Author: Taylor Warfield, Former Bain Manager and interviewer

Last Updated: September 8, 2026

 

The IESE casebook is a free set of practice cases written by IESE MBA students and judged by BCG, and the widely circulated 2021 edition contains 12 cases spanning M&A, market entry, profitability, pricing, and public sector problems. This guide breaks down every case in the book, rates each one against a real MBB interview, and shows you how to run peer mocks that actually build skill.

 

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Key Takeaways

 

The IESE casebook earns its place for quantitative reps and messy exhibit practice, but the math runs heavier than a real first round, so treat it as a stress test rather than a simulation.

You can download the casebook here: IESE casebook.pdf

 

• Written by IESE MBA students through a case-writing competition judged blind by BCG

 

• The 2021 edition holds 12 cases: 5 new winners plus all 7 from the 2020 first edition

 

• Each case is tagged by industry, concepts tested, and difficulty, which makes sequencing easy

 

• Exhibits are cluttered on purpose, so the book trains chart reading better than most

 

• Built for peer mocks, since the red and green title system needs two people to work

 

What Is the IESE Casebook?

 

The IESE casebook is a free PDF of practice case interviews produced by the IESE Business School Consulting Club in partnership with Boston Consulting Group. IESE MBA students write the cases, BCG consultants and club members judge them blind, and the winners are published with full interviewer guidance, exhibits, and sample recommendations.

 

The book exists because of a case-writing competition. The club ran the first one for the Classes of 2020 and 2021, selected the seven best submissions, and published them as the 2020 edition. A second competition for the Classes of 2021 and 2022 produced five more winners.

 

The 2021 edition is what most people mean by the IESE casebook. It reprints all seven original cases behind the five new ones, which gives you 12 cases in a single PDF. A 2023 edition also circulates, along with a 273-page internal version that adds consulting industry primers, office selection notes, and IESE placement statistics.

 

Consulting is by far the biggest destination for IESE graduates, which explains why the club invests in a book like this. According to IESE's 2025 employment report, consulting accounted for 41% of placements for the Class of 2025, ahead of diversified industries at 33% and finance at 16%. Accenture, Bain, BCG, Kearney, McKinsey, and Strategy& all appear on the school's top recruiter list.

 

The club behind the book is not a side project. The IESE MBA Consulting Club lists 11 officers and 224 members, and it supports students across industry discovery, applications, interview prep, and post-offer training.

 

What Cases Are in the IESE Casebook?

 

The 2021 edition of the IESE casebook contains 12 cases. Five come from the second writing competition and seven carry over from the first edition. Every case is tagged by industry, by the concepts it tests, and by difficulty.

 

Case	Industry	What it tests	Difficulty
Eurotech	Technology and media	Merger synergies, ratio math	Hard
Crunch Yo' Burger	Food service	Profitability, two optional estimations	Medium
Transantiago	Public transport	Scenario weighting, cost rebuild	Medium
California Wildfires	Public sector	Expected value, open-ended structure	Medium
South Bank	Financial services	Product launch, payback period	Hard
Cowbon Emissions	Agriculture	Sustainability, estimation, brainstorming	Hard
African Gold Mines Co.	Mining	Cost-side profitability, fleet choice	Medium
Nica Productions	Media and entertainment	Decision trees, sunk cost, perpetuity	Hard
Pipeline Oil Technology	Oil and gas	Technology valuation, price negotiation	Hard
The Bookstore	Retail	Market entry, sizing, cannibalization	Medium
GymCo	Fitness	Revenue decline, contract economics	Medium
Green Airlines	Airlines	Investment decision, perpetuity valuation	Hard

 

Difficulty ratings above are my own assessment after working through the book. The casebook itself tags each case on an easy to hard scale, and my ratings reflect how the cases land against a real interview clock.

 

Two cases stand out for range. Eurotech is a full M&A case interview set in a declining audiovisual hardware market, and it asks you to size synergies across raw materials, production labor, and R&D before applying a 70% capture assumption.

