Mueller, the cases of a SDA Bocconi professor among the world’s best sellers

Another important international result comes for SDA Bocconi. Urs Mueller, Associate Professor of Practice in the School’s “Strategy & Entrepreneurship” Knowledge Group, strengthens his place in the 2020/21 Top 50 Bestselling Case Authors global ranking, where he is 26^th, i.e. 7 places higher than the previous year (33rd in 2019/20). Being among the first 30 authors selected by The Case Centre – the authoritative independent and no-profit international organization that has been disseminating case studies for business education since 1973 – is a very important result, even more so when we consider it comes after a year made difficult by the pandemic and especially that the The Case Centre database includes over 8,800 authors.

Urs Mueller joined SDA Bocconi School of Management, as a Professor of Sustainability, after a long international academic career. His research focuses on business ethics and corporate social responsibility. He is particularly interested in managerial decision-making processes that also have (or should have) a moral component. He is a passionate advocate of the case method and a bestselling case author, who won The Case Centre’s “Outstanding Case Teacher” 2020 competition.

His bestselling case studies in 2020 are “Anna Frisch at Aesch AG: Initiating Lateral Change”, examining the issues related to the change process in a medical-sector company, “Axel Springer and the Quest for the Boundaries of Corporate Responsibility”, which assesses the environmental impact of a publishing company through supply chain control, and “Dealing with Low-cost Competition in the Airline Industry (A): The Case of Lufthansa”, an analysis of the environmental aspects of competing with low-cost air carriers.

Behind these publications is a long process of research and complexity analysis, as Mueller wryly recalls: “At a graduation event an Executive MBA student said to me: ‘You are evil: Your cases don’t have solutions and we couldn’t just google for what the organizations did in order to make smart comments in class.’ And if that is evil – I will take that as the biggest possible compliment for my case writing.”



SDA Bocconi School of Management