Some of the coursework is difficult precisely because it is unstructured. I didn't find the finance courses to be particularly difficult because the problems typically fit into a fairly neat structure: "price this option" or "value this project/company".
One of the more difficult courses I had focused on managing small-to-medium businesses. The issues and cases we discussed tended not to be quantitative in nature, but really honed critical thinking. A particular case I remember dealt with a struggling, family-owned company whose founder/CEO had just died in the midst of an IP lawsuit, etc. (I don't remember all the details). Imagine you are brought in to run the company. What do you do first, second, third, fourth? The challenges are legal, financial, technical, and interpersonal. There are multiple crises: which do you delegate, which have to be dealt with immediately, and which can wait? What information do you need and from where are you going to get it? The answers are not always obvious and don't necessarily fit inside a neat framework. This is "hard" in a different way from advanced quantitative analysis of futures and options.
"A particular case I remember dealt with a struggling, family-owned company whose founder/CEO had just died in the midst of an IP lawsuit, etc. (I don't remember all the details). Imagine you are brought in to run the company. What do you do first, second, third, fourth? The challenges are legal, financial, technical, and interpersonal. There are multiple crises: which do you delegate, which have to be dealt with immediately, and which can wait? What information do you need and from where are you going to get it?"
And how do you know any of the answers you come up with to the above questions are the correct ones?
For example, "There are multiple crises: which do you delegate, which have to be dealt with immediately, and which can wait?"
So I say "delegate crisis one and deal with crisis two immediately". You reverse that answer. Who is right? I am sure two intelligent people can go back and forth for quite a while justifying each answer. Such questions arise in the social sciences as well.
If you have at least a simulation, you can ,(within the assumptions of the simulation - how these map to the real world is a separate discussion/debate) try out your "answers" and see which one works better.
In the absence of a vlaidating/correcting mechanism, how can you ever know what the right answer is or how good your "solution" is?
I've personally found MBA case studies of dubious instructional value (but great entertainment value). It gives you something to do in class, but how much does it really teach?
Where there isn't a way to judge the validity or otherwise of an answer, (in my experience) the most articulate person "wins" and since you are not responsible for implementing the answer in the real word and suffer the consequences therof, it is fairly easy to construct an argument for one ooption or the other. What stops this from happening in an MBA "case study"?
One of the more difficult courses I had focused on managing small-to-medium businesses. The issues and cases we discussed tended not to be quantitative in nature, but really honed critical thinking. A particular case I remember dealt with a struggling, family-owned company whose founder/CEO had just died in the midst of an IP lawsuit, etc. (I don't remember all the details). Imagine you are brought in to run the company. What do you do first, second, third, fourth? The challenges are legal, financial, technical, and interpersonal. There are multiple crises: which do you delegate, which have to be dealt with immediately, and which can wait? What information do you need and from where are you going to get it? The answers are not always obvious and don't necessarily fit inside a neat framework. This is "hard" in a different way from advanced quantitative analysis of futures and options.