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Last week I wrote about the virtues of skepticism when it comes to storytelling—why it's important to be wary about organizations that use storytelling to burnish positive images about themselves, because there's a good chance they're covering up messes that don't neatly fit the narrative. Your comments to that post got me thinking more about when storytelling does and doesn't do its job. (And as an editor at Associations Now who's stared at plenty of blank screens trying to write, I think about this a fair bit.)

So let's add one more complication here: At the Harvard Business Review website, author Anne Kreamer writes about "the business case for reading novels." By "business case," Kreamer means to say that reading fiction bolsters the kinds of qualities that we admire in leaders but which leaders sometimes have a hard time cultivating: emotional intelligence, empathy, poise, conscientiousness. There's data to back up the claim. According to one study she cites, people who read fiction were better equipped to detect emotional cues in others. Moreover, Kreamer argues, fiction is a way to experience the rougher emotions we try to avoid in everyday life, the better to deal with them when they do come up.

I like the idea in the abstract, though I think fiction is only so beneficial as a leadership tool. As Kreamer points out, people who already have "high interpersonal skills" won't necessarily benefit. And however I look at it, I'm not convinced that the novel I'm reading at the moment, Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, which is set on a mutinous slave ship in 1830, has much to teach me about leadership, even in an inverted, here's-how-to-do-it-wrong kind of way. But I don't read fiction to be taught so much as to be reminded: to remember that there are sometimes voices I hadn't considered, that some of the verities I was sure of years ago (or last month) aren't necessarily so, and that the essential but hard-won personal stuff Kreamer mentions—emotional intelligence, empathy, poise, conscientiousness—still matters. Novels aren't formal training; at best they're refresher courses.

But let me throw it to you, an association readership that I know often balances the must-read business books with less-business-y ones. Is there a business case for novels, as Kreamer argues, or do they serve to bolster the storytelling instinct that threaten to make our narratives a little too pat?