Principle Centered Leadership (mngt-5773) Spring 2016, Online Class, Tentative Course Syllabus

Principle Centered Leadership (MNGT-5773) Spring 2016, Online Class, Tentative Course Syllabus

Course Requirements

There are several other readings that are part of The Moral Leader textbook or available on line or at a video store (see Tentative Assignments and note links). Note that for our 2/08 class we will discuss A Man for All Seasons which is available as a movie. Students may want to use Netflix (http://www.netflix.com) to rent this movie. It may also be available at your local video rental store, or at Red Box. Allow time for its delivery. I did find a rough transcript of the play but I think most of you will get more information from watching the movie.

Course Prerequisites

Course Description and Objectives

This is a literature-based leadership course. Each class is dedicated to debating and drawing lessons from a powerful work of fiction, biography, autobiography, or history. The literature spans 2,000 years, covers 8 countries and all of the continents, and continually challenges students to expand their understanding of the world and their place, as future leaders, in it. Through the novels, plays, short stories, and historical accounts students are brought much closer to life as it is really lived, certainly closer than in lecture learning and even closer than in a case discussion. That is because the authors lay out for us the full context of a situation: the fast friendships, bitter enmities, strong ambitions, and confused goals that the characters must navigate. This feels like reality to us—it is how we live and experience the complexity of our own lives. Through literature, the study of moral leadership becomes a very real hunt for clues for how to confront situations that we believe we could encounter ourselves. The texts have been chosen for their thematic relevance at both macro and micro levels. There are obvious segues from one reading to another, but there are also more subtle connections. This allows for students to make sense of increasingly complex topics that build to an understanding of moral leadership—what it entails and how it is demonstrated.

The course is designed to enable students to explore the rich material of the course—extraordinarily fine literary and historical stories of moral challenge and leadership—both broadly and deeply. Armed with background about the wider historical and social environment from the student textbook (chapters in The Moral Leader by Sandra Sucher), students are guided through a detailed analysis of the circumstances of the characters, focusing on the individual situations and problems they face. Ultimately, students build capabilities in moral analysis and moral judgment, which helps them towards the goal of personal discovery and insight into their understanding of moral leadership.

Students engage with the literature through active discussion and debate. The Instructor wishes to create a climate in which people feel free to challenge each others’ views (and expect their own views to be challenged) as they discuss the books/readings. The stories force students to consider and articulate their own moral positions, the judgments they make of the characters and their actions. Most of us treat our own moral views as both obvious and self-evident—the only reasonable response that could be taken. Students are continually surprised and amazed by how differently they each think about the characters’ choices. They hear arguments and interpretations that cause them to challenge their own views. And by repeatedly going through a process of analysis, interpretation, judgment, and debate, they hone their skills in moral reasoning and their understanding of their own moral priorities.

The course’s design aims at having students create a set of analytical skills that prepare them to exercise moral leadership. These include the ability to identify what constitutes a situation with moral or ethical stakes, and the related ability to identify and distinguish types and categories of moral problems.

Broad themes of the course are listed by the three modules in the tables below and include: