Why Indian Managers Don’t See Themselves in Western Case Studies — A 2026 Guide to Leadership Development in India

How deep does this go? The numbers are sobering.

Ashok Banerjee, Dean of New Initiatives at IIM Calcutta, has stated on record: “95 per cent of the cases that we use are written in places like Harvard”. This is not a fringe criticism. It is an insider acknowledgement from one of India’s most respected management institutions.

Oxford Academic’s Indian Business Case Studies (2022) is even more direct, acknowledging “a severe shortage in Indian Business Case Studies faced by B-schools in India”, and noting that the majority of cases used at IIMs and other top B-schools are drawn from foreign industries with “very little or no relevance to Indian business situations”.

Harvard Business School publishes more than 150 cases on Indian companies. But the largest consumers of those India-focused HBS cases are American business schools, not Indian ones! That distinction matters enormously. The case study methodology adopted by these programs was not designed for this audience. A case about an Indian company written to help a US MBA understand India as an emerging market is not the same thing as a case written to help an Indian manager lead within it. The intent shapes everything: the dilemma selected, the data surfaced, the questions the facilitator is trained to ask.

IIMB’s own Management Review has described India’s management education as marked by “wholesale copying of the Western curriculum”. These are not external critics. These are Indian institutions naming the problem from inside the building.

THIS ISN’T A CONTENT PREFERENCE, IT’S A LEARNING SCIENCE PROBLEM

Let’s be clear about something first. This is not about cultural nationalism or a preference for “made in India” branding. This is a learning science problem. And there is fifty years of research behind why it matters.

Andragogy, the science of adult learning as developed by Malcolm Knowles, is foundational here. Adults are not passive recipients of content. They bring prior experience to every learning room. They are motivated by material that connects to their specific context. They are problem-centred, not content-centred. And they need to understand why they are learning something before they engage meaningfully. When a case is set in a Silicon Valley boardroom, it quietly violates each of these principles for the average Indian manager. The prior experience cannot be activated. The context cannot be connected. The problem feels abstract.

The data on training transfer makes the stakes even more visible. A peer-reviewed study of 150 organisations found that while 62% of employees apply training immediately after completing it, this drops to 44% at six months and just 34% at one year. Two-thirds of your training investment disappears within twelve months. The primary driver of this decay is the disconnect between the training environment and the learner’s real-world context.

Brion (2022), writing in the Journal of Professional Development, put it plainly: “culture is a predominant force in people’s lives” and L&D that ignores cultural fit will fail to achieve meaningful return on investment. When a case is culturally distant, something specific happens in the room: participants analyse the scenario as an intellectual exercise. They do not treat it as a problem they actually own. The thinking stays academic. And academic thinking rarely survives the commute home.

WHAT MAKES A CONTEXT “INDIAN” FOR A LEARNER?

Not every case written about an Indian company is contextually Indian. And the reverse is true too. The best India-centric cases are not built around brand names. They are built around the texture of business life that Indian managers navigate every day. Here is what that texture actually looks like:

• Deep hierarchy and deference culture. Decisions flow from the top. Navigating upward, i.e., pushing back without being seen as insubordinate, is a skill most Indian managers learn painfully on the job. Almost no Western case study teaches it.
• Relationship-first business dynamics. Trust before transaction. Long-term bonds over short-term efficiency. A vendor relationship built over a decade in Surat is not a procurement contract, it is an asset that does not appear on any balance sheet.
• Constraint-driven problem solving. The instinct for doing more with less is not a workaround, it is an ingrained discipline. Cases must honour this, not treat resource constraint as a failure state.
• Regulatory ambiguity and complexity. Indian managers routinely operate where the rules are inconsistent, contested, or arrive mid-project. A case built around clean, predictable regulatory clarity trains entirely the wrong muscle.
• Family business and promoter-led governance. A significant portion of India’s corporate sector is still shaped by promoter authority. Loyalty, succession, and strategic direction work very differently here than in publicly-listed multinationals with independent boards.
• Generational fault lines. Managing a Baby Boomer senior and a Gen Z reportee in the same team with entirely different expectations of authority, feedback, and communication is a daily reality for Indian managers. Few Western cases even acknowledge this tension exists.

WHAT INDIA-CENTRIC LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE IN THE CLASSROOM

Over the past decade, we at GlobalGyan have built 150+ India-focused cases, each built around a methodology that prioritises open-ended debate over prescribed answers. They are sector-specific and culturally authentic, drawn from real Indian business dilemmas, not adapted Western cases with Indian names substituted in.

But here is what distinguishes them structurally: they deliver no verdict. Each case is built around a genuine decision point; a manager facing an impossible expansion target, a brand caught between aspirational and affordable, a retailer navigating channel conflict from the rise of quick commerce. There is no prescribed right answer. The case exists solely to provide material for class discussion. The author does not intend to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of the situation.

The sectors are deliberately familiar: value retail, premium brand positioning in Indian sportswear, market entry and localisation, consumer experience design for Indian jewellery buyers, brand refresh in the Indian women’s watch segment. When a participant reads a case and thinks “I know that market” or “I’ve seen that exact dynamic,” the conversation shifts. They stop being observers and start being protagonists.

That is the design intent. The case is not a lecture with a punchline. It is a dilemma with consequences.