What Poetry Brings to Business

For some 15 years, roughly 1996 to 2010, poet David Whyte was the missionary of poetry to business. And he was a very specific kind of missionary for poetry, as the subtitle of his book The Heart Aroused suggests: “Poetry and the Preservation of the Corporate Soul in America.” For Whyte, poetry could be not only a compass and guide for business but also something more than that, perhaps even a way to do business or preserve its soul.

In 2010, Clare Morgan, director of the graduate writing center at the university of Oxford, published What Poetry Brings to Business, coauthored with Kirsten Lange and Ted Buswick of the Boston Consulting Group. Morgan’s book doesn’t actually challenge Whyte’s for preeminence; in fact, she doesn’t even mention him or The Heart Aroused. She’s English and he’s Welsh; in might be one of those intra-Britain rivalry things (although Whyte moved to America).

To continue reading, please see my post today at TweetSpeak Poetry.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

Can Poetry Save the Corporate Soul?

It was 1996. I was in a bookstore, likely the Barnes & Noble not far from my house. I spotted a small book with an unexpected title: The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America. The author, David Whyte, was a poet. His book wasn’t about how poetry might apply in the workplace, but how critically important poetry was if corporate America was to flourish and succeed.

Poetry?

I bought the book. I read it cover to cover. Three times. No book Published by man has had as profound an impact on my and how I understand the workplace as The Heart Aroused. “The poet needs the practicalities of making a living to test and temper the lyricism of insight and observation,” Whyte said. “The corporation needs the poet’s insight and powers of attention in order to weave the inner world of soul and creativity with the outer world of form and matter.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at TweetSpeak Poetry.

Strange and Familiar

Reading The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America by David Whyte has been a both familiar and a strange experience for me.

It was familiar in that I met some aspect of my own work experience and career on virtually every page.

It was strange in that I realized how common my own experience is – or that it’s common enough that Whyte could describe these experiences as common in corporate America.

The strangeness and the familiarity continue on the final chapter, “The Soul of the World.”  Whyte spoke to poetry, and the role poetry plays in the corporate workplace.

“Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat,” he says. “A true line acts like a lightning rod in a storm. All our doubts about the experience disappear in a flash as the accumulated change contained in the electric ripeness of the moment runs to earth. Just before we are struck, we may even feel, as in a true lightning storm, the hair rising on the back of the neck, as we realize ‘it’ is being said.”

What poetry can bridge is the separation of corporate life from “the soul of the world.” Corporate self-preoccupation can often become so great that it separates people from the realities of the world they live in. I might add that nowhere is this self-preoccupation greater than at a corporate headquarters.

I’ve seen poetry – or a kind of poetry – bridge the separation. I’ve described here a speech I wrote for an executive, who used a speech not only to bridge the company to the larger world but also his industry. Some two years later, there was another speech by another executive, this time the CEO, that did something similar, except it completed the process of moving the company outside of itself and position it in the larger world beyond.

And it happened by accident.

The CEO had already created something of a stir with an initiative to reduce air emissions at manufacturing plants – by 90 percent and in four years. But he was looking for something more, something greater and larger, something that would seize the attention of people inside and outside the company. A number of proposals had been studied and brought forward – but the price tags for all of them had created sticker shock (and there were the shareowners to consider).

At some point, I was brought into the process, given copies of all the proposals, and asked by the company’s senior environmental executive to see if there was a “soft path” to getting at what the CEO wanted, defined as significant but without the obvious costs attached to it. I was cautioned not to share what I was doing with anyone, including my own boss.

I wrote the speech. The conclusion was a summary of the speech using seven short but rhetorically related statements. It was meant to be a rousing kind of conclusion, with repetition and rather emotional language. I didn't think of it as a new company policy. I gave the draft to the environmental executive, and didn’t hear anything for several weeks.

And then the word came back. The CEO would give the speech in Washington, D.C. I was pressed back into service for editing and preparing additional documents that would be needed. A few additional people were brought into the information loop, but the speech was still being held very closely. (The concern was that, if existence of the speech became known, various internal people and groups would move to influence it in a “watering down” direction.) (Which turned out to be a well-founded concern, except it happened after the speech was given.)

The CEO gave the speech, and then all heck broke loose inside the company. Senior business executives were upset that significant commitments had been made on their behalf, with no opportunity for input. People responsible for regulatory compliance believed they had been cut out of the loop (they had). The finance people were concerned. Executives responsible for manufacturing were concerned.

Employees loved it.

The outpouring of support was amazing. The CEO was flooded with letters from employees all over the world (this was pre-email). More than that, employees began to do things. Native-plant prairies were established at three plant locations. Initiatives were started in local communities.

Outside the company, the reaction was profound. The head of a major environmental group distributed copies of the speech to thousands of people and groups across the U.S. Discussions at industry trade associations started, leading to new programs. Competitors adopted similar efforts (and gave similar speeches).

Those seven simple “rhetorical devices” became the company mission statement for the next decade, when they replaced by another, similar set of principles announced in – a speech. But that’s another story.

Poetry – of a sort – bridged the separation between the corporate workplace and the world described in The Heart Aroused. For a time, the soul of the company was entwined with the “soul of the world.” David Whyte would smile.

We've been reading The Heart Aroused over at TweetSpeak Poetry. This week concludes our discussion of the book.

Coleridge's Starlings

I have a job that scares a lot of people.

I’m responsible for online media for my company, specifically social media – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, the corporate blog and a few other related sites and activities.

If you’re not involved in social media, and sometimes even if you are, Twitter and Facebook can look like the Wild West, particularly if your company is involved in a lot of issues. You quickly learn that people will say anything and everything online – profanity and vile language are not uncommon. And people will repeat anything, even things they know aren’t rue. They will launch personal attacks; I was once called the “mouthpiece of Satan.”

Fortunately, there is far more online that is good and worthwhile than is bad. But it can appear to be chaos at times, a strange kind of chaos – chaos with direction, impetus and purpose. It is not unlike the huge flock of starlings that Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw in 1799 while traveling in a coach:

“the starlings drove along like smoke…misty…without volition—now a globe, now…a complete orb into an ellipse… and still it expands and condenses. Some moments glimmering and shivering, dim and shadowy, now thickening, deepening, blackening!”

David Whyte, in The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, says this image haunted Coleridge for the rest of his life.  And Whyte uses Coleridge’s observations and reactions to explore the order and chaos of the corporate workplace.

It’s odd to consider that chaos may be an integral part of corporate life, but it is. Whyte observes it well, and he describes how people working within corporations respond to it. Some deal with it directly; others go to extraordinary lengths to put it off and not deal with it, until disaster happens.

This chaos or darkness is not just corporate; it is also personal. Whyte suggests that one reason we avoid dealing with chaos in the corporate workplace is that it may force us to confront and deal with our own inner chaos.

Here is the interesting part: the chaos may not be ultimately controlled, but it can be dealt with, and that’s at both the corporate and personal levels.

Whyte to considerable lengths to explain chaos theory and his ideas around “strange attractors” or impages we can create to deal with the chaos. It’s interesting—but for me, it’s more the idea of a controlling principle or belief system that is centering: what you understand yourself to be, what your priorities are, what’s important and what truly matters. I sometimes use images to express those things, although not likely in the way meant by Whyte.

Whyte wrote this book almost 20 years ago. It’s still amazingly current (and an updated edition has been published). He has extraordinary insight into corporate life, what works and what doesn’t work. He quotes poet Vachel Lindsay:

The Leaden-Eyed

Let not young souls be smothered out before

They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.

It is the world’s sore crime its babes grow dull,

Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed,

Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly,

Not that they sow, but they seldom reap.

Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,

Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.

“Trying to run complex companies, big or small, by imperial command from the top down, may be the single most unnecessary burden carried by the corporate manager,” Whyte says. “Attempting something that is doomed to fail, they produce a manual of required responses covering all eventualities. Doing this, the system they are forced to employ becomes Byzantine and cumbersome. It also carries an implicit lack of trust in the essential elements of the system—people. Not only that, but hierarchal systems based on power emanating from the top cannot plan for the wild efflorescence of impossible events we call daily life.”

And what we see and hear are Coleridge’s starlings.

We’ve been discussing The Heart Aroused at TweetSpeak Poetry, and this week’s discussion covers chapters 7 (“Coleridge and Complexity”) and 8 (“The Soul of the World”). The discussion, led by Lyla Lindquist, will be posted Wednesday. I will have a final post on the book on Thursday.

Our next book discussion will be L.L. Barkat’s Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity and Writing, starting April 4. I reviewed it here last year. Consider joining the discussion—the fact that it’s a great book on writing is an added bonus.

Taking the Homeward Road

Somehow, I missed having a mid-life crisis. I don’t feel particularly deprived, but the fact is that the time of life when a lot of men seem to have a mid-life crisis – late 30s to the mid-40s – was bookended for me by two major career events.

The first was an extended period – from the time I was 37 to 45 – of almost incredible productivity and, for lack of a more humble word, achievement: speeches, national awards, game-changing programs implemented, and new technologies adopted. Looking back, I can see it was an amazing period of work.

The second bookend stretched from 45 to 48. Some of the achievement continued, but along came corporate turmoil, massive organizational and cultural change, being spun off with a separated business, and then, at the end of 1999, being laid off.

I spent the next four-and-a-half years not working within corporations. And that was by choice. I worked for myself for three-and-a-half of those years, and spent the final part of the time working for an urban school district in total crisis.

I did a lot of thinking.

I had a lot of time to think. As a consultant, I spent a lot of time in the car, traveling to and from my office to clients and meetings. One client was in north central Missouri, about a four-hour drive away from St. Louis, the last hour-and-a-half up a two-lane road. I had a lot of time to think.

“It may be,” writes David Whyte in The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, “that midlife is essentially a time of remembering what is most essential to us. We have spent years of building and consolidating – a business, a career, a family. Or we have attempted the sama dn failed to build anything. At the cusp of midlife, irrespective of success or failure, we now want to find out who was at the center of this attempt and what we were building for.”

What we do, Whyte says, and this largely describes what I did, is to take the old road back home, and we pass our younger self almost as a stranger, and then we keep going all the way back to before we set out. We may celebrate, and we may even mourn. “No matter what we have accomplished or what we command, midlife calls on us to experience it in a new way, to birth ourselves into a new kind of usefulness.”

For me, what happened was that I met the college student who read a lot of poetry. I met the 23-year-old who wanted to write novels. And I discovered the 50-year-old who had accomplished so much that, unintentionally and unknowingly, he often threatened the people he worked with.

What I learned, and kept learning, unfolded over a period of about 10 years. Even though my novel Dancing Priest is not at all autobiographical, it is indeed that, in a more deeply subtle way. I reread it (for only the second time) last week, and I found pieces of myself in nearly all of the characters. That was not intentional, but it was likely inevitable. The idea of the book was born in the turmoil of that time.

And the birthing “into a new kind of usefulness” continues. My writing is taking on a new kind of seriousness. Those “career” things which used to seem so vital and important are, well, less so.

Whyte concludes this “Taking the Homeward Road” chapter with part of a poem by T.S. Eliot, from “East Coker” in Four Quartets:

We must be still and still moving

into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

through the dark cold and the empty

         desolation.

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end

is my beginning.

That’s it. That's exactly it.

Led by Lyla Lindquist, we’re discussing The Heart Aroused over at TweetSpeak Poetry. My first  post on this week’s reading was Monday on chapter 5, “The Salmon of Knowledge.” Next week we’ll be covering the final two chapters of the book.

The Spear of Fionn

I had been a supervisor for all of two days. I had been given a small function (two people – Ron and Barbara). I was attending my first leadership team meeting – and I was full of all the idealism and plans of a first-time supervisor.

This meeting was a people review, and the first words my new boss said were, “Big Boss wants Ron fired.” There was a moment of silence, and then I asked why.

“He just isn’t up to snuff. He’s a weak player. And Big Boss didn’t like the job he did on the big team meeting. So he needs to go.”

Two former supervisors of Ron were sitting at the table. One said, “Oh, yeah, Ron has always been a problem.”

