“Is the concept of management as a liberal art feasible and meaningful in today’s world, and can it be conveyed to new generations in the 21st century?” This is a question asked by the Management as a Liberal Art Research Institute. And my answer is yes, though it might not be so easy to convey. After all, who would think that a female MBA student living in 2024 would have anything in common with a fictional sea captain living in 1799? And yet, on closer examination of Herman Melville’s novella, Benito Cereno, we find that the MBA student has much in common with the main character, Captain Delano. They both have mental models that dictate how they see the world.
Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, writes, “Mental models are deeply held internal images of how the world works, images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting” (Senge, 1990, p. 176). If these mental models go unquestioned, they blind us to other possible realities. When our MBA student understands the sea captain’s mental blindness and how it limits his reality, she is encouraged to question her mental models and discover her blindness. More on this later. Because of our ability to relate to and learn from literary characters, business schools can use novels to teach leadership. Melville’s Benito Cereno is but one example. Yet, at this critical time in our history, when the wisdom embedded in works of literature is most needed by leaders, literature departments are being reduced or eliminated.
In a 2023 article in The New Yorker entitled “The End of the English Major,” Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Humanities Indicators project, notes that “from 2012 to 2020, the number of humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six percent. Tufts lost nearly fifty percent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal arts colleges—saw their number of humanities majors fall by nearly half. Finally, for want of students, in 2018 the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy” (Heller, 2023). The list goes on. These statistics indicate an alarming lack of understanding concerning the value of literature in its many forms, i.e., novels, films, poems, and plays. Yet, engagement with literature can teach us essential skills, such as self-awareness—the foundation of effective leadership.
In a 2005 article entitled “How Business Schools Lost Their Way,” leadership gurus Warren Bennis and James O’Toole argue that business schools have lost their way because of the scientific model that dominates business research and teaching. They argue that business students could learn a lot more about becoming a leader if they take a course in literature, noting that fiction can be as instructive about leadership and organizational behavior as any business textbook (Bennis & O’Toole, 2005).
Other business professors have also advocated teaching management as an art. Harvard professor Joseph Badaracco uses fictional characters to teach MBA students. He says, “Literature lets us watch leaders think, worry, hope, hesitate, commit, regret, and reflect. We see their characters tested, reshaped, strengthened, or weakened. Literature draws us into the leaders’ world, puts us in their shoes, and lets us share their experiences” (Badaracco, 2006, p. 3).
Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, also defined management as a liberal art because it deals with self-knowledge, wisdom, and leadership (Maciariello & Linkletter, 2011). Kenneth George and Richard Johnson build on Drucker’s definition. They write, “A liberal arts education creates a foundation that provides a framework to acquire knowledge, which is then internalized as self-awareness. This self-awareness evolves into wisdom, empowering the individual to lead others effectively” (George & Johnson, 2024).
Annie McKee, Richard Boyatzis, and Frances Johnston agree with Drucker, George, and Johnson that management is a liberal art. In their book Becoming a Resonant Leader, they write, “Emotional self-awareness is the ability to process emotional information quickly, to recognize one’s own emotions as they happen, and to immediately understand their effects on oneself and on others” (McKee et al., 2008, p. 26). Like the scholars mentioned above, Senge believes we must be able to reflect on our thoughts, feelings, and assumptions (or mental models) to achieve exceptional leadership. However, not enough business schools prioritize the teaching of self-awareness. Skills such as self-knowledge are often referred to as “soft skills” as opposed to “hard skills” involving numbers. In an article entitled “Do You Hate the Term Soft Skills Like I Do?”, Bill Ellet, lecturer at the University of Miami School of Business and a business consultant, writes, “Soft skills have been stereotyped and kept low in the pecking order at many business schools” (Ellet, 2010).
This article maintains that soft skills are essential for exceptional leadership and should be a teaching priority. Moreover, this article advocates the use of literature to teach those skills. Literature provides us with numerous role models. Psychologist Albert Bandura’s theory of role modeling confirms that role modeling is an effective way to learn (Bandura, 2007, p. 2). Hence, in an MBA class I am designing, Melville’s Captain Delano serves as a role model of how not to be. Observing Captain Delano, students discover the importance of self-awareness and the dangers of not having it. The following is a small portion of the class content.
