At the core of the curriculum at the august Harvard Business School are case studies, written in the style of the paragraph above, that use nonfiction narratives to teach students analytical skills and decision making. "Harvard Business School brings the complex realities of business into the classroom in a variety of powerful ways," states the school's Web site. "Through the case method and other learning techniques, students examine problem-focused situations in ways that are managerially relevant, intellectually and emotionally engaging, and highly interactive." The typical course at HBS examines 20 to 30 cases in a semester.

Given how quickly the Internet is changing the business universe, and how difficult it has proved for start-ups and established firms alike to pick out a profitable path, I was curious whether HBS professors were doing a good job keeping pace with the evolution -- and extinction -- of various Internet business models and technologies. At a time when Web reportage and e-mail bulletins are just about the only things that seem current, and even newsweeklies like the Industry Standard sometimes read like Herodotus, how could HBS' cases -- which typically take four or five months to produce -- possibly be relevant?

To answer those questions, I read more than a dozen recently published cases on Internet companies like Priceline.com, Autobytel.com, Yahoo and Drugstore.com, and non-Internet companies developing digital strategies, like RCA Records and Staples.

This much is clear: In the past five years, the emergence of the Internet as a mainstream medium -- and business platform -- has forced HBS's professors to kick into case-writing overdrive. The school took an informal count last November and found more than 200 e-commerce cases. Tom Eisenmann, who teaches a perennially oversubscribed course called "Managing Marketspace Businesses," wrote 13 new cases during the 1999-2000 academic year alone, on companies like Teledesic, Starmedia and CNet. Fieldwork on the Teledesic case was finished during the second week of January, and Eisenmann taught the case the following week.

"In the old days -- as recently as three years ago, when I taught a course called 'Service Management' -- you could give students a case that was several years old, and most of the people in the room would be happy to project themselves into that time and place," says Eisenmann. "You can't do that anymore. Students all live and breathe this [Internet] stuff. They all know, for instance, that CNet acquired ZDNet." So Eisenmann and other professors either write updates to existing cases or provide pointers on the HBS intranet to news articles that cover recent developments.

But while Harvard profs have been feeling the same pressure as the mainstream media to cover the hot dot-com companies in a timely way, they haven't made the same kind of attitudinal shift as the rest of the media, which abruptly went from composing gushy valentines to doing drive-by disembowelments. The case studies of Internet start-ups and Internet initiatives at big companies they've written manage to convey the excitement of exploring new terrain while always acknowledging that just about anything could go wrong.

After all, HBS professors have been transforming real-world business scenarios into cases and using them to teach leadership skills since 1912. Plenty of promising companies whose strategic decisions had been debated in the repro-Georgian HBS buildings on the banks of the Charles River had fizzled before the Internet came along. "It's always possible for people to get overly enthusiastic and overly pessimistic about things that are happening right now," says professor Joe Lassiter, who teaches a course on entrepreneurial marketing. "Our job is to pick a path through the middle of that."