 

Nica Productions is the heaviest quantitative case in the book. It stacks a probability-weighted decision tree, an NPV comparison between a movie and a streaming series, a sunk cost trap on a $10 million script, and a declining perpetuity into one sitting.

 

African Gold Mines Co. is the most conventional case in the book, and that is a compliment. Revenues are locked by commodity prices, so the entire profitability case lives on the cost side: a $36 million mining department budget that has grown 20% in five years against $375 million of company revenue.

 

The Bookstore is the cleanest entry point. It opens with a market sizing exercise on Spain's non-technical book market, then works through cannibalization as a traditional chain launches its own e-reader.

 

How Do the IESE Cases Compare to Real MBB Interviews?

 

The IESE cases are harder on math and lighter on communication than a real first round. In my experience at Bain, a first-round case gives you one or two calculations and spends the rest of the time on how you think out loud. Several IESE cases invert that ratio completely.

 

Eurotech asks for synergy ratios carried to two decimal places. Transantiago makes you weight three demand scenarios at 30%, 40%, and 30%, apply them separately to normal and student tickets, then rebuild an entire cost base around a 20% fuel price drop. That is more layered case interview math than most candidates ever face live.

 

The exhibits are the book's real strength. African Gold Mines hands you a single page carrying a cost pie chart, a 10-year crude price line, and a year over year cost variance table, and the interviewer guidance says the clutter is deliberate. Reading messy exhibits under time pressure is a real skill, and few casebooks train it this directly.

 

Timing is realistic. Eurotech maps a 36 to 45 minute flow: 5 to 7 minutes on the prompt, 6 to 10 on structure, 12 to 15 on the quantitative work, 8 on risk brainstorming, and 5 on the recommendation. Run the book to those clocks and it will feel like a real round.

 

The gap is format. Most IESE cases are candidate-led, so you drive the analysis and choose the next step, which mirrors BCG and Bain more closely than McKinsey. If you are interviewing at McKinsey, pair the book with interviewer-led practice or my case interview course, which covers both formats.

 

Where Can You Download the IESE Casebook?

 

You can download the casebook here: IESE casebook.pdf

The IESE Consulting Club distributes the casebook to its own members first, alongside mock interviews with sponsored students. Public copies of the 2020 and 2021 editions are mirrored on document-sharing sites, and both are free with nothing to purchase.

 

You do not need an IESE login to use it. The book circulates the same way other MBA consulting casebooks do, which means the 2021 edition is the easiest version to find and the 273-page internal edition is the hardest.

 

How Should You Use the IESE Casebook?

 

Use the IESE casebook with a partner, not alone. The entire book is built around a color system that only works when one person can see information the other cannot.

 

1. Assign roles: one person interviews, the other solves, and you swap on the next case
   
   
2. Read only the red content aloud: the prompt, the clarifying points, and the exhibits
   
   
3. Keep green content hidden: expected takeaways, calculations, and sample recommendations stay with the interviewer
   
   
4. Hand over exhibits in full: release the whole page at the moment the guidance says, not before
   
   
5. Debrief against the sample answer: compare the structure and the recommendation line by line instead of trusting a gut feel

 

The tagging helps more than people expect. Because every case carries its industry, concepts tested, and difficulty on the title page, you can build a targeted set in about two minutes: three profitability cases one week, three estimation-heavy cases the next.

 

Finding a reliable case interview practice partner is the hard part outside a business school. Running two or three cases a week with the same person beats running ten with strangers, because a consistent partner can tell you whether your structure is actually improving.

 

Peers will only take you so far, though. If your feedback has gone vague, my case interview coaching pairs you with a former Bain interviewer who can tell you exactly where you are losing points.

 

Which IESE Cases Should You Do First?

 

Work the IESE casebook in difficulty order, not page order. The 2021 edition opens with Eurotech, one of the two hardest cases in the book, which burns out candidates who start at page one.

