Literature, Moral Leadership and Harvard Business School

Posted on December 4, 2007
Filed Under Books, Business & Entrepreneurship, Leadership |

Following up on my last post on literature, leadership and billionaires, I found a relevant interview in the latest Working Knowledge from HBS.  The interview is with Sarah Jane Gilbert, a faculty member at Harvard Business School, who recently developed a new course on moral leadership.  What’s so interesting about this course is that it isn’t based around the traditional business case study.  Instead, it is based around great works of literature.

Each class is dedicated to debating and drawing lessons from a powerful work of fiction, biography, autobiography, or history. The literature we read spans 2,000 years, covers 8 countries and all of the continents, and continually challenges students to expand their understanding of the world and their place, as future leaders, in it.

Clearly there are benefits to reading literature.  Billionaire business titans who have enormous libraries laud the benefit of learning how to think.  A well thought out and well written situation allows the reader to really explore the characters in the story, as well as the situation at hand. 

One benefit derives from the literature itself. Through the novels, plays, short stories, and historical accounts students are brought much closer to life as it is really lived, certainly closer than in lecture learning and even closer than in a case discussion. That’s because the authors lay out for us the full context of a situation: the fast friendships, bitter enmities, strong ambitions, and confused goals that the characters must navigate. This feels like reality to us-it’s how we live and experience the complexity of our own lives. So through literature, the study of moral leadership becomes a very real hunt for clues for how to confront situations that we believe we could encounter ourselves.

What else makes literature a better teacher than case studies and business gurus?  How about the fact that we know the outcome, there is an emotional and empathetic component, and we can actually debate, and thus refine and articulate, our perspective:

A second benefit of working with literature is that we know what happens. Unlike a case, which always ends with an action question, “If you were Ms. X, what would you do?”, in literature we get to see “the rest of the story.” Because we are searching for examples of moral leadership, we want to understand the impact of characters’ choices on the situation they found themselves in, and on themselves and others. Literature presents us with cause and effect, with action and result, and through the characters’ stories we can learn about the dangers, or rewards, of acting in certain ways.

A third benefit is that literature presents us with characters we care about. We don’t necessarily like them all, and in fact some of the most powerful texts present characters who generate strong emotional reactions. We are puzzled, or enraged, or inspired, or feel desperately sorry for what happens to these characters, and through these emotions the characters live inside us, sometimes just for the length of time it takes to read and discuss their story, but often for much, much longer. That means that the lessons we take from the stories become part of us, a very deep and personal learning that helps students get closer to a goal that many bring to the course: to not just learn about moral leadership, but to prepare to exercise it in their own lives.

But the real power of the integration comes from the fact that students engage with the literature through active discussion and debate. The stories force students to consider and articulate their own moral positions, the judgments they make of the characters and their actions. Most of us treat our own moral views as both obvious and self-evident-the only reasonable response that could be taken. Students are continually surprised and amazed by how differently they each think about the characters’ choices. They hear arguments and interpretations that cause them to challenge their own views. And by repeatedly going through a process of analysis, interpretation, judgment, and debate, they hone their skills in moral reasoning and their understanding of their own moral priorities.

What I love about this is that by looking to literature for moral leadership, we can move outside of the business world.  If morals are universal truths, then seeing them played out in contexts other than business is perhaps the best way to recognize, and thus define authentic moral leadership.

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