Quote:
Originally Posted by nnyhav
Lucy Kellaway in today's Financial Times:
Managers can learn a great deal from fiction, or so thinks Sandra Sucher. She teaches a course at Harvard Business School in which she makes chief executives sit down and talk about novels. She thinks that business leaders should steal the idea of book clubs from their wives, and get together with their peers once a month to thrash out the moral dilemmas posed in fiction.
FT.com / Home UK / UK - A novel approach for chief executives
My take: There are likely to be a lot more ex-managers from which to assemble such reading groups.
add: The hook: Books vs. Cigarettes - by George Orwell |
And so can revolutionaries, of either wing. Certainly the pre-1917 Bolsheviks used fiction when they could not get hold of their cult classics (Marx, Engels). And not only for analysis - moral education and to stiffen those resolves.
Fiction works because it plumbs depths non-fiction cannot, by diving deep into, and synthesizing, elements of our culture and its manisfestations in our individual subconsiousnesses. Something like the alchemists desire to transmute base metals into gold. Also, I never write a sentence as horrible as the one beofre the last when I write fiction.
More seriously, I have never read Jung, although what I suggest above probably has resonance with his work. However, I attended a lecture by Linda S. Leonard who very brilliantly used a Jungian analysis to look into her own alcoholism using biography, literature and history. She wrote "Witnesss to the fire: creativityand the veil of addiction", which I cannot bring myself to buy - bloody expensive in South Africa. It features Dostoevsky's gambling addiction - perhaps not unlike some of the stockbrokers who went to Harvard.