 

• Start here: The Bookstore and African Gold Mines Co., for clean market entry and cost-side profitability structures

 

• Build math next: Crunch Yo' Burger and Transantiago, which layer estimation and scenario weighting onto simple trees

 

• Push hard: Eurotech, Nica Productions, and Pipeline Oil Technology, where the arithmetic stops being obvious

 

• Practice judgment: California Wildfires, Green Airlines, and South Bank, which reward a defensible stance more than a clean number

 

• Save for last: Cowbon Emissions, a long case the book itself flags as built for advanced candidates

 

The Bookstore is the best first case because its market entry structure transfers straight into a real interview. You size a market, estimate share, project five years of profit, and subtract cannibalization, which is close to the exact sequence a Bain or BCG interviewer expects to hear.

 

What Mistakes Do Candidates Make With the IESE Casebook?

 

Mistake #1: Reading the green guidance before you solve

 

The sample calculations sit two pages away from the prompt, and peeking is tempting. Once you have seen the answer path, that case is finished as practice, because you cannot unlearn it.

 

Mistake #2: Stopping when the math is done

 

Every IESE case ends with a recommendation prompt and a sample answer, and most candidates skip both. Delivering a structured recommendation out loud, against the clock, is one of the clearest separators between an offer and a ding.

 

Mistake #3: Treating the exhibits as a preview

 

The cluttered charts are training weights, not a forecast of what BCG will hand you. Real interview exhibits are cleaner and the pressure comes from the clock instead, so do not panic if the book feels harder than the firm.

 

Mistake #4: Running the whole book solo

 

Reading a case to yourself teaches you the answer, not the skill. If you truly have no partner, read only the red sections, solve on paper against a timer, and open the green content afterward.

 

Is the IESE Casebook Worth Using If You Do Not Attend IESE?

 

Yes, and it is one of the better school casebooks for European and Latin American recruiting specifically. Most of the twelve cases are set outside the United States, including a Chilean transit system, a Peruvian retail bank, a Spanish bookstore chain, and a merger between French and Polish manufacturers.

 

That spread matters if you are targeting offices in Madrid, Barcelona, London, or Munich. Consulting recruiting in Europe leans harder on local market context than US recruiting does, and cases denominated in euros and Peruvian soles build that instinct faster than another American retail case.

 

The school's own numbers back up the recruiting angle. IESE reported that 80% of the Class of 2025 secured employment within three months of graduation, works with more than 300 recruiting companies, and ranks second globally for alumni network effectiveness in the Financial Times 2025 MBA ranking.

 

Set your expectations correctly, though. The IESE casebook is not a prep plan, and 12 cases will not carry you to an offer on their own. Use it for what it does best, which is heavy quantitative reps and messy exhibit practice with a live partner, and start with The Bookstore this week.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

 

Is the IESE casebook free?

 

Yes. The IESE Consulting Club publishes it at no cost and there is nothing to buy. The 2020 and 2021 editions circulate publicly as PDFs, and you do not need an IESE account to open them.

 

How many cases are in the IESE casebook?

 

The 2021 edition contains 12 cases. Five were selected from the second BCG-judged writing competition and seven carry over from the 2020 first edition. The 2020 edition on its own contains 7 cases.

 

Who writes the IESE casebook cases?

 

IESE MBA students write them as entries in a case-writing competition run by the Consulting Club with BCG. Each submission goes through a blind evaluation by club members and BCG consultants, and only the winners are published. Authors are named in the book alongside their MBA class year.

 

Is the IESE casebook good preparation for McKinsey, BCG, and Bain?

 

It is strong for quantitative practice and exhibit reading, and weaker as a simulation of a live interview. The math runs heavier than a typical first round, and most cases are candidate-led, which fits BCG and Bain formats better than the interviewer-led McKinsey style. Pair it with cases that match your target firm.

 

Do you need to be an IESE student to use the IESE casebook?

 

No. The public editions are freely available and contain no IESE-only material. The internal 273-page version is aimed at IESE students because it adds school placement data and office selection guidance.

 

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