Syllabus

We tell stories to make sense of the world. Our personal and our professional lives depend on our ability to weave many elements into a coherent whole, both for us and for our fellows. Sometimes unwittingly, we use stories and story-telling as managerial tools: properly applied, they help us motivate a workforce, define a company mission, focus our thinking in moments of crisis. Stories work with the complexity of daily life, and give us perspective on decisions we might otherwise take too casually, or challenges that at first resist our mastery; they rank among our oldest and most persistent means of achieving consensus, a leadership and management device as old as humankind.

In "Literature, Ethics, and Authority," we use story to address current questions: what happens when people, events, and issues take center stage and make us question our ideas of leadership, career, and proper behavior? How do we respond to concerns over diversity, gender, and family in the workplace, or cope with the reality of war, death, and ordinary human frailty? Through films, novels, plays, and short fiction -- good stories -- this seminar examines issues of freedom and control, group norms and individual expression, as they bear on our ambition to manage both work and personal life. We also use some non-fiction -- essays, speeches, letters, memoirs -- to round out the discussion.

The course has five goals. Professor Hafrey shows that:

1. entertainment can educate for managerial action--it is much easier to learn and grow when we enjoy the learning process, and we generally enjoy good stories.
2. by applying the analytic procedures in the seminar, we can improve ourselves as people and professionals through story--whether at work or home, in a theater, a cinema, or an airport bookstore.
3. small decisions have big implications--as we discuss the characters in these stories, we discover fundamental attitudes about human nature, and identify the costs and benefits of applying those attitudes to life and work in society and with organizations.
4. once seminarians have made their values/attitudes explicit, they can better align their professional practice with those values; as they recognize the range of values expressed and behaviors reported by participants in the seminar, they discover that they have choices of how to act.
5. moderated discussion in the style of the seminar, with its techniques of Socratic inquiry, active listening, and consensus-building, also applies to developing leadership in organizations.

1. Class participation: by joining the discussion in 15.269, students discover what they and their fellows think about a topic. Sloan's students are very diverse in national origin, ethnic identity, and industry background; that diversity makes for very different responses to the same stories, and those differences in turn reveal challenges and possibilities for future action.
2. Co-teaching: for the co-teaching assignment, students work alone or in pairs to run one full session of the class, after meeting with me to discuss a lesson plan. Running a moderated discussion simulates the advice-gathering that aids successful leadership; and it allows students to develop skills that will later lead to productive meetings on difficult topics.
3. Three essays: these papers allow students to grasp the big picture of 15.269 by exploring course-related subject matter in an extended argument. The papers allow students to link different readings and recreate the drift of the course in their own terms.

Seminar participants routinely report having acquired a sense of community with their fellow students in 15.269. Thus, the seminar itself becomes an experience of ethics in action -- a group of people articulating together what matters most in their lives, and how they can best achieve it.

Students will be graded on class participation (40%); on the co-teaching with the instructor of one class (10%); and on three papers, five to seven pages in length, submitted at intervals during the semester (50%). In all cases, students' contributions will be judged for the depth of personal and philosophical insight they bring to the seminar. Paper and discussion topics will include those listed in the course description--leadership, diversity, professionalism, consensus, and so on--and will invite students to focus on one or more of the texts/films covered up to that point in the semester; to juxtapose personal experiences and those described in the course material; and to speculate on the implications of the material for a definition of ethical behavior, and on storytelling as a resource for leaders, with its own inherent ethical challenges.