“HE INSPIRED NEITHER love nor fear, nor even respect…He originated nothing, he could keep the routine going—that’s all.” As a description of your typical middle manager, it is hard to surpass Marlow’s view of the boss at a river port in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”. The novella is a critique of colonialism in Africa, and an exploration of power and morality. It is also a guide to dealing with corporate bureaucracy. Marlow’s steamboat is in tatters and the manager is useless—Marlow must solve the problem himself. It sounds like an ordinary day at a Fortune 500 company.
Bookshops are stuffed with management tomes on how to be a good leader, inspire others, survive office politics, navigate cultural differences and win negotiations. But executives would do well to ignore the corporate self-help shelves and head instead for the classics section. Great works of literature, with their piercing examination of the human condition, have much to teach the aspiring chief executive about business—values of honesty, empathy and commercial acumen, as well as insights into vanity, pettiness, greed and ruthless ambition, all of which punctuate the journey from cubicle to corner office.
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This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Genre bending”
From the July 13th 2024 edition
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