It's a fresh start, the beginning of a new semester, and yet in some ways I feel like I'm already saying goodbye. We're transitioning club leadership to the first years, picking what for most of us will be the last classes in our academic lives, and looking beyond business school to our future careers. I'm choosing my last semester's classes in an attempt to make sure I'm fully armed with the knowledge I need, while also satisfying my purest intellectual curiosity in a way that only academia can do.
While finalizing my class schedule online, I imagined the details of a course that I might design and teach at the Johnson School in some parallel universe where I was the professor and not the student. The course would be titled "The Business Novel" and it would survey works of fiction that reveal truths about corporations, markets, the economy, ethics, and generally all the human issues that affect business from Wall Street to Main Street. It seems to me that fiction has the ability to teach us those moral lessons that financial statements, press releases and even history cannot. Authors--good ones--somehow channel the sublime through their characters, and by studying them, we can find inspiration, a sense of fairness, even wisdom.
So what would be on the reading list? Atlas Shrugged would no doubt be the central work (I just read it for the first time over break and I was moved in a way that no excel spreadsheet could ever conjure). There'd be current works too. The Economist just profiled a new book called The Privileges, which is apparently the "morally ambiguous" tale of a fabulously wealthy private equity mogul. I haven't read it, but the subject matter certainly seems pertinent for MBAs who are about to be unleashed on the world to make bundles of money.
Parallel universes aside, I'm glad to be back and looking forward to my final semester at this very special place!
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