. . . . . . . . . . Tuck Consulting Club 1999 - 2000 Guide to Case Interviews Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College 2 . . . . . . . . . . Table of Contents A Note From The Editors.3 Some Thoughts On Case Interviews4 Preparing For Case Interviews7 Strategic Tools I know I can do this.” A framework can guide your intelligent questioning of the interviewer, lets you lay out your analysis in a coherent manner, and lets you apply your experience to the case by pointing out how the case is an instance of a more general problem to which your experience applies. I cannot overemphasize that this is a skill developed through practice. There is no substitute for confronting a case, building your own systematic way to analyze it, then improving your model through discussions with others. Never be afraid to expose your model to others for fear that it is crude, incomplete, or wrong. All frameworks have holes in them. Thats the whole point of practicingto learn how to improve your initial models so that by December or January, you will have a richer and more sophisticated set of organizing schemas to draw upon. And they will be original. How many times do you think the average interviewer has heard someone apply a five forces model or a 2x2 matrix to the same problem? What is a framework? The world is confusing, and to understand cause-effect relationships, we have to distill most problems to their essence. Thats what theory does, highlight the most important aspects of a situation that account for most of the variance between specific instances of the situation. You might call these important aspects “drivers” or “critical success factors” or “independent variables.“ If our model of the world is almost as complex as the world itself, it is not very usefulmodels help us understand and predict only when they strip a problem down to something we can grasp, a small set of key driving forces that we can focus on while ignoring other things that have far less explanatory power. If you give a manager a checklist of 37 things to focus on, s/he simply cannot grasp the essence of the problem. If you can highlight a much smaller number of drivers and articulate the relationships among them, s/he not only can grasp the problem but can apply those insights to other, similar problems. Frameworksor call them models, analytical schemas, analytical lenses, conceptual maps, etc. show the key cause and effect relationships that you think a person should focus on to approach a given situation. They apply to a general class of problems; each case is a specific instance of a problem class. The acid test of whether a framework is useful is that it both 5 explains and predicts. It helps you understand what is going on in this case and draw appropriate analogies to other cases that exemplify the same problem class. It helps you predict what will happen if the client takes a given course of action, and test your prediction by seeing how other cases in the same problem class turn out. These predictions are hypothesesthey are insights into what would follow if the world worked the way your model suggests. I cannot overemphasize that this is a skill developed through practice. You should not try to follow a recipe when constructing frameworks. There are many, many ways to organize an approach to a problem, identify the key drivers, and articulate the relationships among them. However, some of these organizing structures are weak. I will give you a few suggestions here purely to stimulate your thinking, not because they represent the “best” frameworks. Checklists. The weakest framework is the checklist. Simply telling managers, “Here are some things to think about,” does not help much. A checklist does extract some elements from the problem for managers to focus on, but it does not provide much insight into the nature of the problem, nor does it show the relationship among the elements. SWOT Analyses. One step up from a checklist, and still a weak framework in my humble view, is a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis. This is basically a checklist supplemented by “pros and cons.“ Again, it does not provide a lot of insight into the cause-effect relationships in the problem, and it does not show a relationship among those elements. The Familiar Frameworks. Let me pause for a moment here and suggest that I do not think much of the “7S” framework McKinsey used (that is in the heart of In Search of Excellence) when it is used simply as a checklist. Similarly, it is a misuse of Porters five forces model simply to use the forces as topic headings. Porter lays out many causal connections between each force and industry structure; it is the causal connections, not the list of five forces in and of itself, which is of intellectual value. Articulating the three generic strategies (cost leadership, differentiation - broad market, and differentiation - narrow market) is not very interesting; what is interesting is th