Barbara Fillip's List: Didactic Fiction

Should C.E.O.’s read novels?

Yet literary fiction is not normally considered an important source of knowledge in the field of international development. There clearly exists a hierarchy of authority concerning what constitutes “valid” development policy knowledge, which is generally predicated on the form in which this knowledge is presented. Although there have been some attempts to broaden this knowledge base beyond the familiar academic monographs and policy manuals, such as the World Bank’s “Voices of the Poor” study in 2000, these are rare, and anything that does not match up to standard forms of representation – such as literary fiction – are generally discarded, ignored, or otherwise marginalized as “merely anecdotal”.

We would like to suggest, however, that literary representations of development and poverty are important, influential and potentially valuable. In arguing this, we do not take a relativist position and claim that literary forms of representation can substitute for academic or policy writings; nor do we construct a case for literature being a “voice from the developing world”. Instead, we suggest that practitioners and academics in the development field should include fictional representations within the scope of what they consider to be “proper” forms of knowledge in order to open up new space for exploring understandings of and policy responses to development and poverty.

Like many other works of literature in The Moral Leader, both fiction and non-fiction, "Blessed Assurance" serves as a powerful stimulus for discussion and debate among students on the complexities of leadership, in this case specifically on the question of what character really is.

Robert Brawer, Fictions of Business
 "Thoughtful essays, by a former CEO and English professor, on classic works of fiction and their implications for managers and employees of business."