Why poetry and business together?

A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

– Salman Rushdie

 

This blog is about poetry, innovations, creativity and business. And you wonder how can we merge all that in one? My first encounter with poetry was in my second grade when I wrote a poem called “Spring” that was also published in the local school paper. Nobody taught me how to write poems. It simply came naturally. Then, for a couple of years, poetry wasn’t that predominant in my life until first teenage loves came and poetry was a great tool to pour out all of those heartaches and other lavish feelings. But when I think more deeply, poetry was somehow always present in my learning process. I remember especially in my graduate years, while I studied geophysics, I had a subject called Historical Geology where you need to memorize a huge geological time scale, paleontological terms, fossils -and I used rhyme to do that. It made it so much easier.

Then, for my graduation project I was offered to do something related to bio-magnetism – how we can use permanent magnets in medicine for healing purposes. How that relates to geophysics? At first sight it doesn’t but certain principles of geomagnetism we can apply in bio-magnetism processes – but you need to think unconventionally and out of your comfort zone. The project resulted in the application of developed methodology in sense how we can use small magnets as a mean of non-invasive, healing tool in medicine, which was soon afterwards patented.

So my first working experience was dealing with innovation process and patents. Observing world from poetic point of view, gave me confidence to deal with uncertainty, unknown, to let my scientific spirit free so to speak. Later in my teaching process, it helped me develop variety of innovative learning tools to increase imagination and problem solving capabilities in students.

Poetry is fascinating as it helps us get in touch more with our feelings, gives us different perspective on the world around us; we become more receptive of other people’s needs, more empathetic. We learn to train our mind to think more creatively and derive complex situations into more simple structures. No matter how rational and straightforward management and businesses are, reading and writing poetry can help us speed up innovation process and can increase leadership qualities. It ignites our imagination in so many different ways. So stick around as in this blog I will explore all these possibilities and how we can use the beauty of poetry and other arts for improving creative and innovation skills.

Work without hope by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair –
The bees are stirring -birds are on the wing –
And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.