ABSTRACT

Leadership and Wisdom: Narrating the Future Responsibly gives business students and practitioners the opportunity to re-read tales, poems, myths and fables that have been interpreted by leading management scholars in order to translate the world’s folk wisdom into insightful and actionable lessons for a more responsible leadership practice.

Most, if not all, cultures generate narratives that teach people how to make sense of the world and how to respond to challenges with wisdom. These sources provide a medium for character, as well as a guide for decision-making in ambiguous and uncertain circumstances. Management and organization scholars increasingly focus on what narrative wisdom traditions can teach us about leadership and organizational practices, and this book is designed to bring it to students and practitioners. Statler and Küpers have assembled a world-class team of contributors, who reflect on narratives near and dear to them, and draw out the lessons for leaders.

With consistency throughout and end-of-chapter questions, this book enables all readers – including undergraduate and postgraduate students of leadership, management and organization studies, as well as interested researchers and practitioners – to reflect on the contents and implications of folk wisdom.

chapter |10 pages

Editors’ Introduction

Overview of Chapters

chapter |25 pages

Prometheus, Humbled

Leadership and Hope in the Anthropocene Age

chapter 2|18 pages

“Don’t fly too close to the sun”

Using Myth to Understand the Hazards of Hubristic Leadership

chapter 3|21 pages

Choosing Our Cross with Wisdom

A Folktale for Living and Leading

chapter 5|18 pages

The Wisdom of Others

Cultural Acclimatization and Engaged Leadership

chapter 6|20 pages

A Tale from The Ah-Ah Country

chapter 7|25 pages

Laocoön, leadership and wisdom

chapter 8|17 pages

How You Wanna Go?

Learning from the Unfortunate Rake