I then committed a corporate faux pas. “So why didn’t you do something about it when he reported to you?” I asked.

The truth was, I knew Ron was a problem. I’d known since I’d been on the team, for almost three years. Ron was overwhelmed by his job, and the new technology that was transforming it. Some things he did well; others he didn’t do at all. Even before I became his supervisor, he had spent a fair amount of time in my office complaining how the rest of the team didn’t “get” what he was trying to do. He complained to me because, a long time previously, I had done his job. Actually, I did his job and a lot more.

At the leadership meeting, I looked down the table at the Human Resources person, who hated this kinds of issues. “What are our options?” I asked.

Looking at my boss, she said, “Fire him.”

“So what has he been told in his performance reviews? What’s in his file that would justifu the company firing him?”

I knew the answer.

Nothing.

Most organizations don’t like telling people they’re not doing well. It can get messy. Youmay have to explain yourself, and have your facts lined up.

But in Ron’s case, there was nothing.

“I’m going to put him into the performance process,” I said, “We’ll do it for 90 days and see where we are at the end.”

The process – designed by HR (and what the HR rep should have recommended) – is for problem employees. It’s a planned program of milestones and learnings. It has to be thought through carefully, and aims to get the employee up to par or end in termination. It’s a pain for supervisors to do, which is why Ron’s previous supervisors hadn’t done it. I hadn’t done one before, but spent a few days learning how to do it and set the program up.

I was unwrapping the spear of Fionn.

In The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, David Whyte speaks of the myth of Fionn, the legendary greatest Irish poet, who is raised in hiding by two aunts in the woods of western Ireland. When a teenager, he meets the great bandit Call Mac Lara, who turns out to have been an adherent of Fionn’s father.

Call teaches Fionn all the cunning he knows – everything he knows – including about the spear, “a spear so given to the spitefulness of killing that it had to be tied to a tree and bound tightly with cloth.” The weapon is not to be used unless Fionn’s life is at stake.

Whyte likens the spear to a tool used (or not used) in corporate ethics. “Corporate ethics seems to swing between two extremes, on the one hand outright ruthless avarice, and on the other a reliance on bland and bloodless middle class ethics. The first one usually issues from the boardroom, the second from the Human Resources Department. One says the spear is to be used all the time or someone at some time will use it on you, while you’re not looking; the other denies its existence altogether and says we have only to work together and everything will be all right.”

The reality is that sometimes the spear has to be used. The parallel reality is that it should be used only sparingly.

Ron had largely failed in his job, but the organization and its leadership had also failed. That was why the situation had been tolerated – no one wanted to use the spear even though it was needed.

We did the performance process, which included weekly milestones and progress checks. At the end of the 90 days, Ron offered this assessment: “I did some things well, but the ones I know matter the most I didn’t do well at all. I just don’t get it.”

Two weeks later, I told Ron that we were letting him go with a severance package. He wasn’t happy about it, but he understood why.

I had used the spear of Fionn, and I quickly tied it back to the tree.

At TweetSpeak Poetry, we’re discussing David Whyte’s The Heart Aroused. Led by Lyla Lindquist, the discussion with links to other posts will post on Wednesday. My post today is on chapter 5, “The Salmon of Knowledge.” I will have a post Thursday on chapter 6, “Taking the Homeward Road.”

David Whyte’s “Fire in the Earth: Poems”

Over at TweetSpeak Poetry, we’ve been reading The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America. Not coincidentally, Whyte has a book of poems entitled Fire in the Earth (same title as chapter 3 of The Heart Aroused) that contains poetic renderings of much of what he covers in the book.

In fact, Fire in the Earth is a kind of workbook for The Heart Aroused, or perhaps The Heart Aroused is a kind of commentary on the poems. Either way, to read them together is to know and experience what Whyte is describing in the non-fiction work and what he is saying in the poems.

The volume is divided into four sections – Fire in the Body, Fire in the Voice (also a chapter title in The Heart Aroused), Fire in the Quiet and Fire in the Mountains. Each section contains poems that anticipate or amplify the ideas in his book.

