Using timeless stories and characters as case studies can illuminate leadership challenges in powerful ways. Great stories offer characters with memorable traits and leadership styles, without losing sight of each character’s complexity. And the settings in those stories provide us with rich contexts that allow us to explore environments and issues in our own society.
We can broaden our view of such issues by using stories from other times and places, thereby considering them in other contexts and looking for universal themes. These settings allow us to consider how leaders’ world views shape the ways in which they frame and respond to their societies’ challenges.
In this course, we especially examine an important overarching aspect of leadership, by considering leaders as architects, or shapers, of environments in which other people must live, work or pursue their goals.
We will apply this approach to a range of readings in which the characters are not just potential leadership models but can also be people who are affected by the ways in which others lead. This approach encourages us to explore different aspects of society by taking the perspective of many different actors in those settings, while respecting the context in which each is operating.
This allows MBA students to consider how different approaches relate to some of the values or virtues that they often aspire to incorporate into their own leadership styles, such as: leading with integrity, with courage, or with empathy for those affected by one’s approach to leadership; dealing with doubt; thinking and communicating clearly while considering multiple perspectives; and combining hard skills with softer or more ambiguous considerations. This approach enables students to inquire deeply, in discussion with each other, into how to lead with these considerations in mind in a society with multiple value-systems, interests and perspectives.
Besides providing valuable perspectives that we can apply to our own environments, the stories that we read and discuss will present us with memorable characters, who have varied traits and bring distinct approaches to the challenges they face. We can use these characters to explore different ways in which leaders bring their individuality to bear on problems.
By considering these nuanced characters in context, we will also attempt to understand their virtues and flaws in richer and deeper ways than typical business case studies and modern media accounts allow for. Leadership problems, and those who take them on, are often multifaceted, and this complexity is not easily captured by modern media caricatures of business heroes and villains.
Among other themes, there will be a special emphasis on ways in which the social environment that businesses operate in can distort communication. We will use these readings to explore leadership strategies for delivering and interpreting messages in the modern social environment, and will examine the role of rhetoric, principles and thoughtful communication in dealing with it.
