A Look Back at the Final Exam in Management and Narrative

I see a final exam as an opportunity to challenge students to demonstrate what they have learned by applying the course material to situations they have not encountered in the course. But because the examinations are never returned, the learning loop is not completed. To rectify this, today’s post will be about the final exam in Management C35 (Narratives on Management and Organization) given last month.

The first question highlighted the work of young adults: learning to perform their chosen trade effectively, finding and learning from a mentor, and defining the boundary between professional obligations and personal life. Students had little difficulty choosing characters in the course (for example, Erin Gruwell in Freedom Writers, Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men, and Kevin Calhoun in City Hall) and explaining how each dealt with each of the challenges. The most ambiguous of the challenges is finding a mentor. In some cases, such as City Hall, it turns out that the mentor has values his protégé, upon reflection, will reject. Therefore, if you are going to put all your eggs in one basket, choose that one mentor wisely. Another alternative, demonstrated by Erin Gruwell, is looking for a variety of partial mentors, each fulfilling a specific need.

The second question asked students to imagine any three of the characters in Twelve Angry Men being put through the Milgram Obedience Experiment and to predict how they would respond. Such a question has no definitive answers, only good explanations. I don’t know if Milgram or anyone subsequently replicating the experiment ever gathered data on the demographic and psychological characteristics of the subjects and used that data to explain their choices. It would seem to me that three crucial factors predicting the subject’s response would be deference to authority, willingness to inflict obvious pain on another human being for no good reason except that someone in a position of authority says so, and any personal experience that might provide a lens through which to see the experiment.

Applying those criteria, there are some jurors whose behaviour could readily be predicted. The architect (juror number 8) showed himself unwilling to inflict pain or defer to unreasonable authority and would not have administered the shocks. The European watchmaker (juror number 11), likely seeing the “scientist” in the experiment through the lens of his own escape from European authoritarianism and embrace of American democracy, would also refuse to administer electric shocks. The angry father (juror number 3) was certainly willing to inflict pain and would likely see the “learner” as his own recalcitrant son, and therefore would willingly shock the learner into unconsciousness.

The third question asked the students, in several cases, to distinguish between the narrator’s and creator’s point of view. In some, for example as a first-person memoir such as Graham Burnett’s A Trail by Jury, narrator and creator are identical. In others, such as Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day, and Errol Morris’s documentary The Fog of War, they are not. Both these narratives employ a misleading narrator, but it is from the creator’s point of view that the narrator is misleading.

Ishiguro uses irony to show us that the butler Stevens has wasted his life serving a misguided master and putting absurdly loyal service above a level of personal happiness to which any human should be entitled. Morris presents the forcefully articulate narrative of Robert McNamara, but Morris’s own questioning, choice of visuals to accompany McNamara’s voice, and ability to catch occasional disconnects between McNamara’s words and emotions, creates a point of view starkly different from McNamara’s.

The last question in the exam used John Kennedy’s June 1963 speech at The American University about world peace. I had read excerpts, but never the entire speech. It still remains a powerful and, for its time, radical denunciation of the nuclear arms race and search for an alternative. I asked students to interpret Kennedy’s rhetoric in light of the mid and late adult stages of Erik Erikson’s developmental model. I see the speech as strongly generative because Kennedy was searching for an alternative to the dead-end of nuclear warfare and doing so out of a concern for the lives of future generations, regardless of their nationality. He, of course, did not live to see late adulthood but - perhaps because of his seriously compromised health - was acutely aware of his own mortality. The line “and we are all mortal” strikes me as unusual on the lips of a world leader. And recognition of one’s own mortality relatively early in life would spur a concern for one’s legacy.

My students did well on the exam. I hope they learned from it. I know that I learned from reading their answers and thinking about it myself.