Abstract
Contemporary business gurus call for a new understanding of the manager. Gary Hamel has challenged managers to become wise stewards. This chapter focuses on the process of transformation, especially the way that narratives shared in a reader-author friendship can bring about a transformation in the character of the reader. Drawing insights from literary criticism regarding narrative and the friendship between reader and author, the focus turns to the implied narrative, a story of moral transformation intended to occur in the character of the reader. A community of readers can develop a conversation in response to a text, treating authors such as Plato and Aristotle as friends with whom we might engage in an ongoing conversation in order to cultivate the virtue of practical wisdom.
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Notes
G. Hamel (2012) What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstappable Innovation (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass), 3.
H. Mintzberg (2005) Managers, not MBAs (San Francisco, CA: Berrett Koehler).
S. Sanghera (2003) “You Should Be Bonkers in a Bonkers’ Time,” Financial Times September 23.
T. Peters (2003) Re-Imagine: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age (London: Dorling Kindersle), 13.
P. Senge (1990) The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (New York: Doubleday), especially Chapter 18, “The Leader’s New Work.“
R. Scholes and R. Kellogg (1966) The Nature of Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 4. Alternatively, see the 40th-anniversary republication of this text; it contains an excellent essay by James Phelan that covers the development of literary criticism pertaining to narrative over the last 40 years, pointing especially to the work of Wayne C. Booth.
Scholes and Kellogg include oral narrative in their account of narrative. For an excellent account of the distinctive features of oral culture, see W. Ong (2002) Orality and Literacy (New York: Routledge).
W. Ong (1975) “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction,” PMLA, 90, 1, 9–21.
Booth uses the example of Aesop’s fable of the goose who laid the golden egg to illustrate the distinction between “nonce beliefs” (beliefs suspended for the sake of the story) and fixed norms. See W. C. Booth (1989) The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 142–146.
For a particularly engaging account of Twain’s biography that focuses on the religious influences in his life and in his writing, I warmly recommend H. Bush (2008) Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama).
J. Pieper (1966) The Four Cardinal Virtues (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press), 29.
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© 2013 Gregory R. Beabout
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Beabout, G.R. (2013). Character Transformation in the Friendship of Readers and Writers. In: The Character of the Manager. Humanism in Business Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304063_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304063_11
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