Is good business as much about storytelling as the stock market?

See The Rise of the M.B.A. Novelist: A novelist who worked at Google and Goldman Sachs says the next generation of writers may be toiling away in tech and finance companies by Cecilia Rabess. She is the author of the new novel “Everything’s Fine.” She previously worked as a data scientist at Google and as an associate at Goldman Sachs. Excerpts:

"Could business really be the new breeding ground for literary talent? Although this point is so obvious it may not seem worth mentioning, I’ll say it anyway: publishing is a business, a multibillion-dollar industry where art and commerce collide. It’s also an industry in which corporatization, conglomeration, the digital revolution, disintermediation, thinning margins, relational gatekeeping, the myth of meritocracy, private equitization, the price of paper, social media, social stratification, educational elitism and shorter attention spans have led to what writer Will Blythe has called “the death of literary fiction.”

No wonder stories of economic precarity and income inequality are so popular right now. Tales of late capitalist woe are trending, and stories of rich people behaving badly have never gone out of style. This year’s Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, for example, was awarded to Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead,” a story of institutional poverty in the American South, and Hernan Diaz’s “Trust,” about Wall Street during the Great Depression.

M.B.A.s have a front-row seat to the boardroom drama. Good business is as much about storytelling as the stock market, and while you generally won’t find a classroom of M.B.A. students dissecting the finer points of a short story, the business “case”—a popular pedagogical tool that enlists empathy to practice problem solving—is not too far off. These are stories about beset employees or executives and they usually go something like this: A man named John is staring out of an office park window contemplating widgets. Inevitably he finds himself in a best-of-bad-options type of situation. There’s a ticking clock. A red herring. Discussion questions at the end. Alice Munro the business case is not, but it is ethos, pathos and logos, all the essential elements of story, if not style.

There’s another kind of story that business school privileges: stories of failure. M.F.A.s certainly tolerate failure, but M.B.A.s celebrate it. M.F.A.s are inevitably comfortable with rejection, but M.B.A.s romanticize and even fetishize failure. Fail fast, fail often. Fail better. Fail forward. In business there is almost as much advice for how to fail as how to succeed. Which is, of course, helpful and necessary in an increasingly competitive publishing landscape."

"An M.F.A. may teach students how to lay their souls bare on the page, but an M.B.A. teaches students how to market, sell and serve their souls up on a platter for public consumption."

Wouldn't it be great if there was a blog that looked at the intersection of the economy and storytelling or mythology? Well, there is! See Dollars and Dragons.

Related posts: 

Is Storytelling Important For The Economy?  (2021)

Economists Love Fables And Parables (Or, What Is The Essence Of Economic Analysis?) (2011)