What I love about General Shoe is it allows students to practice a core skill of general managers: how do you go into an ambiguous situation and get to the bottom of it? . . . That skill is as relevant today as it was in 1921.
Jan W. Rivkin; C. Roland Christensen Professor of Business Administration
Above quote from “Celebrating General Shoe Company, the Inaugural HBS Case,” 2019. (1)
Clinton P. Biddle, ca. 1923. HBS Archives Photograph Collection (olvwork399917).
The Bureau of Business Research, now the Division of Research and Faculty Development, was founded as the research division of HBS under Dean Gay. Dean Donham, who followed Gay, directed the Bureau to research and write case studies for use in the School’s curriculum. The Bureau’s early industrial research studies examined the shoe industry in Massachusetts, a center of shoe manufacturing, as did the Bureau’s first case study, “The General Shoe Company.”
“General Shoe” was written in 1921 by Clinton P. Biddle, MBA 1920, an early researcher at the Bureau, who later became associate dean, director of the division of research, and a professor of investment banking at HBS. The case presents a labor problem in a hypothetical shoe manufacturing plant of the same name: workers were routinely leaving the plant 45 minutes early, adversely affecting production while the plant was struggling to fill its orders. The one-page case served as a prompt, encouraging students to analyze and discuss the situation with the information available to them, determine what questions still needed asking, and decide on a possible course of action.
Harvard University. Bureau of Business Research. Depreciation in the Retail Shoe Business. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1915.
The Harvard Business Problem Books Used in the Case System of Business Training. New York, Chicago [etc]: A. W. Shaw Company, [1922].
Harvard University. Bureau of Business Research. Depreciation in the Retail Shoe Business, pages 14-15. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1915.
The problem of workers leaving their shifts early, as outlined in “The General Shoe Company,” dealt with issues of industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and social unrest. Among the factors students might consider in addressing the problem were assembly line production, worker fatigue, workplace supervision, wages, and inflation. Other HBS cases also focused on issues of labor relations following the direction of Dean Donham.
The A.W. Shaw Company, which published books on business management, produced the early case books or “Problem Books” as they were called. The volumes were successfully marketed to colleges and business schools around the country. (2) As early as 1923, more than 100 other colleges and universities used casebooks produced by HBS faculty in conjunction with the Bureau’s researchers and staff. (3)
Bureau of Business Research booth at the Chicago Shoe Convention, 1923. HBS Archives Photograph Collection (olvwork373852).
A.W. Shaw sold his company to the McGraw Hill Company in 1928.
Wallace B. Donham, Dean’s Report, “Graduate School of Business Administration,” Reports of the President and the Treasurer of Harvard College, 1922-1923, Official Register of Harvard University, vol. xxi, February 29, 1924, no. 6, 117.
