Something I try to ignore is business writing. However, I stumbled upon the American Express Open Forum with the tagline: “A wealth of resources for savvy business owners.” In particular, I stumbled upon a short piece by Guy Kawasaki called “Literature and Narrative Management.” He cites a New York Times article about the benefits of teaching literature to medical residents, then muses that maybe a similar form of mentoring could transform management types into better people too. He then makes an extraordinary leap by suggesting that it might help build a better business.
Because Mr. Kawasaki leaves the idea undeveloped, it’s difficult to discern what (if any) thinking lies behind this suggestion. Here are some questions for him, starting with why. Why abuse literature in this way? What did it ever do to you? And why do you think literature would succeed in transforming management types into better people? Next is what. What texts would you recommend for a program of study? If medical residents read Tolstoy (I’m assuming The Death of Ivan Ilych) to improve their empathy, then would business students read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol? With whom should a good business person empathize? Colleagues? Employees? Suppliers? Children in sweat shops? And if it makes for better business, how do you measure that? What counts as better business? More profits? Better ethics? Bigger Christmas bonuses?
When other disciplines, like medicine and business, decide to cherry pick in literature’s back yard, they make a couple assumptions. The first is that literature isn’t really a discipline; it takes no particular expertise or practice to read well. The second assumption is evidence of the first. It’s the assumption that literature is for something. Literature must have a function and its usefulness must be quantifiable. Immediately, we’re thrown back 2,500 years to one of our more primitive literary theories, first articulated by Aristotle: the purpose of literature is to teach and to delight. This was transmitted to English readers through Sir Philip Sidney’s A Defence of Poesie. So if poesie happens to teach the art of empathy to MBA students, then it’s serving one of its functions.
Unfortunately for Aristotle (and all those who followed him), he was answering a question that nobody was asking. When people sit around a table sharing the stories of their day, they don’t start by asking: “What purpose does our storytelling serve?” They simply tell their stories. The same is true of fiction writers. They don’t write for a purpose (“Oh, let me write a story to promote more ethical business practices”); they write because they have to. Creativity is a compulsion. As literary theorists, the best we can do is offer something analogous to a postmortem. We look at the body and ask what happened. That’s it.
It seems disingenuous, then, that business should suddenly find as fuzzy a purpose for literature as empathy when, since the dawn of public education, business considerations have dictated a slash-and-burn approach to arts in education budgets. I think it’s time to turn the tables. Time to demand that business justify its existence as a discipline.
One of the functions of storytelling is identity formation. Through story, we work out personal and collective accounts of who we are. This is not a purpose. Nobody intends this when they first confront a blank page. Nobody says: “I’m going to write a story so that my readers will better understand who they are as a people living in the 21st century.” That simply seems to be the way things work out in much of our best writing. We define ourselves through our art, through our literature and music. These are the only tools at our disposal to transform ourselves from machines that consume into beings that revel in our self-awareness. It is through the arts that we give expression to our highest aspirations. And it is through the arts that we seek ways to reconcile ourselves to our deepest pain.
I would suggest that the proper question is not “How can literature serve business?” but “How can business serve literature?” For without literature (or culture more broadly understood), the pursuit of business would be mere survival. And mere survival isn’t good enough.