Some Thursday Readings

Murders for the New Year – Jeremy Black at The Critic Magazine. 

The Genius of John Dickson Carr – Rian Johnson at CrimeReads.

 

Blake Reconsidered – Julia Friedman at New Criterion on the exhibition at the Getty Center.

 

How an Obsession with Art Crime Became a Thriller – Jonathan Santlofer at CrimeReads.

 

Santiago – poem by David Whyte.

Painting: Poet and artist William Blake.

Poets and Poems: David Whyte and “The Bell and the Blackbird”

David Whyte is my unexpected workplace godfather.

Whyte, a poet, consultant, speaker, and even tour guide, published a book in 1996 called The Heart Aroused : Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America. He asked a question that no one else was asking at the time: can poetry save the corporate soul?

My experience at the time was workplace convulsion after workplace convulsion, the bad and the good of the old ways swept out replaced by what was often and only the bizarre. And I mean bizarre – meditation rooms (bring your own pillow), senior executives playing with Legos, wandering minstrel and choral groups serenading employees in their offices, self-directed employees (like the one who decided a great job was to read novels for seven hours a day and teach them for an hour at lunch in the corporate cafeteria). 

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

It’s Poetry at Work Day 2017! Join with Us to Celebrate!

It’s Poetry at Work Day 2017.

And I have a confession.

This is now the fourth year that Tweetspeak Poetry has sponsored Poetry at Work Day. I’ve written about it and celebrated it. I wrote a book called Poetry at Work.

My confession: associating poetry with work still sounds strange to me.

The first connection between poetry and work was made for me. I was part of the speechwriting team at my company, and a friend gave me three poetry collections, “You can’t write speeches unless you know T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and Wallace Stevens,” he said. These three great modern poets helped shape not only poetry and literature but also speechwriting.

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

The Business Books That Have Most Influenced Me

Over the years, I probably have read most of the self-help books that have taken the business world by storm. Speechwriters were almost required to do this, if for nothing else than finding a topical quote to use in an executive’s speech. In Search of Excellence. Who Moved My Cheese? The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The One Minute Manager. Reengineering the Corporation. Crucial Conversations. The Tipping Point. On Management. First, Break All the Rules. Made to Stick.

Many of these books had interesting ideas. However, the impact on me was nil, or close to nil.

But I did read books that changed my day-to-day work, transformed my work life, and made me think about work in a completely different way.

Most of them weren’t actually business books, however, or what we think of as business books. Many were about communication, which is no surprise because that’s the field I’ve worked in for my entire career. Some were academic works. Others weren’t.

Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (first published in 1964) is the source of the famous, almost clichéd statement “the medium is the message.” What that means is that the medium is as important as the message; some media are better for some kinds of communications than others. In this contemporary culture of the mania for “message points,” no one remembers what McLuhan said about the media themselves.

Eloquence in the Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking by Kathleen Hall Jamieson (1988) came at the mid-point of my speechwriting career. Jamieson’s focus was politics, and how the television sound bite had transformed political speech (and by extension, corporate speech). She did not see this as a good thing. She was right. Look at Washignton, D.C., where discourse has become all but impossible.

Poet David Whyte published two books that approximate “business books” – The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Corporate Soul in America (1994) and Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity (2001) that had an enormous impact on how I thought about work, and what I understood work to be. (I also like his poetry.)

Walter Ong was a Jesuit priest who taught at St. Louis University. In 1982, he published Orality and Literacy, which in a sense continued the discussion started by McLuhan but broadened it to what was happening in human communication generally. I didn’t read the book until the mid-1990s, in the throes of just having started a (revolutionary-at-the-time) email newsletter and the company’s first web site. Ong helped me understand why I seemed to intuitively grasp electronic communication – it’s closer to an oral culture than a print culture (words encouraging to a speechwriter).

The late Neil Postman wrote two books that served as serious warnings in the rush to all things electronic: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1987) and Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1993). He wrote a number of other works as well (all of which I read) but these two provided the watch outs for embracing the internet and (later) social media.

More recently, and one closer to a traditional business book, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith published Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation and Earn Trust (2009). It shaped my entire approach at work to using social media. It still does.

Other books had an influence, but none like these eight. I still go back and read highlighted sections. And I remain surprised at how up-to-date they’ve remained.

Over at The High Calling, Jennifer Dukes-Lee is asking for what business books have influenced you the most. Check The High Calling to see what others are saying.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

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.”