we encountered. The first problem had to do with obtaining case releases on the
sensitive IT issues involved in our cases. Some of the case situations turned out badly,
and getting companies to sign release forms for distributing and teaching the case studies
often ran into trouble as senior manager at companies were asked to sign the releases.7
The second problem we discovered was our collection of IT cases were from different
industries, and there was a pre-case setup time required by students to learn about
industry structure and context. While there were obvious learning benefits from this
learning, we discovered that learning many industry contexts raised a pedagogical issue;
the balance between learning and discussing industry context limited the time to
adequately focus on the IT issues. Shannon suggested a way that we might cope with
6 Currently, Rob Austin is a chaired professor and Shannon O’Donnell is an assistant professor at the
Copenhagen Business School where both are involved in an innovative program at CBS in integrating
the Arts into research and study of management.
7 Often if a senior manager was concerned about releasing the case, he/she would consult the company’s
law department. Inevitably, the release process became more complicated, drawn out, and conservatism
transpired where important case content was asked to be edited out, or release permission was simply
denied.
these two problems, as well as suggesting an innovation that could enhance the
industry for the context of all the cases in the series. This seemed workable to us because
the IT issues were relatively common across industries. To cope with the release issue,
she further, suggested that we use a fictional novel case format, but based on the
foundation of the issue as the issue played out in the real companies that we studied—
similar in form to the fictional novels written by noted authors such as James Michener.8
Finally, Shannon observed that our current collection of cases could be organized
into the classic story format based on Joseph Campbell's monomyth, or the “hero's
journey”-- a basic pattern that is found in many narratives from around the world.9 The
advantage of applying the monomyth structure had the considerable benefit of enabling
us to craft our case characters to further engage our students in the work of the characters
and by extension and projection, their human characteristics in conducting their work.
And, of course, human value systems and past experiences play into the judgments
Working with this format, we created our hero, the line executive (Jim Barton)
employed by a fictional financial service firm (i.e., IVK) experiencing a financial crisis
8 James Michener wrote engaging novels such as Hawaii and Alaska based on his extensive historical
research on these states.
9 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949. In a
monomyth, the hero begins in the ordinary world, and receives a call to enter an unknown world of strange
powers and events. The hero who accepts the call to enter this strange world must face tasks and trials,
either alone or with assistance. In the most intense versions of the narrative, the hero must survive a severe
challenge, often with help. If the hero survives, he may achieve a great gift or "boon." The hero must then
decide whether to return to the ordinary world with this boon. If the hero does decide to return, he or she
often faces challenges on the return journey. If the hero returns successfully, the boon or gift may be used
to improve the world. The stories of Osiris, Prometheus, Moses, Gautama Buddha, for example, follow this
structure closely. (See Monomyth Website, ORIAS, UC Berkeley accessed 2013-08-21). Perhaps, the most
famous use of Campbell’s hero’s journey was the producer of the movie Star Wars, George Lucas.
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and in the throes of turnaround mode. Jim Barton is asked by the new CEO to assume
the CIO position, which is seen as pivotal to the turnaround. With no formal IT
background, Barton is reluctant, but decides to set off on his “hero’s journey” to learn
how to be an effective CIO, and manage the IT function to facilitate the turnaround of
IVK.
Our set of draft field cases on IT management and strategy issues provided the
foundation for eighteen IVK cases paralleling Barton’s “hero’s journey” and integrating a
cast of characters along the way. For each case, we developed an associated case
teaching note. Then Rob and I with assistance from Shannon, taught MBA,
classes: at the Harvard Business School, the University of Washington Business School,
and Copenhagen Business School. We took careful notes on our teaching experiences
University of Washington: The Seattle Innovation Symposia (SIS). Results from the SIS
Educational Channel (Channel27) that were also released widely in the USA and other
countries through the Public Broadcasting Research Channel. These program segments
10 Shannon served as our research assistant and attended our classes and also took careful notes. In
addition, she engaged students after the classes to further discuss their thoughts about the cases and
discussion. Finally, Shannon administered an evaluation instrument surveying the students about on their
class and IVK case experiences. The survey results were reported in our joint article with Shannon: Austin,
Nolan O’Donnell, “The Technology Manager’s Journey: An Extended Narrative Approach to Educating
Technical Leaders,” Academy of Management Learning and Education, Vol. 8, No. 3, 337-355.
