How We Chose McDonald's and Nike as Case Studies

Choosing case studies for a program like this is an act of curation. There are thousands of interesting companies in the world. The real question is which ones can carry a lesson for our students without a single wasted minute of setup. Over many iterations, we settled on three criteria.

Criterion one: every student already knows the brand

Attention is the entry fee for learning, and we refuse to spend it on introductions. Every student can picture the golden arches and the swoosh. The lesson starts at second one, in familiar territory, and then goes somewhere surprising: most students will never have asked why McDonald's sells franchises, or why Nike bet its future on one basketball player.

Criterion two: one dramatic decision tells the whole story

Great teaching stories are simple at the surface and deep underneath. McDonald's, at its core, is a story about a business model decision: Ray Kroc realized the big money was not in flipping better burgers, it was in owning the real estate underneath the restaurants and selling the system to operators. That single insight teaches revenue models (how a business makes money), franchising, and margins (what is left after costs) in one pass. Nike's story is Michael Jordan: a company with modest revenue bet an enormous share of its future on one unproven rookie, and the Air Jordan line became a business larger than most companies ever get. That teaches risk, branding, and competitive advantage (what makes a company hard to copy) in one pass.

Criterion three: the financials can be explained honestly

We do not simplify to the point of lying. McDonald's revenue mix and Nike's deal structure are genuinely explainable to a motivated student, in the same terms an analyst would use, just with smaller numbers. That is a high bar, and plenty of famous companies fail it. Their stories are either too tangled or too boring at the level of the fundamentals.

The famous company we passed on

The clearest way to see the criteria working is a company that fails them. General Electric is the example we give whenever someone asks. For a century it was among the most admired companies in America, an icon of the industrial world, and by adult standards an obvious case study. It fails all three of our tests. No student will walk into our classroom with an opinion about GE, a picture of its product, or a single thing it sells. No one dramatic decision tells its story, because GE was really a bank wearing an industrial costume, and its unraveling took two decades of tangled financial engineering. For a sense of the tangle: in the years before the crisis, a large share of General Electric's profits came not from jet engines or appliances but from an in-house finance arm bigger than most standalone banks, and when that unwound the company went through a decade of restructurings, a slashed dividend, and a revolving door of chief executives, each with a different story about what GE actually was. McDonald's passes the same test in one sentence: a company that makes most of its money from real estate and fees. General Electric cannot survive one sentence. And the numbers cannot be explained honestly to a motivated student without a long detour into what a conglomerate even is, and the detour alone would eat the session. Famous is not the same as teachable. GE is the proof, and the discipline of leaving it out is part of why the sessions that made the cut are built to move as fast as they do.

The result is that when we say students study real companies, we mean it in the strictest sense: real revenue, real decisions, real consequences. Familiar, dramatic, honest. Everything else is trivia.