Jake Goodman (MBA ’26) shares his worry that everything is becoming a case.
“That could be a case,” I muttered, almost involuntarily, as I swiped my card for a medium frozen yogurt, a towering, architecturally unsound structure littered with toppings spanning the full spectrum of human impulse : healthy, performative fruit, whimsical confetti sprinkles, and — the true form factor destabilizers — brownie chunks.
I turned to my friend, who had already begun the mental calculation of whether it was worth pretending to Venmo me.
“Think about it,” I pressed on, spoon in hand. “The frozen yogurt boom of the 2010s. The overexpansion. The rise and fall of the self-serve model. The misguided attempts at product-line diversification. The existential question of whether consumers actually like frozen yogurt, whether it was truly healthy or not. This could be the perfect case!”
Since starting my RC year, I have begun helplessly spotting cases in my day-to-day life. The problem is I can no longer stop.
How did it all begin, you ask? Well, I was grabbing a free coffee at the weird, sinister Capital One café in Harvard Square when I thought to myself that the story of the café strategy could be a case. How does it make sense to grab a coffee and willingly hang out at my bank of all places? Were we, the oat-milk-guzzling, MacBook-staring dwellers in this bank-cafe Frankenstein, part of some grandiose LTV/CAC experiment? There’s got to be a story there, or something even better than a story — a perfectly crafted narrative, a document short enough to read in a half hour and dense with ripe business insights, a document published by the finest business institution in the land: an HBS case.
As I giddily imagined the case-to-be and exited the cafe, I kneeled down to tie my shoelace and thought to myself, “well, the shoelace must have been invented somehow. That could be a case too. It has been in the market for so long without any innovation — there’s no way to reinvent the shoelace wheel. No one is doing LaceTech nowadays. Who cares about the origin of the world? What’s the origin of the shoelace? What’s the market size, and how does distribution work?”
As RC year unfurled, these types of ponderous bouts became more and more common. I began to classify the everyday moments of my life by modules in the carefully crafted curriculum. The absurd strategy of having multiple cashiers while disincentivizing the self-checkout option at Spangler (I mean, does this really make sense re: throughput time? Don’t they teach process flow here?): TOM case. What about the fraudulent temptation of entering my usage of the small china plate at the Spangler self-checkout machine despite clearly and most obviously using what typical plate users would call the larger of the two plates (though it’s subjective, right? I mean, how big a plate is it really? In my mental image of a “large” plate, it is not really the plate of this size, so it seems like we’re operating in a heuristic grey area regarding standardization of relative plate sizings): FRC case.
My case fanaticism followed me outside of the halls of Spangler. Over winter break, in a squabble with my family over our inability to pick a takeout option, we were firmly stuck in the valley of despair, or maybe the cycle of doom, or some cataclysmic combo of the two.
“Chinese sounds good.”
“Eh, I have never been the biggest fan of Chinese food, Italian?”
“So heavy, let’s do something else.”
After ten minutes of back and forth filled with extraneous personal digs related to a certain family never being able to make up their mind not just about food and what to get on on a menu, but also in all aspects of life, all I could add to the conversation was the gleeful remark that “this could be the perfect LEAD case!”
“You want to go to a restaurant called LEAD?”
“What type of food?”
As my fixation with cases grew, I started to imagine myself as the protagonist of one never-ending case. How would my post-case reflection lecture fare? Was I meant to be in an “ah, this guy was going to succeed all along case,” or an “eh, this doesn’t seem like the greatest path, but there’s going to be some type of jaw-dropping turnaround,” case or a “this is a horrible idea, and this business is going to definitely fail type case?” Could the collection of my days on this earth be reduced to 10-12 pages of stark-white documents, emblazoned with the fierce HBS crest of truth and supplemented with easily ignored — though awfully detailed — exhibits? Should the transcription of my life be copyrighted by the president and fellows of Harvard College, churning out case after case, a Matryoshka doll of cases about me, oh, me!?
Returning this semester, my descent into case-hyperawareness has only escalated. I wake up in the morning and look out my window just to think: “Windows, yes! Everyone would love a window case — window history, window market share, window distribution strategy. Windows are so fun.” I interrupt sectionmates mid-sentence in exasperation yelling, “THIS COULD BE A CASE!”
As I walk the halls of Spangler, I feel the urge to fully shutter my eyes, only letting in enough visual stimuli to make my way around, lest the sight of some object trigger the need to begin drafting the ideal case about said object. Stares and vicious whispers now haunt me. “Isn’t that the ‘this could be a case guy?’” These words follow me everywhere, initiating again the cycle of doom as I think, “this whole situation, this thinking everything about this could be a case, it could be the perfect case, the Mount Everest of cases, the case I was meant to write.”
Jake Goodman (MBA ’26) is originally from Davie, Florida. He graduated from Brown University with an honors degree in English and Economics in 2019. Prior to HBS, Jake worked in corporate development, strategic finance, and retail strategy and operations at Gopuff, a rapid convenience app, in Miami, and for Barclays in New York City. He is an avid banjo and guitar player and misses the Florida sun dearly.
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