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are still actively broadcast, and are available through the University of Washington TV
web site.11
Two of the SIS TV program segments are particularly relevant to our IVK cases
and Adventures of an IT Leader book. The first is the TV segment at the SIS whereby
Rob Austin, Shannon O’Donnell and I explained the theory and practice of our IVK
novel initiative: Digital Natives in IT learning.12 The second is the TV segment where
Rob Austin and I demonstrated to the SIS attendees the use of the combination of a
audio chapter/case (IVK Chapter 11) on a shorten audio case (read by Shannon):
course of action developed by the IVK IT team, and then listen in to the CEO’s meeting
where the course of action is discussed, and the CEO dramatically decides to take a
different course of action. In these combined cases, the students “walk in the shoes of the
During the discussion of Barton’s IT team thinking, most of the students agree
that this is the course of action that IVK should take. When the students learn of the
CEO’s overruling of the IT team’s decision and are asked to consider why the CEO chose
an alternative course of action, only about half of the students are able to make the
transition of “walking in the shoes of the CEO” and change their position to the CEO’s
perspective. Students actively experience and learn that once making up your mind on a
11 http://uwtv.org/series/17392905/
This is the url for the SIS web site, and includes all the program segments that were produced during SIS.
Accessed by Richard Nolan on August 23, 2013.
12 http://uwtv.org/series/17392905/watch/16212760/
Accessed by Richard Nolan on August 23, 2013.
13 http://uwtv.org/series/17392905/watch/16212454/
Accessed by Richard Nolan on August 23, 2013.
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decision, the natural tendency is to defend the decision that you first made and be highly
course of action, and then resist reacting defensively once you have earlier made up your
mind.
With a grant from Novell, we also put up a web site with the assistance of the IT
staff at the University of Washington making our IVK cases, teaching notes, course
outlines, and an IVK blog available to a set of colleagues, and other IT professors
interested in using all or some of the IVK cases in IT courses. Some professors had
tailored their own IT courses to emphasize various themes and IT issues, and chose to use
Simultaneously with our IVK project, we entered into a contract with Harvard
Business School Press to publish the individual cases, make the case teaching notes14
available through Harvard Business School Case Publishing, and publish a Harvard
Business Press book: Adventures of an IT Leader.15 Our Harvard Business Press book
editor, Kathleen Carr, was enthusiastic about the project, and made a number of
important contributions such as facilitating graphics for the book cover, and character
scenes for the beginning of each major part of the book. Since a major objective of the
incorporated the concept of Jim Barton’s living white board, where he kept a running list
updates his white board. We crafted “Reflections” at the end of each chapter, and have
14
The IVK individual cases/chapters and teaching notes are available from Harvard Business Press by
going to the HB Press web site, and then searching on “Adventures of an IT leader.”
15 Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan, and Shannon O’Donnell, Adventures of an IT Leader (Boston:
Harvard Business Press, 2009).
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used the ending white board in a course final examination asking student to derive their
set of key concepts and principles for developing an IT strategy and a set of IT
During the course of the project, we worked with HBS IT Video professional
Tom Ryder, to develop an audio version of the book, where Shannon read the chapters,
and we posted them on Apple’s iTune’s making the audio chapters globally accessible to
our HBS ExecEd course participants (Delivering Information Services) in advance of the
course. We learned that a number of the executive attendees who spoke English as their
second or third language, used the audio chapters in different forms: some listened to
each chapter, others listened while they also read the chapters. Their collective responses
were that having the audio chapters facilitated their comprehension of key ideas.
sequel to Jim Barton’s hero’s journey: Harder Than I Thought: Adventures of a twenty-
first century leader.16 Jim Barton’s hero’s journey continued facing a turnaround
By the turn of the century, corporations had become huge in size, scope, and
global economic impact. Information technologies had matured to the point that the pace
IT—referred to as digital natives, while the older generations of digital immigrants were
16 R. Austin, R. Nolan and S. O’Donnell, Harder Than I Thought (Boston, Harvard Business Press, 2013).
This book is also available in hard cover, kindle edition, and audio from Amazon.
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fading into a minority of consumers and corporate leaders. Corporations were forced to
become collaborative and continuous learning organizations. The new hero’s journey
plight of Jim Barton was to lead a struggling military cargo airplane manufacturing
company into this new, full-fledge corporate reality of the twenty-first century.
