But B-School professors say the case system does allow flexibility for students to depart from the curriculum and discuss outside events such as the Wall Street insider trading scandal.

Since the students normally control the flow of class discussion, says Christensen, they may direct their comments toward current issues if they choose. "I can't imagine a method that allows more freedom," he says.

That Harvard MBA's may have a less technical understanding of subjects such as finance and accounting than their counterparts elsewhere is by design. While the business schools of Chicago and Pittsburgh's Carnegie-Mellon University may train their accounting students to pass the Certified Public Accountant exam and marketing students to be consultants, the stated purpose of the B-School is to train managers. As a result, Harvard MBA's don't necessarily know all the intricacies of such financial operations; but they can efficiently oversee those who do.

"Harvard does what it does better than anyone," says Weil. "For its mission it's the best."

"The true academic wants the timeless answer--we want the timely," says Christensen. "We want you to learn and discover." The case method, he says, "isn't trying to intellectualize up to higher levels of abstraction, but down to the lower level of what you would do in a particular situation."

Harvard-Bred But Unwanted

As a result of the gap between Harvard's predominantly case-based curriculum and those of other major business schools, B-School doctoral students often find that their alma mater is the only option for a career in business academia. Many B-School professors completed their doctoral study at Harvard; but at other schools, fewer Harvard MBA's join the faculty ranks. Harvard students' excellence in case research is unquestioned, say other business school professors, but their potential for scholarship in a non-case atmosphere is limited.

"Since the Harvard Business School Ph.D. is more oriented toward writing cases, the students often don't come out with as keen a level of scholarship and as theoretically-minded," says James W. Kuhn '50, professor of management and organization at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business. "I tend to accept this general impression as a little harsher than reality justifies...but you certainly do not have the same kind of scholarship you see at [the business schools of] the University of Chicago or Carnegie-Mellon [University]."

"The Harvard student is very smart--he will do very well--but he needs to do more work," says Weil. "We want people who can do their own analytical work, not who are always relying on staff."

Weil adds, "Harvard's training is different, and its research is different from the rest of the world. Harvard considers research to be the documentation of cases, that the way to push knowledge forward is to write cases, not scholarship."

The discrepancy between these schools of thought is no accident. As Harvard's Christensen explains, "Many schools are devoted to the study of the practice of management--we are devoted to the practice of management." Nevertheless, this fundamental difference in training is still often regarded as a weakness in other business schools' assessments of B-School graduates.

"In the cutting edge of methodology, Harvard has not been as productive, but there are other dimensions, like case research, in which Harvard excels," says John Deighton, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Chicago. Still, says Deighton, "there is something wrong" when Harvard's B-School, often regarded as the best in the nation, doesn't produce students who go on to take teaching positions at other top business schools.

System Forces Preparation

The case study method, say Harvard professors, forces students to control each day's discussion, allowing them to dictate which aspects of a general case are examined, but also requiring intense preparation for each class. Professors are often referred to as "facilitators" rather than lecturers; they don't lead the discussion so much as moderate it.

"The class won't be as insightful if everyone is unprepared, but that's a risk representative of the business world," says first-year student Eric-Vincent Guichard. This risk looms largest during the corporate recruiting season, says Guichard, when preparation for job interviews tends to take priority over classwork.