A Transdisciplinary MBA Class
Learning to Question Your Mental Models
or
Learning How Not to Believe Everything You Think
In this transdisciplinary class, students read Herman Melville’s novella, Benito Cereno, and Peter Senge’s book on leadership, The Fifth Discipline. Benito Cereno, set in 1799, tells the story of an American ship captain, Amasa Delano, and his encounter with a mysterious slave rebellion on a Spanish ship, the San Dominick. Senge’s book describes the concept of “mental models,” and students will be challenged to discover the mental models held by Melville’s main character, Captain Amasa Delano. They will discover Delano’s unwillingness to question his mental models and how that unwillingness keeps him from seeing reality—the reality that the enslaved people have captured the ship. Captain Delano cannot see this reality because his mental model about Black enslaved people blinds him.
Mental Models
To illustrate how mental models work, look at the image below and determine what it is.
At first glance, it is unrecognizable. It looks like five black shapes. But, if you change your mental model of reading black print on a white page to reading white letters on a black page, you’ll see a word. Does the word LIFT jump out at you? This is an illustration in recognizing the power of mental models and the need to question them and sometimes change them.
According to Senge, the first step in changing mental models is to surface them and then test them to improve our internal pictures of how the world works. A major problem with mental models arises when the models are tacit—when they exist below the level of awareness. According to Chris Argyris, "We trap ourselves in defensive routines that insulate our mental models from examination, and we consequently develop “skilled incompetence” (Argyris, 2003). When we read Benito Cereno, we see Captain Delano’s skilled incompetence concerning his perception of the enslaved people. It is clear to us but not to him. Here is Delano’s description of Black people: “There is something in the negro which, in a peculiar way, fits him for avocations about one’s person. Most negroes are natural valets and hair-dressers; taking to the comb and brush congenially as to the castanets, and flourishing them apparently with almost equal satisfaction” (Melville, 1990, p. 73). Delano’s mental model of Black people is that they are good at serving the white man. Moreover, he thinks enslaved people are docile, which he attributes to “the unaspiring contentment of a limited mind” (Melville, 1990, p. 73). In other words, he cannot conceive of Black people taking over the ship because his mental model tells him that enslaved people are compliant and not smart enough or motivated enough to take such actions. And this mental model causes him to misread reality continuously. His intuition tells him that something is wrong and that he may be in danger, but he refuses to listen to his intuition and continues to force fit every situation into his mental model.
Captain Delano has failed to learn the important leadership skills of self-reflection and questioning his mental models. When students vicariously experience the danger of not questioning mental models, they will not feel superior to Captain Delano; instead, they will be alarmed by his lack of self-awareness and motivated to learn to question their assumptions and preconceived notions.
Analyzing the Self by Using Literature
In addition to analyzing Captain Delano, the class demonstrates how to use literature to help students analyze their reading process by having them answer questions such as: What did I do as I read? Did I stop and ask questions? Did I make inferences? Did I look up words? Did I skim the surface to get to the end quickly? What preconceptions did I bring to the text? Did I see the situation onboard the San Dominick through Captain Delano’s eyes? After participants answer these questions, they can equate their reading process to their perceiving and decision-making processes.
Melville is intent on challenging the reader concerning their perceptions. His aesthetics, such as his complex sentences, similes, metaphors, allusions, and double negatives, make comprehension of the text difficult. Consider the following sentence: “Captain Delano’s surprise might have deepened into some uneasiness had he not been a person of a singularly undistrustful good nature, not liable except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man” (Melville, 1990, p. 37). Using over 40 words in this complex sentence, Melville is saying that Delano wants to see himself as a good person who sees the best in everyone. But why the complexity? Melville wants his text to be challenging to illustrate that seeing reality is also challenging. He is concerned with reality and wants the reader to work to discover what lies beneath the surface of his descriptions. Good decision-making requires learning to see what lies beneath, which means being willing to question—to question our assumptions and mental models. We need to be aware of our process in dealing with the world and be willing to change that process to fit the situation. In other words, we need to learn not to believe everything we think.
Conclusion
Studying literature alongside leadership can teach us to question what we think and, as Einstein would say, “learn to see the world anew.” This transdisciplinary class facilitates the process of seeing the world anew by bringing together the art of literature and the science of business in a unique way that enriches both disciplines and humanity. I invite readers to discover mental models in literature for themselves. Read the play or watch the film Twelve Angry Men and analyze how and why each of the twelve jurors changes his distorted mental model about race. Read The Sun Also Rises and watch the main character, Jake Barnes, slowly change his debilitating mental model regarding masculinity. Read the poem “The Lady of Shallot” and see how the lady in the tower challenges the mental model regarding her assigned caged role in life. Race, gender, and assigned roles in life often come freighted with malformed mental models with which we must reckon. Literature and the liberal arts show us how.