Leadership Philosophy in the Fiction of C.S. Lewis

Aaron Perry

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030415075
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030415082
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

This book aims to develop a philosophy of leadership from the fiction of C.S. Lewis. Using such works as The Chronicles of Narnia, The Cosmic Trilogy, and Till We Have Faces, the author focuses on the benefits of fiction for leadership philosophy, including the use of models for leadership from narrative worlds. Exploring topics such as agency theory, conflict, authentic leadership, and dark leadership, this book will offer researchers in HRM and leadership studies a fresh perspective of the fictional works of the foremost Christian apologist of the 20^th century.

© The Author(s) 2020

A. PerryLeadership Philosophy in the Fiction of C.S. LewisChristian Faith Perspectives in Leadership and Businesshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41508-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Leading Between the Lines

Aaron Perry¹

(1)

Indiana Wesleyan University, Marion, IN, USA

Aaron Perry

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Biting Off More Than Can Be Chewed?

I bit his head: Shift’s head, the malicious Ape antagonist from C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle . If you don’t know Shift, perhaps you’ve had a similar visceral reaction to horrific leadership. Hopefully you didn’t actually bite the head of someone whose leadership was resulting in disaster, but I did—I could, of course, because Shift is a fictional character. I was about ten years old and reading my older brother’s copy of the final book from his boxed set Chronicles of Narnia where Shift’s selfish, greedy, malicious, lying face was featured on the cover. I finally came to a point in the narrative where I had had enough of his schemes, so I bit his head. Sank my teeth right in, leaving a mark. (I don’t think my brother yet knows and I don’t think he’ll read this book, so the secret’s safe between us.)

I wanted to leave a mark on Shift’s head because the story was leaving a mark on me. Leadership mattered in The Last Battle . “Everything could have been so different!” I thought to myself as a ten-year-old while seeing the problem escalate. While I wasn’t naming the plotted problem as malevolent leadership, something was getting into my imagination through that story—the imagination that I still carry around even into my leadership research and teaching. Perhaps I became interested in leadership that day; perhaps a good story started forming my imagination to see the world as a context for leadership. Either way, I could bite Shift’s head because he is fictional, but the fictional world to which he belonged was impacting someone in the real world.

The story was, in a tangible sense, leading me. You could even say that Lewis was leading me. If someone sufficiently versed in Lewis put my life under a gracious microscope, they would, hopefully, see the influence of Lewis through characters like Peter, Puddleglum, and Perelandra’s protagonist, Ransom. At least, that was the preliminary hypothesis that inspired searching Lewis’ stories for a philosophy of leadership. But to be fair to an actual philosophy of leadership developed from Lewis’ stories, I hurry to say that a philosophy of leadership cannot simply be studied, it must be lived. As Barfield once reminded Lewis of Plato’s relationship to philosophy: Philosophy wasn’t a subject; “it was a way” (Lewis, 1955/2017a, p. 275). So, this book might be considered the articulation and application of a philosophy of leadership from Lewis’ fiction. To that end, I hurry to say three things:

First, like James March on using fiction in his courses, this is not a book about literature (Bennis & O’Toole, 2005). I am not a scholar of literature, though, as should be obvious, I believe literature and stories can help us learn about and teach leadership.

Second, I am trying neither to be theoretically strict nor idiosyncratic when I talk about leadership in this book. It is famously acknowledged that as many people who talk about leadership define it differently, and the same might be true of authors telling stories that involve leadership contexts. To read literature with a strict definition of leadership might beg the question as to which kinds of literature or which parts of literature might tell us about leadership. At the same time, to read without any parameters would lose the leadership plot. So, while at times I will try to articulate a picture of leadership from Lewis’ literature, I often have a broad view of leadership as a phenomenon that involves influencing and inspiring personally, articulating shared goals and achieving shared goals as a group, forming team unity through accountability, and so on.

Third, and expected, this book operates with a pragmatic philosophy. If leadership is, at some point, about achieving outcomes, then any philosophy of leadership must have some element of pragmatism. Yet because this book attempts, among other things, to name metaphysical realities, it may not provide immediate practical, technical pay-off. As a pragmatic text, then, its final value and, to the extent that I have read, assimilated, and articulated Lewis correctly, the very possibility of Lewis’ literature forming a philosophy of leadership, must be judged against whether or not it is eventually useful and effective.

For the rest of this introductory chapter, I will (1) flesh out the rationale for selecting Lewis, (2) articulate the spirit of the book, (3) further delineate the aims of the book, and (4) lay out the structure of the book which will hopefully apply the subject, exemplify the spirit, and accomplish these aims.

Why Lewis? A Rationale

Besides his writing a book so engrossing that I bit its cover in anger at its antagonist, I chose to explore a philosophy of leadership from C.S. Lewis because I like Lewis! The excitement I feel in reading and sharing these texts, when applied to the field of leadership resonates with a spirit of postmodern organizational theory (Linstead, 2003, p. 2). Authors and researchers are wrapped up in their subjects.

