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CRN 24123
MGT 06312, section 2
Thursday Evenings 6:30pm to 9:15pm
Business 204
​Physical Presence Optional
Students who are Non-Matriculated: please find instructions for how to register for the course here.

Course Description

This course is designed to leave students actually being leaders and exercising leadership effectively in those areas of life that matter most.
  • The first part of the course provides students with access to mastering the four foundational elements on which being a leader and the effective exercise of leadership is built.
  • The second part enables students to create for themselves a contextual framework for leader and leadership that gives them the being and actions of a leader.
  • The third part allows students to examine and create access to those perceptual and functional constraints common to all human beings that get in the way of being a leader and exercising leadership as their natural self-expression.
Either individually or in teams, students will propose, plan, and execute a leadership project during the course of the semester, which project will require written and spoken communication with those relevant parties whose participation is essential to the success of the leadership project.

How the course is taught: Ontological Inquiry

The promise of the course is that students leave actually being leaders and exercising leadership effectively in their lives. Delivering on this promise is possible because of the distinctive approach we will take together: the approach I will take to teaching, and the one you will take to discovery.
​The technical term for this approach is "ontological inquiry," an approach that involves looking carefully and deeply at who we are--what it means to be the human beings we are--and then exploring what is possible for ourselves beyond the limits and constraints bound up with the way we wound up being.

And so in this course we will examine our inherited understandings of what it means to be a leader, and ultimately invent new possibilities for leadership, which each of you will practice "on the court" with a specific leadership project you create for yourself. ​

The Leadership Project

Any leadership project exists as a leadership project because there is a concern to be fulfilled. As we use the term concern, we mean “a matter of fundamental interest or importance.” We do not mean something "worried about." Note that, when there is (or could be if looked for) a clear-cut pathway to fulfilling a concern, while it may require competent management to fulfill, it does not require leadership.

In short, the genesis of any true leadership project is a concern to be fulfilled. Or saying the same thing in another way, leadership projects are born out of some matter of fundamental interest or importance, the fulfillment of which, you take on. Your Course Leadership Project will come from a concern you have (or that another or others may have), the fulfillment of which you will take on.
Reading #3, page 1
Given the open-ended nature of the leadership project, you will be encouraged to generate, propose, and get into action toward fulfilling a project most attuned to your professional, private, and/or civic commitments. The promise of any such project is for you to fulfill, or contribute to fulfilling your concerns as well as the concerns of the relevant parties.

Any such project will likely call for varying degrees of publicly engaged scholarship—moving beyond the university to collaborate with community, business, or institutional partners to generate rather than merely consume knowledge—to produce real-world impact.

For instance, some projects may be personal and local, while others may be public and global; some may involve building community to enact social justice, while others may connect product designs to businesses who can produce, market, and distribute; some may involve personal campaigns to land coveted summer internships, while others might call for engaging in local, state, or national politics; some may seek to alter public spaces through art installations, while others might be organized around producing a film that both entertains and impacts a world-wide audience. You may or may not succeed in fulfilling your leadership project: the point of the leadership project is to get yourself "on the court," so that we might apply the contextual framework for leadership offered by this course to the set of conditions you are dealing with. 

The deliverables for the course will include:
  1. Low stakes journaling in response to course readings and lecture/discussion as well as actions taken and the results produced;
  2. A leadership project proposal;
  3. A concluding display of the leadership project, including a critical reflection on the written and spoken communications with the relevant parties.

​Taught by Rowan Writing Arts Professor Dr. Drew Kopp

One of Dr. Kopp's trajectories of research explores the practice of ontological inquiry, its implementation in the development of curricula in higher education, and the role such inquiry plays in transforming understanding of the self and the world, as well as the impact of such transformations on what it means to be in the world rhetorically.

One outcome of this trajectory is his book, co-authored with Bruce Hyde, entitled Speaking Being: Werner Erhard, Martin Heidegger, and a New Possibility of Being Human, which presents and explores a particular expression of ontological inquiry developed by thinker and entrepreneur Werner Erhard, who is also one of the chief authors of the Being a Leader and the Effective Exercise of Leadership course.