As a large consumer of American literature, movies and academic case studies, last week’s protests coupled with the never ending squabbles between the federal government and state governors on the appropriate response to the Covid-19 pandemic threw me for a loop.
In the academic space locally, we have for years drawn on many case studies of American companies that have brilliantly succeeded or spectacularly failed in business.
The reason local academia has relied heavily on these American case studies, in my limited experience, is because there exists in America an abundance of academic writing skills as well as troves of published financial data, analyst reports produced after numerous detailed investor briefings and, most importantly, unbridled willingness on the part of current and former management to tell their side of the story.
Very few academic case studies exist for local companies and a handful have been written by American universities who’ve managed to crack open tightly sealed corporate lips.
I once used a local case study in class, based on data collected anecdotally and from the media and was embarrassed to find one participant avoid the class altogether as he was related to the shareholders and couldn’t bear to listen to the class dissect the decisions and internal politics that were causing the company to decline.
