Leadership stories: literature, ethics, and authority

Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session

There are no prerequisites for this course.

We tell stories to make sense of the world. Our personal and our professional lives depend on our ability to weave many elements into a coherent whole, both for us and for our fellows. Sometimes unwittingly, we use stories and story-telling as managerial tools: Properly applied, they help us motivate a workforce, define a company mission, focus our thinking in moments of crisis. Stories work with the complexity of daily life, and give us perspective on decisions we might otherwise take too casually, or challenges that at first resist our mastery; they rank among our oldest and most persistent means of achieving consensus, a leadership and management device as old as humankind. They are tacit builders of what we call our ethical standards.

In "Leadership Stories: Literature, Ethics, and Authority," we use story to address perennial questions: What do we do when people, events, or issues test our ideas of leadership, career, and proper behavior? How do we respond to concerns over diversity, gender, and family in the workplace, or cope with the reality of war, death, and ordinary human frailty? Through films, novels, plays, and short fiction—good stories—this seminar examines issues of freedom and control, group norms and individual expression, as they bear on our ambition to manage both work and personal life.

The syllabus for "Leadership Stories" brings together materials from a dozen national cultures, a diversity that mirrors the Sloan student body and the workplaces in which many of you will find yourselves upon graduation. The course also explores multiple professional perspectives—in medicine, law, politics, science, teaching, the military, the church, journalism, and stay-at-home parenting—in order to situate business in the larger social context. We read some non-fiction—essays, speeches, letters, memoirs—and use some daily material from the news media.

Individual mid-term paper due

Team paper 2 due

Students will be graded on class participation; on three team response papers and one team teaching exercise with the instructor; and on two individual papers, five to seven pages in length, submitted at mid-term and semester's end.

In all cases, students' contributions will be judged for the depth of personal and philosophical insight they bring to the seminar. Paper and discussion topics will include those listed in the course description and syllabus: Story and management, ethics in society, individual values, social enterprise, leadership, diversity, and so on. The papers will invite students to focus on one or more of the texts / films covered up to that point in the semester, and to juxtapose their personal experiences with those described in the course material. All assignments encourage students to reflect on the implications of the seminar material for a definition of ethical behavior, and on the inherent ethical challenges and benefits of storytelling as a resource for leaders.

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