Book Review: If Harry Potter Ran General Electric, by Tom Morris

I just finished this book too, and I have to say, it had a lot more to it than I was expecting.  Despite the current irony of lauding General Electric (who allegedly failed to pay their taxes in 2010) as a model for other businesses, the associations Morris makes between principles of ethical leadership and the world of Harry Potter are actually quite insightful, and more importantly, accessible to today's budding leader. 

Morris takes a philosophical approach to the most common problems of leadership and outlines the first leg of his project using a comparison between Aristotle and Albus Dumbledore, illustrating how the latter lives out the virtue ethics of the former in his own leadership at Hogwarts School.  Dumbledore is an Aristotelian "good" person to his very core, and opening the book with this parallel serves the purpose of pulling the reader into a discussion of how the tenets of Aristotle's virtue can be applied to "real-world" scenarios involving the students of magic we all know and love. 

Most of the book's remainder is dedicated to showing the many ways Harry Potter is a successful leader among his magical peers.  We get a look at how Harry embodies and lives many of the virtues praised by the ancient philosophers as well as modern ethicists, and we also get to see instances where Harry breaks away in some manner from the traditional approach, as well as how each of those situations works out for him and his friends.

Harry is shown to be an aspiring leader with genuine potential, but also a young man who remains prone to the same mistakes we all make in our daily lives.  Morris commends him for his seemingly limitless courage in the face of peril (which only gets more impressive in the seventh installment, which was unpublished at the time of this book's release), but he also warns the reader of caution in those situations when they, like Harry, might be tempted to allow their emotions to rule and perhaps cloud their judgment.  Having two co-pilots in Ron and Hermione is perhaps Harry's greatest strength, because they each bring to the table those strengths which he lacks. 

Overall, Morris' book provides a manual for leaders (in any realm, not just the business world), as well as a fresh lens through which we can examine this beloved book series and the characters who populate its world.  I have recommended it to the staff I'll be training for next year (we'll see if they actually give it a chance), and I recommend it to anyone who's interested in the lessons they can learn from such a seemingly unexpected source.