In “The Husk of Your Voice” and all of the poems in the Fire in the Voice section, the poet explores the creativity of the human voice, more the spoken expression of the creativity in the soul:

The husk of your voice

is like a chrysalis

grown round something

hidden,

waiting to be born

and waiting for you

to stop.

What is inside

Want you to know itself fully

Before it is born…

“Whether or not we try to tell the truth,” Whyte says in The Heart Aroused, “the very act of speech is courageous because not matter what we say, we are revealed.”

This is what I find so personal about poetry – the writing of poetry is revealing to a greater extent than other kinds of writing, with the possible exception of the formal speech (and poetry and speeches are intimately related). Poetry and speeches are revealing, removing the disguises we often place in other forms of communications and expression.

The poems in Fire in the Earth are all of this, and more – a revealing of the depths of the soul from which creativity, and the creative urge, spring.

Related:

Fire in the Earth

Four poems inspired by Fire in the Earth

Fire in the Voice

The discussion at TweetSpeak Poetry

Fire in the Voice

I was all of 24 years old when I stumbled into speechwriting, the discipline that would shape my career for most of the next 35 years. I was working on a special project, a major issue facing the company, because I had just changed jobs and was the only person available to do it. Some months into the project, an executive needed a speech on the issue. I had never written for someone else, but I did it. It worked, and soon I was writing speeches.

Some years later, I became aware that no matter what else I might be doing, I was at heart a speechwriter. It’s a practice/profession/job that most communications people avoid for many reasons, not the least of which is that someone else always gets credit for your work.

But I liked it and enjoyed it. I liked learning how executives spoke and what mattered to them, the words they used and avoided (or needed to avoid), how their personalities and deepest hopes and fears would come slipping out of those outlines and speech texts and blossom into policies, programs, initiatives and programs. I liked playing with ideas and translating them into human speech.

I found myself often climbing into executives’ heads, which could be both joyful and discouraging (and often both at the same time). A speechwriting friend who was considerably older told me once that I would know I was doing my job right if only the executive’s spouse knew him or her better than I did, and that it was a power and influence to be used carefully and with sober judgment.

And while most of my work was helping executives find their voices, I discovered that speechwriting also helped me find my own voice.

Poet David Whyte would say that finding one’s voice, a familiar enough concept to writers, is also vitally important to anyone working in a corporate or organizational setting. Even a timid, tentative voice is important, for it is through that timidity that we can begin to learn “to treat the world or the organization as a mythological equal, a peer instead of a parent, a co-partner on the path instead of an all-powerful provider or persecutor.”

Is such a thing as equality even possible?

Not only is it possible, Whyte would say, but also necessary for the good of the individual and the organization. Even the “mouse” sounds of timid speech are important, Whyte says: “Without the compassionate understanding of the fear and trepidation that lie behind courageous speech, we are bound only to our arrogance.”

Writing for some 12 CEOs and dozens of other senior executives, I learned quickly which ones were the best to work for – the ones who had that compassionate understanding, who knew that truly courageous speech arises form humility.

We’re reading David Whyte’s The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America over at TweetSpeak Poetry. This week, we’re reading chapters three and four. My post on chapter three, “Fire in the Earth,” was Monday.

Related: 4 poems inspired by “Fire in the Earth.”

Fire in the Earth

A friend and I were talking about a perennial topic – how organizations seek to control the environments they operate in. Control is, at most, very limited; the 24-hour news cycle, te flood of social media, citizens journalism, and the increasing distrust of all institutions are only a few of the forces steadily dismantling the notion that organizations can control their worlds. The fact is, we can’t, if we ever could.

This desire for control remains strong, however. Promises to investors depend on it. And the desire for control is one reason why organizations both seek creativity and fear it. Creativity allows the organization to adapt to new and changing circumstances. But creativity is a two-edged sword – it also leads to change within the organization, upsetting status quos, challenging closely held assumptions and beliefs, and rendering sacred cows obsolete if not actually slaughtering them.

Creativity is like fire, and fire, says David Whyte in The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, contains two qualities simultaneously. Fire warms and nourishes, providing heat and light; it also consumes, acting as a “dance of energy that devours and sublimates the outworn.”