While the researcher must attempt a measure of objectivity, the very nature of literature and stories must also be acknowledged. In his biography of Lewis, A.N. Wilson (2002), speaking of Lewis’ work on Milton, noted Lewis’ ability to enjoy that which he was critiquing (p. 173). In acknowledging my appreciation and joy at reading Lewis, I am not avoiding objectivity as much as acknowledging my prejudice and admitting that I am “probably even less equipped to notice” (Wilson, p. 173) whatever spirit I bring to the text. By acknowledging my appreciation and joy at reading Lewis for leadership, I also hope to exemplify the man’s own ability to enjoy his own subject matter while remaining critical.

Of course, this posture to Lewis would be more disconcerting if it was not more widely shared among potential readers. It is possible, perhaps even likely, that you are a fan of Lewis (or the one who assigned you the task of reading this book is a fan of Lewis, in which case it might benefit you to try appreciation or, at least, to feign it!), but even more important is his prominence in popular culture and scholarly discourse. Lewis’ famed series the Chronicles of Narnia has been the source of popular leadership reflection (Maister, 2002; Willard, 2014) and Lewis’ work has been used to consider transformational leadership theory (Hurd, 2012). Further, the series remains important in popular culture as evidenced by three major film adaptations in the last fifteen years (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in 2005, Prince Caspian in 2008, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in 2010) and Netflix’s recent agreement to develop productions of the series (Netflix Media Center).

I must make a confession, though: I never met Lewis. It is possible that I know somebody who knew somebody who met Lewis, but I leave my vicarious knowledge there. With this concession in view, this book is not really about Lewis, as much as it is about the stories he has written. So, are we learning from Lewis or the stories? Discussing the nature of fiction as a tool for experiential reflection, Taylor (2008) writes,

It is the story itself that seems to teach use something. It draws us in, and by the time we get to the end of it, it is as though what we have been through is not just a reading experience but a series of events encountered at first hand, from which we have emerged wiser than we were before. (p. 265)

Taylor offers an example, “Nor do we feel we are relying on Leo Tolstoy as our authority on love, in the way you might rely on a doctor’s authority on a question of health” (p. 265). So, perhaps we are not learning Lewis’ experiences and reflecting upon them for leadership, but just his stories.

At the same time, however, isn’t the author a kind of authority because, well, they wrote the story? Unless one is expressly disagreeing with the author, the author remains the one who has provided at least the narrative context from which knowledge may emerge. Lewis might not be a leadership expert, but might leadership expertise flow through his writing in a way that is faithful to his life and thought, though perhaps not completely conscious to him? Lewis may not have been completely conscious of leadership wisdom contained in the stories, yet he remains the author and to the extent the reader seeks to learn, Lewis remains a kind of authority. One might see here another postmodern move, although one that does not completely do away with the author: I am attempting to learn from Lewis (deference) about a subject he was not explicitly addressing (difference).

Consider The Screwtape Letters as a brief test case. I read the book because it is bitingly enjoyable and brilliantly clarifying about the subject of temptation, but Lewis’ “ability to see through human failings, his capacity to analyse other people’s annoyingness, his rich sense of comedy and satire” (Wilson, 2002, p. 177) provides insights into leadership that would not be so readily seen unless one reads it a second time. In the second read, I am learning from Lewis but now I am providing the subject matter.

Lewis, as an actual person of history, was subject to his own foibles and failures. Those need not be discarded, ignored, or consistently dredged up in order to acknowledge the complexity or condemn the pursuit of learning from him. Even if we wanted to, we could not completely disentangle the man from his fiction when we read of the pious pettiness of older women, the joyous reunion of children with parents, the cruelty of some British prep schools, or the beauty and subtle wisdom of animals in a variety of stories. “How much is the bookish man distinguishable from his imagined self, the self he projects into the book he reads?” (Wilson, 2002, p. 45). We might slightly change Wilson’s question and make it about the book such a man writes. What this concession allows is for us to take Lewis’ stories as the prime focus of this study, while at the same time allowing various essays and sermons to confirm and clarify concepts his stories narrate. Lewis is in the stories...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Leading Between the Lines
• 2. If Jadis Ran the N.I.C.E.: Philosophy of Leadership
• 3. Defeating Dragons by Reading the Right Books: Narrative and Leadership
• 4. Womb of Worlds or Silent Space? Imagination and Leadership
• 5. Let the Prince Win His Spurs: Agency Theory and Agency
• 6. Saving Faces: Authentic Leadership and the Tension of Self-Disclosure
• 7. Upsetting a Basket of Deplorable Words: Overcoming Dark Leadership
• 8. A Lewisian Way of Leading
• Back Matter