The current issue of Harvard Business Review (July/August 2016) contains several articles explaining the reasons why workplace diversity programs simply don’t work. “Diversity training programs largely don’t change attitudes, let alone behavior,” writes Iris Bohnet, Director of the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School and co-chair of its Behavioral Insights Group. “Start by accepting that our minds are stubborn beasts,” she explains. “It’s hard to eliminate our biases, but we can design organizations that make it easier for our biased minds to get things right.”
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When it comes to teaching, I confess that I’m a sucker for iconic texts: Shakespeare’s Othello, Mary Godwin Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Frankly, it bothers me that these authors’ fame derives from ubiquitous cultural allusions so divorced from their work. Boris Karloff immediately comes to mind when people hear the name Frankenstein. People blithely characterize someone as a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde-type” without knowing the original story. And they refer to a talented person as a Shakespeare without having read enough of the Bard to know why he’s a genius. With the mission of connecting cultural allusions to their sources, I have introduced these texts to Books@Work readers, and several anecdotes will tell that tale of how well my approach has worked.
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We’ve written a great deal about the power of conversations on this blog. Books@Work professors have considered how our seminars create space for hard conversations in the workplace and how they help us bridge differences and share ideas. When writing our reflections—our “Musings”—we continually refer back to our own conversations with participants. Conversations, we recognize time and again, open the door to empathy and understanding. They bring us closer to one another—especially when we take the time to share our stories and listen to those of others.
Recent research confirms our sense that conversation has the power to transform people and their relationships with others.
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We talk a lot about the powers that literature seemingly holds in our world. Literature can inspire, bridge gaps of time, place and experience and offer perspectives into people’s lives that are far removed from our own. As a Books@Work instructor, I have come to experience the power of literature to equalize and humanize.
The first Books@Work session that I led was for a well-established downtown law firm. As I walked into the imposing art-deco building, the faces of partners from decades past gazed out at me from gilded frames.
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In the wake of last week’s massacres, we’re all thinking about how we can work to understand each other a little better, how we can overcome and appreciate difference. As Gianpiero Petriglieri writes for the Harvard Business Review, “Fostering civilization means cultivating our curiosity to recognize substantive difference, and our commitment to respect them – within and between groups.” And as novelist Jennine Capó Crucet reminds us, a good book “gives the reader a chance to see what it feels like to be someone else for a little while. And so, in doing that, it shapes a sensory experience that inspires compassion and empathy.”
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For Books@Work professor Gail Arnoff, James McBride’s The Color of Water is more than a memorable family story. It’s an opportunity for conversation, for exploring identity, family and history in the Books@Work seminar as well as in the traditional classroom. As she writes, “We talked about Ruth’s refusal to reveal anything about her background; childrearing; and racial and religious exclusion. In the last session, we discussed the burden of family secrets – in the book as well as in our own families. Most of all we talked about our identity, and the places from which it comes. So many passages in the book triggered discussions, including McBride’s own declaration: ‘Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds. My view of the world is not merely that of a black man but that of a black man with something of a Jewish soul….[When] I look at Holocaust photographs…I think to myself, There but for the grace of God goes my own mother—and by extension, myself.'”
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We are all taught the classics in school, so what’s the problem with reading only canonical literature? What is the value in going outside of your comfort zone, literary or otherwise? And why might moving outside that zone be necessary to understanding the world in all its fullness and complexity? On stories and power, and how that power shapes us . . .
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This week, we remember Alf, become fixated on eggo waffles and David Hume, and touch on the Jane Austen Festival, podcasts, diversity in publishing, and “Defenders of Wonder.”
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It is a truth universally acknowledged that even book lists with titles like “100 Best Novels” must be incomplete. But what gets left out? And why? Our resident Victorianist takes on The Guardian’s recent “100 Best Novels” list, pointing out its dearth of early women novelists and offering some substitutes. Her favorites? Novels about slave rebellions, Regency scandals and shocking nineteenth-century sensations.
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