To avoid this “fear of fire,” and especially in the corporate workplace, Whyte says, we will take the path of ice “to freeze everything and everyone around us so that they cannot move or take light.” To control and secure, corporations tend to touch everything with a “bureaucratic hoarfrost.”

At times, I’ve felt like road kill on the path of ice. And yet as painful as it can be, it’s part of what creativity is about. You have to risk the vulnerability of pain and loss to crate something new and needed and powerful.

Oddly enough, this is also the source of joy in the workplace, Whyte says, and joy is rare. “the rare appearance of joy at work is so painfully exquisite that we may actually experience joy as a moment of terror…it means we are made more vulnerable to loss in a corporate culture where loss is the first bullet point on the important list of things not to be experienced.”

To know joy at work means we must know grief at work. Both happen; both are intimately connected so that the same things often bring both. Grief is not a risk of creativity; grief alongside joy is an inevitable outcome of creativity.

At Tweetspeak Poetry, we’re discussing David Whyte’s The Heart Aroused. This week we’re covering chapters three and four, led by Lyla Lindquist. Lyla’s discussion and links by others participating will be live on Wednesday. My post today covers chapter 3, “Fire in the Earth.” If I get really ambitious, I will have a post on chapter four, “Fire in the Voice,” later this week.

Healing the Heart: “The Heart Aroused,” Part 3

There is a scene in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf where the hero emerges from the swampy lake with the head of Grendl’s mother. His own sword being found useless, he first fights with his bare hands, and then discovers a sword in her lair, “an ancient heirloom from the days of the giants.” With this sword he slays the monster and cuts off her head and the head from Grendl’s corpse. But then he sees that the sword has been dissolved by her blood, leaving only the hilt.

David Whyte, in The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Corporate Soul in America, says this dissolved sword signifies two things.

First, that “as the enemy that has frightened us melts away, so does the requisite need for the weapon of attack.” It’s as if the weapon can be used once, and then it’s no longer needed; other battles will have to be fought with other weapons.

And second, that “we can never ultimately show to others exactly how we slew the monster.” We can tell the story, we can create elaborate accounts (like Beowulf) to try to describe what happened, but the battle with our individual monsters can really only be fought by ourselves. This may be the underlying reason by Beowulf fights Grendl and his mother by himself, while other warriors wait nearby (of course, it could be, too, that they were cowards.)

And then there’s the scene at the end, where the aged Beowulf fights one more battle, his last, with a dragon. He succeeds, and kills the beast, but he’s mortally wounded. This time, one young warrior, named Wiglaf, stands with him, while the others hide in the woods.

I find a strange kind of resonance with the scenes in the poem.

For some time, I’ve been regularly talking with a friend about an array of human issues – dealing with anger, how much we are shaped by our parents, how you recognize and break out of patterns of behavior – in short, how to heal your heart. After a considerable period of regular conversations, he told me that I was guarding my heart, that the defenses were significant, and that I needed to find a way to tear the defenses down and become more vulnerable.

To use literary terms, he was suggesting that I had to plunge into that lake and battle with Grendl and possibly Grendl’s mother. No one could tell me exactly how to do this; no one could arm me with the weapons that would be successful. Or perhaps it’s that dragon, and there is no guarantee of success or of escaping with some mortal or even temporal wound.

I think of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. He knows what he faces; he knows what he is about to plunge into and what is going to happen. His friends can’t even stay awake to pray with him, and before the night is over they will have all abandoned him.

Even when the hotheaded Peter raises his sword and strikes the servant, Jesus does something remarkable – he heals the servant’s ear. It is his last miracle before he dies, and he exhibits a tender vulnerability.

Is that the kind of vulnerability that is being asked of me? Is this what is needed to break down the guarded defenses and heal my heart, this tenderness, this vulnerability in the midst of upheaval, betrayal and certain death?

I suspect I know the answer.  