To create the context for this novel project, we concluded that a leading edge
executive leadership. At the time, Boeing and Airbus were fighting for industry
leadership in the commercial airplane industry. Shortly into the twenty-first century
(2003), Airbus had surpassed Boeing in the number of commercial airplanes delivered, as
well as size of orders backlog, and was deemed the new industry leader after Boeing held
strategic partner process. Some likened the new airplane to be an industry “game-
changing” airplane in a similar way to Boeing’s 707, which was the first successful jet
propelled commercial airliner launching Boeing’s long industry leader position during the
last half to the twentieth century. The new Boeing airplane was futuristically called the
significant task of researching commercial airplane industry competition and the recent
change of industry leadership as well as Boeing’s challenge in gaining back its lost
industry leadership position. This required both secondary research and primary research
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research was especially important in getting Rob, Shannon and I to a relatively deep
understanding of the industry competition, and the key decisions made by the executive
leaders in the competing corporations. Even though the three of us were often located in
different countries, we engaged in numerous Skype video conference calls discussing the
the decisions.
century executive and board leadership, which we then began to weave into Jim Barton’s
hero’s journey at the fictional SMA (Santa Monica Aerospace) Corporation. Barton’s
journey begins with becoming a member of the SMA board of directors, being elected to
chair the board’s governance committee and leading the search for a turnaround CEO.
With no “takers” for the CEO job, Barton is pressed into taking the CEO job himself.
We then trace Barton’s first day as a CEO through his journey of turning the corporation
17
The extended case study of a company has been a practice at the Harvard Business School for many
years. It took several forms at the Harvard Business School ranging from a series of cases such as
Professor David Yoffie’s cases on Microsoft (Yoffie 1992,’95, ‘96, ’97, ‘98’ ’99, 2000, ’02, ’05) and Apple
(Yoffie ’95, 2002, ’04, ’05, ’06, ’08, and ’12). A second variant had a number of case authors writing
HBS cases on various topics on one company such as the General Electric Corporation. For more than 30
years numerous HBS GE cases have been written. A third variant involved historians publishing academic
articles in the quarterly Business History Review, which began publishing in 1926 and in 2011 became a
joint partnership with the Harvard Business School and Cambridge University Press. A fourth variant has
been the publishing of books on corporations and their executive leadership by university presses including
the Harvard Business Press. The fourth variant as a viable publishing opportunity seems to have
significantly declined during the last decade with decreasing university budgets in general, and the pressure
that is being brought to bear by digital media on traditional book publishing.
16
In addition, we brought back the living white board from our Adventures book,
implications of CEO leadership decisions. This new form employs simulation and
avatars of the cast of characters to amplify their individual characteristics, which provide
A Leader of Men
These interludes are created as videos played privately in Jim Barton’s office, and
are staged to allow both Jim Barton and the reader to step out of the reality of their
current situations, and experience a different view and perspectives of the situation and
the various CEO issues and decisions. By amplifying the individual characteristics of the
Japanese outsourcing strategic alliance. We also continued to use Reflections at the end
of each chapter as a basis for reader contemplation, and suggested classroom discussions.
17
During our research and case writing over the past 5 years including Adventures
and Harder, we have concluded that corporations have grown to reach sizes and
complexities whereby they have outgrown the form and workings of their board of
directors. Especially in the United States, the common corporate practice of having
CEO’s also serve as board of director chairs, has impeded the restructuring of board
membership to provide the experience and skills required to discharge the fiduciary
shareholders, employees, and society. Accordingly, we have concluded that Jim Barton
hero’s journey requires one more book-length episode in tackling the challenge of
reinventing boards of directors. This hero’s journey is turning out to be Jim Barton’s
To take on this ultimate challenge, we are privileged to have expanded our team
with one of the most talented HBS case method teachers and case writers: Professor F.
Warren McFarlan. Warren has not only distinguished himself at HBS, but also has
With our expanded team, we now join Jim Barton as he takes stock on his career
as a corporate executive, CEO with a clipped short tenure due to his own making, and
forced to resign as CEO of Santa Monica Aerospace. During his contemplation, Barton
18 Warren joined Marc Epstein in recently authoring: Epstein, Marc J. and F. Warren McFarlan, Joining a
Nonprofit Board (San Francisco: Josey-Bass, A John Wiley Imprint, 2011).
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pursuit of these opportunities that Barton reflects on his own personal experiences with
corporate boards and earlier serving on boards that he concludes that board service, and
he is not only vitally interested in, but something that he might be able to make an
important contribution. So once again, Jim Barton embarks on another hero’s journey.
So I have been privileged to have stumbled into case method teaching and case
writing, and have found both a wonderful career and a continued challenging experience.
I hope that my experience might inspire some of you to continue to engage in the
innovations required to take the case method into the twenty-first century, and likewise
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