Personal Case Presentation

                                    Guidelines for Personal Case Presentation

            The personal case is a brief description of an incident in which you have been involved, or in which you expect to be involved, that raises issues of your own approach to leadership.   The presentation will be approximately 15 minutes long.   Provide a copy of your presentation paper to the instructor.

Basic guidelines for presentation

1.      Choose an experience that is or was important and challenging for you and your organization, and that raises issues of how you can lead effectively. It could be a case that has already happened, one that is ongoing, or one that you anticipate needing to deal with in the future. (Define "organization" as you wish in terms of the whole or of the part that is relevant to you.)

2.      A case that contains questions, puzzles, or challenges provides a richer vehicle for analysis.

3.      Make sure that the experience is bounded and manageable, so that it can be described in a relatively brief case (suggested length for the case paper is 3 to 4 pages). Your description need not be elaborate: simply provide enough information to enable someone unfamiliar with the case to understand the essentials of the story.  Please feel free to disguise the case if you wish.

4.      The personal case should be only the facts -- a description, not an analysis or interpretation, of the key events. But the “facts” can include what you were thinking and feeling at the time the case occurred.

5.      In a page or two, provide a brief description of the incident.  Your description need not be elaborate, but should provide enough information to enable someone unfamiliar with the case to understand the essentials of the story.  Include in your discussion: (a)  key elements of the organizational context – the situation in which the incident occurred; (b) your goals or objectives (what you wanted or hoped to accomplish); and (c) your strategies for achieving your goals.

6.      Then, in another paragraph provide a brief sample of a dialogue involving you and the other person or persons involved in the incident.  Note the tone of the conversation, what underlying thoughts or feelings were involved.  Were they  expressed?

Approach

Case-writing is very much like telling a good story. When writing about a case in which you were involved, it usually works best to write in the first person. Describe what happened as you saw it, including your own thoughts and feelings (but make sure your thoughts and feelings are labeled as such).

            It is usually best to focus the paper around a particular experience or series of experiences, rather than trying to cover many months or years. A single critical event (or brief sequence of events) usually works best.  Examples include the early stages of a challenging project, a critical meeting, a tough decision, or a major conflict.  Like good drama, a good case rarely arises from a situation in which everything was smooth and easy.  Obstacles, conflict, or dilemmas are likely to be the ingredients that make a case interesting and worth exploring.