We’re discussing A Heart Aroused at TweetSpeak Poetry. The links went live yesterday, and I likely went overboard a bit by having three posts on what’s covered in the two chapters being discussed this week. I’ve had the book since it was published in 1994, read it and reread it, and referred to it numerous times in the succeeding 18 years. Among a handful of books I can name, it’s become a part of who I am.

This post is also submitted to Bonnie Gray's blog carnival at Faith Barista, where the prompt is "a heart-healing moment."

Related:

A Kind of Madness: The Heart Aroused, Part 1.

“Beowulf: A Management Guide – “The Heart Aroused,” Part 2.

"Beowulf:" The Management Guide – "The Heart Aroused," Part 2

For more than 40 years, I have had a relationship with Beowulf.

As a high school senior, our English textbook included two passages from the famous Anglo-Saxon poem – Beowulf’s fight with the monster Grendl and the death of Beowulf after the battle with the dragon at the end of the poem. In college, I took two semesters of English literature, and the Norton Anthology of English Literature (big fat textbook) included a bit more of the poem, but not much.

Then in 1989, author John Gardner published Grendl, telling the monster’s side of the story. I had been reading a lot of John Gardner’s fiction, and of course had to read Grendl as well. Five years later, I was reading David Whyte’s The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, and found Beowulf again in the second chapter. Six years after that, I was in a bookstore in New Orleans and saw a new translation of the poem by Nobel laureate and poet Seamus Heaney. I bought and read it.

In his introduction to his translation, Heaney, points out one more connection for me with the poem. The scholar who performed a kind of rescue of Beowulf from several decades of something amounting to literary deconstruction, and gave it its rightful place as a work of art, was none other than J.R.R. Tolkien.

At TweetSpeak Poetry, Lyla Lindquist is hosting a discussion of Whyte’s The Heart Aroused, and tomorrow will be covering chapters 1 and 2, which includes Beowulf. Whyte subtitles the chapter “Power and Vulnerability in the Workplace,” and draws a number of management lessons from the story of the poem:

·         To achieve something important in the workplace, you sometimes have to go to those “dark regions” of the human soul, where you not only find creativity but also your fears and phobias.

·         For the things that truly matter, the outcome of the battle is usually in doubt. Victory and success are not foregone conclusions. And the price of success involves a real cost.

·         Sometimes what you think are problems (represented by Grendl) turn out to be only symptoms of larger problems (represented by Grendl’s mother).

·         And most people don’t have the heart for the battle. Many times you will be alone.

I reread the Heaney translation of Beowulf this past weekend. It is an easy translation to read, even with all the Angle-Saxon names. What surprised me was that the accounts of the fights between Beowulf and Grendl and Beowulf and Grendl’s mother are actually rather short. In fact, most of the poem is “back story” – the history of the Geats and the Danes, the family connections and rivalries, and old battle stories. A poet and a singer have their parts, and there is a considerable amount of boasting by the main characters, which is rather jarring to contemporary sensibilities. But this is all important to the story, or to the story in the way it was told in 8^th or 9^th  centuries (some argue for later) when the poem was first composed.

I would add another “management lesson” to the list developed by White, another lesson of the poem: : we spend far more time worrying and fretting about our fears than what it required to confront them and deal with them.

For me, one of the most moving parts of the entire work is the speech by Hrothgar, king of Denmark, when he warns Beowulf of the perils of power:

O flower of warriors, beware of that trap.

Choose, dear Beowulf, the better part,

eternal rewards. Don not give way to pride.

For a brief time while your strength is in bloom

but it fades quickly; and soon there will follow

illness or the sword to lay you low,

or a sudden fire or surge of water

or jabbing blade or javelin from the air

or repellant age. Your piercing eye

will dim and darken; and death will arrive,

dear warrior, to sweep you away.

Focus on what matters, Horthgar says; focus on the eternal things, the things that matter to God. That is what has lasting value.

We’re discussing A Heart Aroused at TweetSpeak Poetry. The prompt for the discussion can be found here, and the links will officially live on Wednesday at TweetSpeak. I will have a third and final post on these two chapters on Thursday.

Related:

A Kind of Madness: The Heart Aroused, Part 1.

Some resources for the study of Beowulf from Greene Hamlet.

