Harvard Business School’s Sandra J. Sucher on the value of a book club for executives

♦ READING LIST: See what executives are reading in The Moral Leader course at HBS.

For 20 years, Harvard Business School’s literature class The Moral Leader has tapped a rich canon of fiction and nonfiction to offer executives deep and powerful lessons about leadership. Senior lecturer of business administration Sandra J. Sucher, who teaches the course and has had a long career as a practicing manager, argues that bringing executives together to read and discuss literary works can be a potent leadership development tool.

Teaching literature in school may illuminate big ideas, but how do you justify spending executives’ time reading and talking about books? Shouldn’t those be off-duty pleasures?

Life as an executive is replete with decisions that have moral or ethical dimensions—and that usually catch you off guard. You see a colleague being mistreated by your boss—do you speak up? You don’t agree with a decision that comes down from senior management—how do you explain it to your subordinates?

Most people, when asked how they would approach such decisions, say that they would rely on their moral code. But what does that really mean? Organizations provide few opportunities for executives to develop a nuanced understanding of moral challenges or to practice moral debate. The value of The Moral Leader isn’t so much in what I or previous instructors have had to say during the course but in how the students reason through the moral challenges together and debate the perspectives that the literature evokes. Managers responsible for developing other leaders can use this type of literary debate to spark very revealing conversations.

Because the books we read are not about business, executives can distance themselves from their biases and only later, upon reflection, see how their own choices might mirror those in the narratives. For instance, we read Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, The Remains of the Day, about an English butler reflecting on a life given over to a single moral principle: loyalty to his boss. His sacrifices and their consequences for him and others paint a terrifying picture of a moral code taken to extremes, even though the protagonist can understand this in only a limited way. It’s very hard not to read the novel at least in part as a cautionary tale about the limits of loyalty and the points at which we start to lose ourselves in our jobs.

A book can be a cautionary tale whether or not we discuss it. Why make it more than assigned individual reading?

The Remains of the Day is a fine piece of literature no matter how you read it, but if you want to wrestle with your own moral code, reading it in isolation isn’t so different from the butler’s lonely musings. He gains some perspective into his actions and their consequences by reflecting on his life, but he doesn’t have the full story. People need others’ points of view.

I also have my students read an excerpt from Personal History, Katharine Graham’s autobiography, which details her bold decisions about covering the Pentagon Papers and Watergate at the Washington Post; and Alfred Lansing’s Endurance, the tale of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s disastrous Antarctic excursion. The moral question concerns Shackleton’s motives for saving his entire crew—he stood to gain financially by sparing everyone, even though supporting the weakest of them put the other crew members at risk.

What value does a book group offer individual leaders and, by extension, the firms that employ them?

It is in the exchange of ideas about these books that people come to understand how their own moral codes constrain them—and how they might approach decisions with a more nuanced understanding. Most of us believe that our moral views are self-evident. Hearing people present arguments you had never thought of is one way to strengthen your own moral reasoning skills. It also can create a powerful bond within a group. Firms might consider integrating discussions of texts into their leadership development programs or even creating a book club for senior leaders—or for any group that confronts moral decision making. Choose a few books, meet once a month or so, rotate discussion leaders, and see what happens; you might be surprised at the depth of insight that emerges.

To view a list of recommended texts for an executive book club, visit sucher.readings.hbr.org.