with your “secret” side,
your shadow side, your
reflective side.
I think Achebe is suggesting that mo- ments of testing come in unexpected ways. In “The Secret Sharer,” Conrad is also interested in accidents of fate. At one point, Conrad refers to “the chap- ter of accidents which counts for so much in the book of success.” It’s signif- icant that Conrad gives the captain no name, which suggests that accidents of fate can happen to anyone.
Many of the authors we are dis- cussing are telling leaders not to kid themselves. At any moment, challenges can leap at you, testing whether you have what it takes to be a leader. No one needs to seek out these challenges, and no one should. Crisis moments like the captain’s in “The Secret Sharer” will come to anyone in a position of respon- sibility. The captain in “The Secret Sharer” faces his challenge of taking responsibility when he is finally given command of a ship. He is in charge of the boat that night, and the sea is per- fectly calm, so he doesn’t expect any- thing to happen. Then, all of a sudden, he has to deal with a stranger who swims to his ship and claims to be falsely accused of murder because he killed a sailor whose failure to follow orders en- dangered his own ship. So that may be another element of these tests: They’ll probably come out of nowhere.
Many accidents can derail your life and career, including ones involving health, which most of us take for granted. Consider Richard Gerstner. In the mid-1980s, he was at the height of his career. I met him when he was run- ning IBM Japan, and a lot of people thought he might be the next chairman of IBM.
But then he got sick. A series of con- sultations with the world’s top doctors didn’t uncover the problem. His illness became so debilitating that Gerstner retired from IBM. Eventually, he was di- agnosed with Lyme disease. He received treatment and was ready to go back to work. But, by then, IBM had tapped Gerstner’s younger brother Lou – who had never worked for a computer com- pany – for the top job that Richard had hoped for. Call this fortune or fate, but there is so much outside our control.
Business scandals have stoked a lot of skepticism and distrust in the community. What can literature teach us about what a good moral code looks like?
In one way or another, morality is the theme of most great works of fiction.
But serious literature rarely endorses black-and-white morality. Let’s go back to Things Fall Apart. Essentially, the story is about Okonkwo’s struggles to come to terms with the colonial mis- sionaries who move into his world and challenge his deep beliefs and way of life. Okonkwo is driven, focused, and tal- ented – in other words, he is the psycho- logical and emotional counterpart of the strong, determined people who run most organizations today. But as the story unfolds, he loses his followers, falls into despair, and kills himself.
So what has happened to this once- successful African chieftain that he cannot put up a fight against the colo- nialists? What we learn from Okonkwo is the danger of adhering blindly to rigid moral codes in times of change.
Okonkwo believes that the simple moral code of his early years is all he needs to lead his people. But this mistaken belief turns his determination and firmness into liabilities rather than the assets they could be; they push him further down the wrong track. Sometimes, for leaders, morality is not as simple as looking up the rules and following them. Okonkwo never understands this.
So, serious literature encourages leaders to break the rules?
Fiction suggests that in facing their day-to-day challenges, leaders may need to embrace a more complex code of ethical behavior than they may have learned as children. Real morality is not binary; it comes in many shades of gray.
Leaders need moral codes that are as complex, varied, and subtle as the situa- tions in which they find themselves.
This does not mean abandoning basic values or embracing moral relativism.
What it does mean is that over the course of a career, leaders may have to embrace a wide set of human values.
Like Okonkwo, executives sometimes
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don’t grasp this idea. They mistakenly believe that the simple moral code of their early years is all they need to be leaders.
For instance, I know of a successful executive who recently joined a small, fast-growing firm run by a longtime friend. After just a couple of weeks on the job, the executive found evidence that the company had been booking revenues for sales that hadn’t actually occurred. He confronted his friend and the board and eventually resigned. The company issued a press release saying the executive had stepped down be- cause the demands of the job were greater than he had expected. But the markets saw through this ruse. They halved the company’s stock price, and they derailed a planned stock offering.
The firm soon declared bankruptcy.
On the surface, the executive seemed to have acted courageously and cor- rectly. He refused to participate in ac- counting dishonesty and stood up to his friend and the board. However, by following his clear-cut code of ethics, this executive triggered the destruction of the company. A harder path would have been to give the president and the board the option of disclosing the problems and taking dramatic steps right away. This would have given the company a fighting chance, but the ex- ecutive, believing that he was follow- ing his conscience and doing the right thing, apparently never considered it.
The question is whether his moral code was just too rigid.
Does literature suggest that leaders be pragmatists when it comes to morality?
The clash between principles and prag- matism is one of the hardest tests of a leader’s character. Of course we want our leaders to be both principled and pragmatic. Principles alone qualify men and women to be preachers or saints.
Pure pragmatists can open their tool kits and get down to work, but their amorality makes them dangerous. As many leaders know, sometimes the worst conflict is between two strongly held principles. Navigating that can be
harder than trying to keep a balance be- tween principles and pragmatism.
In his play Antigone, the ancient Greek dramatist Sophocles shows what can happen when leaders are motivated by principles alone. Even though Antigone is set in a different era, it is relevant to leaders facing the high-pressured envi- ronment of today. This is partly because Sophocles takes a very broad view of leadership. One of the main characters, Creon, is the new ruler of Thebes. He fits the classic definition of a leader be- cause of his official role and authority.
The other central figure is Antigone, the
daughter of Oedipus, the former king of Thebes. Antigone has no formal posi- tion, but she represents the social and religious leaders throughout history who have mobilized others through their deep, personal commitment to fundamental moral values.
Antigone wants to bury her brother in accordance with religious law, but Creon has declared her brother a traitor because he started a civil war. Creon is- sues an edict that Antigone’s brother be left unburied, to be eaten by dogs and vultures. When Antigone proceeds with the burial, Creon sentences her to death.
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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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