The Darden School of Business, University of Virginia, uses the case study method, where each one of the class is a different case study. Over 30 years of his teaching experience at Darden, Professor Elliott N. Weiss has done more than 150 case studies.

He also spends a lot of time talking to shopfloor professionals to make his teachings relevant to his students. Darden also has extensive executive programs as well where Weiss' students are actual managers with real work experience. This gives him a very good objective perspective into how shopfloors are functioning and how they should be functioning.

Interestingly, Weiss also loves to draw parallels between operations management on the shopfloor with day to day life. And he says that his students find it easy to adopt and understand. He believes that principles that are applicable on the shopfloors are also applicable on the services business as well as in day to day life.

"What I try to do is to make them adopt these principles in their daily life and see if it makes any difference. Whether they are getting out of the house, or making toast or doing the laundry or raising their kids, I encourage them to relate with the principles of operations management. In fact, I assign them projects where they are required to apply the principles of operation management to their own life. So not only do they have to learn it in the classroom but also have to adopt these lessons in their day to day life. And it works," says the Professor.

He has students who have improved their tennis games by applying ‘leaning thinking' to their games. And one student also learnt how to ‘optimise' baby feeding in the middle of the night!

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