Resources for Humans editor Celeste Blackburn reviews Minding the Store: Great Writing about Business from Tolstoy to Now, edited by Robert Coles and Albert LaFarge. While those looking for straightforward business insights will be disappointed, literature lovers should appreciate the business lessons that can be learned from great literature.
Whether you are a member of the business community that enjoys literature or a bibliophile looking for some business insight, Minding the Store: Great Writing about Business, from Tolstoy to Now [MINDING THE STORE]
The idea for the book actually came from a class Coles taught at Harvard Business School. In an interview with Marketplace, he says of the stories he taught and include in the book, “I picked them from my teaching life and reading life. I picked them because in one way or the other, businessmen appear, the business world is approached and in a vernacular sense, these folks are either running stores or getting people to come into their stores.”
Those who pick up the book expecting straight-forward business advise will likely be diappointed. Rather, readers should try to enjoy each story as a piece of literature, letting the underlying themes of inequality, struggle, and humanity sink in almost subconsiously — after all, isn’t that how great literature is supposed to work. If you can do that, by the end of the book, in addition to being able check some great literary names off of your “must read” list, you should also have some insight in to the daily human interactions of employee and employer, customer and provider, and more.