I’m not a businessperson, but I do believe that the humanities—if properly taught—could offer a great deal to businesspeople. By reading, people can become more aware and acquire a broader range of sensibility. But I disagree that the study of literature will make businesspeople more moral. I’ve been intimately acquainted with poets and novelists and literary critics all my life—people who have had the subtlest and most comprehensive consciousness—and they are some of the greatest scoundrels I have ever met. Moreover, I am very unhappy with any attempt to put the humanities, and literature in particular, in the service of social change.

2/ The editorial quotes several HBR staff for their literature recommendations, which include William Blake, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, and Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” I’m not sure what this does to the idea that businesspeople “must be plainspoken in order to be successful,” but it certainly wouldn’t seem to endorse it.
3/ I think there’s a fair case to be made that the author of the shocking statement Christian quotes (”Because literature concerns itself with the ambiguities of the human condition, it stands as a threat to the vitality of the business executive, who must at all times maintain a bias toward action”), which comes from the mouth of Nick Carr, was uttered with a healthy dose of sarcasm directed at those who would seek “a bias toward action.” This is a man who is, after all, a writer. Moreover, he’s a writer who has an M.A. in Literature from Harvard, who knows enough about poetry to say, “I didn’t think it was possible to write a great poem about rock n roll, but Paul Muldoon proves me wrong with Sillyhow Stride, his elegy for Warren Zevon,” and who can say, without irony:

Just as things that should be short shouldn’t be made long, things that should be long shouldn’t be made short. Many of man’s greatest works demand and deserve extended, steady attention. They can’t be boiled down. They can’t be snippetized, widgetized, or otherwise turned into bite-sized morsels. You can’t compress culture into a Zip file.

And finally, he’s a person who could answer the question, “Is the internet good for writers?” by saying,

It seems to turn on how you view writing. If you see it as a utilitarian information-delivery vehicle, then the net’s boffo. If you see it as a craft that’s as much an end as a means, then the net’s a curse.

Granted that none of these are dispositive, it still seems to me likely that Carr was having a little fun at the expense of the people he spends most of his days writing about.
Am I the only one who fears that the price of all this lofty anti-capitalist dudgeon will be our god-given irony? I still think the best satire on capitalism ever produced is William Gaddis’s novel J R, but I am chastened to recall that Gaddis was a true believer in at least the possibilities of capitalism.