Almost exactly a year before the door to academia opened for me, I closed the door of the psychiatric ward behind me. It was 4 weeks after my son's birth, 3 weeks after finding out for myself what the meaning of psychotic is and what still to this day can happen behind closed doors when people in authority can exercise control over patients that have lost theirs.
In Crucibles of Leadership, Bennis & Thomas (2002) don’t just normalise trauma as the thing we have in common, they also argue for its numerous merits in terms of advancing leadership capacity. They are not alone. Brown (2018) insists that transformation is what happens when leaders begin to share their true stories. Using personal adversity as the backstory, I develop an argument for management scholars to take a more personal stance towards research and teaching, thereby generating and passing on more transformational management insights. Losing my mind amongst other things, might have indeed prepared me well for a professional life that is dedicated to the quest for new knowledge. I examine the necessity of more openly discussing hard-earned and painful lessons in professional settings to allow hardship and accompanying personal growth to shape the nature of our scientific advances. This line of argumentation does not aim to suggest the management scholars of the future should sit in a circle and discuss their sorry upbringing. Instead, it is about professionalizing conversations that deal with life’s challenges by making them safe and effective.
Imagine the intellectual elite integrated its fragility with its brilliance? If management science learnt to combine its wisdom gained through adversity with its cognitive ability, I wonder how the boundaries of knowledge could be forever altered. After all, what good is knowledge if not met by compassion for the self and others?