Literature and Leadership, University of Chicago (Booth)

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 great stories provide us with rich contexts that can serve as archetypal strategic environments. This course will use timeless works of literature to explore current issues in leadership. 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 distant settings will also allow us to consider how leaders’ world views shape the ways in which they frame and respond to challenges. Besides providing valuable leadership 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 the those who take them on, are often multifaceted, and this complexity is not easily captured by modern media caricatures of business heroes and villains. Exploring different characters and their contexts not only allows us to consider them as possible leadership models; it also helps us to improve empathy for the people who are being led, or who are affected by one’s leadership. This course will include – among other themes – an emphasis on growing into leadership and dealing with doubt; defining success and failure; challenging environments that test integrity; and the creative and destructive aspects of creative destruction. It will also include 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 communication environment, and will examine the role of rhetoric, principles and thoughtful communication in dealing with it. This information has been collected for the Post-Discipline Online Syllabus Database. The database explores the use of literature by schools of professional education in North America. It forms part of a larger project titled Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities, led by Dr Merve Emre with the assistance of Dr Hayley G. Toth. You can find more information about the project at https://postdiscipline.english.ox.ac.uk/. Data was collected and accurate in 2021/22.