The entry for Beowulf at Wikipedia.

A Kind of Madness: "The Heart Aroused," Part 1

I first read David Whyte’s The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America when it was first published in 1994. I was occupying one of those “high watermarks” in my career, having helped create an environmental revolution in the chemical industry; writing speeches for a CEO whose words were recognized, admired, quoted and reprinted; successfully undertaken the transition of employee communications to new electronic technology; and preparing to create the company’s first web site – one of the first corporate web sites in the manufacturing industry.

I read The Heart Aroused, and I remember the shock of recognition, and even a sudden chill. With my team, I had gone through an incredible burst of creativity, and it had helped to unleash profound change within the company and within our industry. But alongside that creativity was a growing feelings that people, processes and the status quo were being threatened.

We launched the corporate web site. One of its most popular features was a weekly cartoon (which back then took forever to load on the computer). It humanized the company in a way nothing else quite could. Employees loved it. Human Resources didn’t.

The CEO retired about the time we launched the site, and it was sooner than expected. His successor, like new CEOS like to do, started making changes. The changes to the business weren’t that unusual, but within five years they led to the company being split, merged and acquired. But the changes to internal management and the management of people became an all-out assault on the company culture.

What came was a kind of madness.

Staff functions were reorganized into the latest business fad – shared services. Staff functions were expected to be profit centers, selling their services to the business units. To my knowledge, only one team managed to succeed – mine. We hired a PR firm to teach us how to be a PR firm. I had to go out and sell, which I did. I will not forget the expression on my boss’s face when I told him I had sold enough business to cover the cost of my team and to hire five additional people.

We were successful; most teams weren’t. The reorganization created significant chaos, and a lot of work simply stopped. The concept was finally abandoned when the CEO decided to spin off a significant portion of the company. As that was planned, some of the most bizarre corporate behavior I had ever experienced was occurring.

Imagine 300 senior executives at a retreat, directed by a consultant to sit on the floor to play a game with Legos.

Imagine spirit teams wandering the corridors, looking for people to celebrate and sing to.

Imagine a room set aside in the executive office building for meditation, opening to any and all employees but you needed to bring your own meditation pillow.

Imagine people being paid as full-time employees to lead a one-hour discussion a week on novels.

Imagine people being told to work on whatever they found interesting – even if it was someone else’s job and responsibility.

Imagine a decision to eliminate the corporate archives, because someone wanted the physical space the archives occupied.

Imagine a corporate speechwriter telling a secretary to get the vice chairman out of a meeting so the archives could be saved. Imagine that speechwriter – in his business suit – climbing into a large dumpster to rescue archived photo files that had already been trashed.

Whyte’s book helped me make sense of what was happening. The changes did unleash a lot of creativity, but they also unleashed something Whyte talks about in his book – the darkness where creativity lives. Because with creativity come our fears and phobias.

The company eventually split, merged and was acquired. The madness (and those singing spirit teams) came to an end. There had been a lot of creative destruction, accompanied by a lot of destruction of creativity.

I found myself washed up on the shore of the spun-off company, and two years later washed up on the shore of a downsizing. Like a lot of other people, I learned that cultural change can also be matched by utterly ruthless people grabbing what they want and prevailing, even if for a short time.

Many of the really good, creative things my team had done were destroyed. A few things (like the archives) were saved. Other things did outlast our version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Surrounded by chaos, fear, ruthlessness, meanness, and a few examples of heroism, I was forced to confront and define what was important to me. I would turn away from corporate life for almost five years. In the middle of that period, I started envisioning a story – a story that became a manuscript and finally a published novel.

But the creativity that could have been utilized in a corporate context was channeled in another direction.

On Wednesday at TweetSpeak Poetry, Lyla Lindquist will begin a weekly discussion of David Whyte’s The Heart Aroused. You can read the prompt here. Because of the importance the book has played in my own career and development, I will have three posts this week: this introduction today, a post on Beowulf on Tuesday; and a meditation on the heart on Thursday.

This post is also being submitted to the One Word Blog Carnival hosted by Peter Pollock. The word for this carnival is madness, and the links will be live on Tuesday.