Teaching The Moral Leader

What do Sir Thomas More, Chinua Achebe, and Sophocles have to offer today’s business leaders? For MBA students in HBS professor Sandra Sucher’s course, The Moral Leader, great literature helps them find their own definition of moral leadership.

Sucher is one of a number of HBS faculty who have taught the course. First introduced to HBS in the late 1980s by Harvard psychiatrist and educator Robert Coles, The Moral Leader uses literature to study moral decision-making and leadership. Individual faculty teach the course using their own unique curriculum.

Sucher recently published 2 books about the course: One is a textbook, The Moral Leader: Challenges, Tools, and Insights, that provides historical and social context for the works read in the course, as well as instructional materials.

In The Moral Leader course at Harvard Business School, students exchange their business management case studies to discuss some of the great protagonists in literature. Professor Sandra Sucher discusses how we all can find our own definition of moral leadership. Key concepts include:

* Some of the hardest leadership decisions are the ones with moral or ethical stakes.

* The Moral Leader course gives students the opportunity to develop their own workable definition of moral leadership.

* Great literature allows students to develop emotional reactions to characters facing difficult decisions and prompts great classroom discussions and learning.

Q&A with: Sandra J. Sucher

Author: Sarah Jane Gilbert

Full Story: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5801.html