march 2006 55 L e a d e r s h i p i n L i t e ra t u r e • D I F F E R E N T V O I C E
Antigone’s fundamental principle is religion; Creon’s is country. Both charac- ters are strongly committed to their views. Yet, at a deeper level, the two leaders are similar in an unfortunate way. Both take a single, important human value–religion for Antigone and civic duty for Creon – and pervert it.
They each do this by taking that single value and using it like a scythe to mow down all other considerations. Antig- one and Creon let their single value dominate not just their thinking but their personalities. We see the same thing today in organizations when leaders are unable to see beyond their own agendas for truth, change, and human development.
Let’s talk about one of the few pro- tagonists who actually is a business- person. You’ve said Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Sales- manhad the wrong dreams. What are the right dreams? Is this just the vision thing?
Miller would never have equated dreams with corporate vision. Rather, he saw dreams as a crucial inner re- source for leaders. He suggests that dreams drive all of us, but the wrong dreams can be slow-acting poisons. The fall of Willy Loman illustrates the nox- ious power of certain dreams. The play raises a difficult question for leaders:
How do you know when your dreams are toxic?
The conventional wisdom about Death of a Salesmanis that Willy em- braces a corrupt version of the Ameri- can dream that defines success as money, status, and celebrity. The play was written in the late 1940s, and some critics saw it as a brilliant indictment of modern American capitalism.
But this view treats Willy as an anti- capitalist icon and not as a human being. Another possible interpretation of the play is that Willy doesn’t dream with his eyes wide open. This sounds paradoxical; dreams are meant to re- sist pragmatism. At the same time, it is uncompromising realism – about the world and about oneself–that separates dreams from delusions. Willy’s dreams
are a gossamer – fragile and fanciful.
He is naively optimistic, and his dreams lack the basis in reality necessary to grow and reshape themselves over time. Good dreams have deep roots in everyday life, not in the seductions of the society around them. Someone said that the test of a vocation is the love of its drudgery. A successful management career is challenging and rewarding in so many ways that it may seem odd to emphasize drudgery. But Death of a Salesmansuggests this may be a better test of a healthy dream than excitement or inspiration.
In the texts you discuss in your classes, several protagonists commit suicide. One lands in prison. Another character is sentenced to death.
Does all this grimness really resonate with businesspeople?
I wasn’t deliberately trying to choose grim literature. Certainly I don’t mean to suggest that business is a grim en- deavor. If I felt that, I would encourage
MBA students to look for other lines of work. The fact is that in business you have to be confident and believe that most of the time you’re going to suc- ceed. This is the opposite of grim.
At the same time, unlike contempo- rary management literature, which is relentlessly upbeat, serious literature is unsparingly realist. We find no quick hits of inspiration, no stories of unal- loyed success, or five-step programs for happiness. The leaders portrayed in lit- erature sometimes fail and often strug- gle. The pressure is on because the stakes are high. When business leaders read about the struggles of literary char- acters, they can better understand their
own conflicts. Still, fictional stories don’t lead to cynicism, passivity, or despair.
Literature can be hopeful and even in- spiring because its questions and les- sons are hard-won and real. This realis- tic approach provides a deeper, more enduring kind of encouragement.
Throughout this conversation, you have emphasized the need for leaders to reflect. Why is this so important?
We pay far too little attention to the inner lives of leaders. A lot of what you learn in business school seems to sug- gest that you can treat executives like lab animals whose behavior can be con- trolled if you get the environment right.
Pay-for-performance systems, for exam- ple, assume that the right pellets, like stock options, will produce the right behavior. And Sarbanes-Oxley is really just about giving bigger shocks to mis- behaving rats and shining brighter lights on them.
This kind of behaviorism is not enough. Serious fiction suggests that leaders should learn more about them- selves if they want to succeed. In other words, before you set out to change the world and manage other people, you should look inside yourself and see whether you are ready to be a leader.
You should reflect on how well you can manage yourself. That takes time, and it is an unnatural act for action-oriented people. And you may not like what you see. But if Sophocles teaches us that leaders cannot escape their flawed hu- manity, he also suggests that we can lower the risks of error and tragedy through sound reflection. Productive deliberation is a chaotic process of going back and forth, zigzagging between feelings, thoughts, facts, and analysis.
It resists the temptation to grasp hold of a single grand principle and allow it tyrannize all other considerations. As Antigonestrongly suggests, the best re- flection involves dialogue with others.
Solitary, self-designated geniuses are a prescription for disaster.
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Leaders may need to
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ro c t e r & G a m b l e launched a new line of Pringles potato crisps in 2004 with pictures and words – trivia questions, animal facts, jokes – printed on each crisp. They were an immediate hit. In the old days, it might have taken us two years to bring this product to market, and we would have shouldered all of the investment and risk inter- nally. But by applying a fundamentally new approach to innovation, we were able to accelerate Pringles Prints from concept to launch in less than a year and at a fraction of what it would have otherwise cost. Here’s how we did it.Back in 2002, as we were brain- storming about ways to make snacks more novel and fun, someone suggested that we print pop culture images on
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