Looking ahead to upcoming free webinars

I’ve been having a real gas recently, spending a lot of time in conversation with our 2021 competitions and awards winners. The variety of new authors and schools among the winners this year means I’ve had the pleasure of making new friends as well as delight in renewing old acquaintances.

It’s been rewarding to see how our case writing workshops have supported less experienced authors produce cases that are first workshopped, then become competition winners, and then go on to become category award winners in subsequent years. 

I have also noted how consistently authors acknowledge a single impulse to write a case: not to win prizes, or the respect of peers, but the need to create the perfect case for their own classroom.

Hazel Walker (External Relations Manager) and I shall be sharing these and other insights into competitive case writing in our free webinar on Thursday 1 July – Competitive Case Writing: How to Prepare and Polish your Entry for our Case Writing Competitions.

And, of course, every new case written by you or colleagues at your school is a step towards establishing a case collection – taking your school brand into classrooms around the world.  If that is something your school has identified as part of its developing case culture, then join Antoinette Mills (Media and Systems Development Manager), Fran Baylis (Content Acquisition and Rights Manager) and Trevor Williamson (renowned case method tutor) for another free webinar on Wednesday 7 July – Creating a Case Collection, From Concept to Distribution. 

I began by welcoming the diversity and inclusion that is so noticeable in our award winners this year. We continue to support your work in writing cases that reflect the lives and aspirations of businesses and students of every kind. We will be hosting a webinar Talking About Someone Like Me: Implementing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in Cases and Classes, in partnership with the Center for Equity, Gender and Leadership (EGAL) at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business on Tuesday 12 October.

Tribute to Debapratim Purkayastha

We love the counterintuitive, don’t we? There is a tendency to see opportunity in every crisis, to hold each disruptive tech firm up as a model of how to take advantage of change. 

Some of that has held good for our response to the COVID-19 crisis. We have worked hard to find the good in the disruption of our teaching, student accommodation and other support services, to focus on the lessons learned and what will be retained as new best practice when we return to campus-based education. 

I know that many of the cases being written about the pandemic will explore how opportunity emerges from disruption.

But we can never forget the real losses suffered in the loss of jobs and lives, and case writers will also wish to examine critically the narratives behind the origins of COVID-19, and the comparative effectiveness of government responses to the pandemic.    

One such loss, that of the truly exceptional case writer and teacher, educator and academic Professor Debapratim Purkayastha, was felt deeply here at The Case Centre, as it was most acutely by his family and many other friends and colleagues around the world.

Debapratim dominated our top 100 cases for the past five years and featured regularly in our award winners, and his talent as a case writer was recognised in other competitions and awards around the world. None of that changed his friendly, open-hearted sharing of insight and skills in workshops, professional development sessions, and academic conferences. He was respected and loved in equal measure and we feel his absence dearly.

You can get a personal insight into Debapratim’s achievements and personality by his colleague Sudhakar Rao A true explorer’: COVID-19 claims ICFAI’s Debapratim Purkayastha, from his friend Sid Ghosh here and Debapratim’s own last writing here.