Dear readers,

I write this newsletter once every month or so. It features my reflections on the deployment of creativity to making the world’s economic systems (and by extension social and to some extent political systems) more inclusive and, therefore, fairer. That sounds like a tall order – and it is!

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I made a list of books on my shelves that I’ve really enjoyed reading.

Then, I stared at them some more, and cut it down to five. Let me list them here in the order in which I read these, along with a one-line summary of what each is about:

Reading Lolita in Teheran [Azar Nafisi, Iran] – memoir of a university lecturer defying the Iranian Islamic regime to read forbidden Western novels with her female students
Kite Runner [Khaled Hosseini, Afghanistan] – novel about a family in Kabul living through the fall of the Afghan monarchy through the Soviet invasion and to the (first) rise of the Taliban
Immobile Empire [Alain Peyrefitte, China] – controversial history of British Embassy to the court of the Qianlong emperor of China in 1793.
Glass Palace [Amitav Ghosh, Burma/Malaya/India] – novel about Indian immigrants in Burma and Malaya during the British empire and how individuals relate to the idea of nationhood
Disgrace [J M Coetzee, South Africa] – novel about a white man transitioning in his personal life as post-apartheid South Africa itself transitions in a way that undercuts his own privileged position in it.

Okay, so they’re not all novels. They’re novels and memoirs and histories. I thought about whether I inadvertently picked these because most of these countries are in the news – the Taliban are back in power in Afghanistan in a tumultuous turn of events, an Iranian hardliner is the new president in that theocracy, the Chinese Communist Party is flexing its authoritarian muscle, as are the Burmese generals, and a South African technocracy is teetering in the face of its factionalism.

But that’s not why I picked these. I enjoyed them as beautiful pieces of writing. What’s common about each is their rootedness of place, how each anchors the story they are telling in a particular moment or period of time, and how that transported me to that milieu and made it come alive.

I can devour statistics and read (dry) descriptions of political or social or religious events, fact-based, but they are not nearly as evocative of the moment as are those lovely books.

Why does this matter to me as a student and scholar of institutional change? What do these tell us about how the fabric of societies come into being, or are destroyed? Several things, it turns out.

Each of these works is about disorienting change, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes soul-sapping and enervating. In Disgrace, you see the white community losing its moorings, just as you see university lecturers in Reading Lolita in Teheran losing their bearing as the theocracy takes root.

Each of these works is about a clash of mental models. The British embassy dispatched to the court of the Qianlong Emperor in Beijing couldn’t have a more incompatible world view than that of its host.

Each of these works is about experimentation and gradualism. What I mean by this is that, following tumult, new processes, new customs and rules, are created by decentralized trial-and-error, by de facto experimentation, with many well-intentioned dead-ends. In Glass Palace, you see the replacement of one institutional fabric in Burma and Malaya by another.

Now, these labels I’ve used to describe these changes – change management, mental models, experimentation – are ones that recur in my more formal classes on entrepreneurship as a means of economic development. These are themes that would be central to a discussion in many of the entrepreneurial hotspots of today.

That’s why I think we can learn less conventionally than we often do in the academy – I teach at Harvard College and at Harvard Business School – not just through academic papers, textbooks, and managerial case studies, but from sources that are far more eclectic. In fact, we’ve long had a successful elective course at HBS called The Moral Leader, first started by the legendary psychiatrist Robert Cole in 1980, which requires students to read novels that teach them to wrestle with the philosophical difficulties of exercising leadership in situations that don’t typically permit black-or-white “answers” to conundrums.

The intractable nature of problems in which the world is enmeshed isn’t going to change, but we might as well learn to enjoy the process of collectively making progress addressing these.

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Dr. Tarun Khanna’s Newsletter

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