Publications
Publications
- July 2001 (Revised March 2003)
- HBS Case Collection
Running and Growing the Small Company: Project-Paper Writing Recommendations
Abstract
Students are required to do a team project. During the project, they are to do a benchmarking study of a business process to determine best practice or to study a single business process for the purposes of discovering improvement opportunities. The student teams are required to report their results in a 10- to 15-page paper. In years past, students have struggled to "ground" their findings properly in the specific observations and other data they have collected through direct observation, interview, survey, and other methods. As a result, the persuasiveness of their papers has suffered. Furthermore, and of longer term concern, the students have not fully exploited the opportunity to develop a critical management skill--reasoning inductively to discover how a process or system works when an adequate explanation is lacking a priori.
Keywords
Citation
Spear, Steven J. "Running and Growing the Small Company: Project-Paper Writing Recommendations." Harvard Business School Background Note 602-022, July 2001. (Revised March 2003.)