Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Todd Murphy, Professor of Leadership at Northwestern University and a consultant for the New York Times in Leadership. And I also write the case studies. So I wanted to take a few minutes to tell you about how I go about constructing the case studies and hopefully in the process offer you some insight about how you might use them effectively in your classroom and in your discussions. So when I start out constructing a case study, I begin by looking for a particular leadership challenge. And this can fall into a number of categories. It could be difficult trade-offs that a leader faces. It might be ethical dilemmas. It might be things like balancing different constituencies and the demands that each of them brings. It could also be things like personal sacrifice that a leader has to make or just the fact that there are multiple possible right answers to any given situation. Once I've identified leadership challenges or at least a story that has one or more of these challenges that I'm looking for, I look at the context in which leadership is being practiced. And if you look at my case studies or the stories that I've written already, you'll notice that I try to focus on leadership as it's practiced in many different arenas. So that can begin with things like business. Or it might be government, politics, public policy. It might also be not-for-profit. Other contexts are arts and media, education. Sometimes I look at context in a whole different sense and I try to look at leadership in the midst of crisis or in the midst of a major transition. If I find a story particularly compelling, I'll focus on that and not really worry about this. But in any case, I'm trying to look at leadership in many different contexts so that students can see which points are consistent, which principles are consistent from context to context and which ones aren't. Once I've done that, once I've identified the story based on the challenges and the context, I begin the process of constructing the narrative. And in doing that, I might have to go through 30 or 40 different New York Times articles that go back weeks, months, or even years in order to pick up the beginning of the narrative thread. I then take all those articles and boil them down into a narrative that really retells the story from a leadership perspective. And when I'm doing that, I'm trying to illustrate the challenges that a leader faces. So having done that, after I illustrate the challenges, I'm also looking at multiple perspectives. At least I'm trying to retell the story from many perspectives. In reading the cases, it might look like I'm going in one direction only to switch in a completely different direction in the next section. And really the idea is to show that there are multiple points of view that need to be taken into account. And there are many different ways to look at any particular issue or problem. And a leader will have to reckon with all of that. Having done those two things, I want to make it interesting to read. At least I hope it is. I find leadership to be inherently interesting. I find current events to be inherently interesting. So there's no reason that the case studies should not be interesting as well. There's no reason I see that they should really be dry in any way. They should be compelling. They should be engaging. And that's what I try to make them for the students. After I've written the narrative, I then switch to the discussion guide. And in writing the discussion guide, I really try to make it adaptable for leadership professors or really any professor who's trying to use it. In reading that, you'll notice that when you look at the discussion guide or when you look at the narrative as it's presented in its form that you can download, you'll see you get a complete narrative and then you get a complete discussion guide. And the discussion guide and the narrative are broken down in the same section so that it's very easy to correlate the questions with the narrative so that you can have students read through the entire narrative uninterrupted or you can give them the questions and have them answer the questions as they're going through the narrative. That's really up to you. But really, my goal is to drive the discussion towards leadership. In my experience, I've found that students can often get hung up on superficial details or they can go down rabbit trails. All I really want to do with the discussion guide is give you the opportunity to make sure that the discussion stays on the level of leadership issues and allow you that luxury. At the same time, it's just a suggestion. In reading through the story, you may see many leadership challenges that I don't even touch on in the discussion guide. If you do, feel free to go in that direction. The discussion guide and the questions aren't what the case is really about, so to speak. Really, as I said, it's just a suggestion to help you make sure that the discussion in the class or with your students stays on leadership and doesn't really veer off into other things. But again, feel free to take it in any direction that is useful to you. My name's Todd Murphy. I really appreciate your interest in the cases and taking the time to listen to this little tutorial. I hope that you find it helpful. I hope that you find the cases helpful in your class, and I thank you for listening.