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Can poetry help you become a better strategist?
You have to be fast on your feet and adaptive or else a strategy is useless.
– Charles de Gaulle
Strategic thinking at its core is a careful planning process where project or business idea is directed in such a way that it has a greater chance for successful, desired outcome. It usually applies innovation, especially in the operational processes.
It’s true we can learn a lot from our past experiences, but we shouldn’t build our future strategic foundation merely on that, but rather considering how to create a value for customers, long-term contribution. And strategic planning helps us analyze and put in perspective the “how” and “when” in our business applications. It requires a dose of creativity and innovation where mixed with our current knowledge is a winning formula for successful strategy. It serves us as a framework for decision making – namely about direction of the business and resource utilization.
This is about strategic thinking seen form a managerial point of view. But what happens on the more subtle levels, when we try to conceive new strategy, innovative approach to an old problem?
C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel suggest in one of their papers that in order to be a successful strategic thinker, you must be aware of the competitive environment, have grasp of the future and be able to motivate others to practically do the same: share the view of the big picture.
In the article “How strategists really think” Giovanni Gavetti and Jan W. Rivkin argue that the reasoning by analogy plays a crucial role in the successful strategic thinking. In the example they’ve given in the paper, you will see how Intel chairman Andy Grove came up with an important business strategy:
In the 1970s, upstart minimills established themselves in the steel business by making cheap concrete-reinforcing bars known as rebar. Established players like U.S. Steel ceded the low end of the business to them, but deeply regretted that decision when the minimills crept into higher-end products. Andy Grove, seized on the steel analogy, referring to cheap PCs as “digital rebar.” The lesson was clear and Intel soon began to promote its low-end Celeron processor more aggressively to makers and buyers of inexpensive PCs.
Our brain frequently uses metaphors in order to compare experiences, make choices, decisions, exclude or include certain things from desired experience – somehow it guides our conclusive thinking. In our minds we form one set of conditions analogous to another from which we derive great idea for action.
The mind of a good strategist needs to have an intellectual flexibility, a sort of adaptation mode which enables him to come up with the best possible solutions to challenging situations. It’s interesting that by reading poetic metaphors, using them for better understanding of the world around us we enhance our own capabilities of envisioning possible scenarios in every given situation; it helps us train our thinking in a way that from the given conditioning we can set the course of future development in the most favorable direction for us.
And as Emily Dickinson pointed in her poem Life:
The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.
The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.
What poetry can teach us about business ethics?
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.
These verses are from R. Frost’s poem “Nothing gold can stay”. At first 
sight it might has nothing to do with the world of business – hence, even when I first read it, it made me think in what kind of business world we live in. Most people see the connection between business and poetry in the realm of advertising, and are very skeptical to notions that there might be something deeper. In my opinion, if we just let ourselves go beyond superficial view of poetry – it can actually motivate us to find the meaning in ambiguity.
Poet is not trying to explain or justify anything. He offers you to see the world with his eyes, but the experience and the understanding is only yours. He takes you on the journey of self-exploration. Just as with the poem written above. Reading the poem, reminded me of the transitory quality of life: sometimes we are so allured to run after wrong values; all our activities mainly oriented towards making more profit that we literally forget that the gold is not everything that shines: quite the opposite “nature’s first green is gold”. And nature’s real green is very hard to recognize as due to pollution, smog, too much concrete in our immediate environment, busy lives we don’t have time to see and enjoy real treasures in life.
Or “The moment” by Margaret Atwood:
The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,
is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can’t breathe.
No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.
She is not here dealing with any facts. She doesn’t tell you how many acres of rainforests have been devastated. She doesn’t argue about the amount of plastic bags found in the oceans that are killing our marine wild life. But focusing only on business and material gain, pretending that we are the governors of the nature around us and that we need to subjugate other beings are not the values we should emphasize. We are integral part of nature. And nature should be integral part of our business endeavors: not by killing and polluting but rather working in accordance with natural laws, fostering any life – no matter how minuscule. The awareness we have is our advantage and we could use it in a way that we can contribute beyond ourselves, beyond profit, beyond corporate expansion. After all, we are just visitors and we can choose what is going to be our legacy that we leave behind.
Reading poetry stimulates specific way of thinking which is vitally important to addressing world’s economic, political and social issues. It can broaden our views, help us recognize wider societal needs and gaps where our qualities can be fully utilized. Especially in entrepreneurship, when difficult and unpleasant decisions needs to be made – is it going to be mainly about the profit or entrepreneurial contribution is going beyond that?
Excercise your creativity through poetry, part I
Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found.”
— James Russell Lowell
This post will not be reflective as the previous one, but rather fun and entertaining (I hope 😉 )
I ‘ve always been fascinated by the facts how mind works and its cr
eative processes. Words and language are the tools we mostly use to express ourselves and it comes so naturally to us. In the same fashion, I believe that words and language can be our igniting spark to initiate creative thinking. And what about using words and language in different, innovative way? It can be beneficial for us in any case of creative process and problem solving. So here today I will share some of my ideas and little exercises I practice to start creative juices flowing.
React to given act
Remember Newton’s Third Law in physics? Every action has a reaction. That’s simply how Universe works. Thus, use the following statements to imagine a dramatic situation – express emotions, describe scenery, what each of your senses feel and try to write your story or poem. It’s a refreshing activity and your untamed imagination and power of visualization will move your creativity in positive direction.
Example statements:
You woke up alone, hurt and wet on the sand beach. What happend to you?
You heard a noise on the stairs, behind the closed door. What made that noise?
A smiling child runs into you. How do you react?
A crowd has gathered below your window. What do they want?
You are in the unknown country: nobody speaks your language, nobody understands you. How do you communicate?
The moment
Whenever you feel lack of inspiration, go back to some pleasant moment in life – something nice that you experienced for first time like first bike ride, first swim, first love, hanging out with friends, moments from your travel: those special events in your life can be an inexhaustible source of emotions for a touching poem. Re-living the moments again reconnects you with your true nature and helps you get that intensity you need to move forward with your thinking and creativity.
Acrostic alphabet
Write a poem, where the first letter of the verse in the poem spells out a word you choose, subject, message. You can go even further: write a poem where each starting letter of the line is a consecutive letter of the alphabet, from a to z.
In poetry it is called acrostic technique and poets frequetly use it while experimenting with their own writing.
Below is an example I did using acrostic technique:
Acrostic allowed animated alignment:
Bright blue bird borrows beatiful barn
“C’mere!” – Coherently cried crow, crawling cowardly!
—
Windy waves widely warned
X-rated xylophone:
“Yuck”- yawned yak
Zoological zodiac zen.
It’s funny what can really come out – no matter how quirky it might look and sound. Fun and humor are those additional spices that make the process of creativity even more enjoyable!
And when questions like what…? and how..? begin to bother you, remember the answer below:
O Me ! O Life! by Walt Whitman
O ME! O life!… of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the
foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I,
and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the
struggle ever renew’d;
Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see
around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me
intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O
life?
Answer.
That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.
Poetry and Creativity: crucial blocks in building leadership qualities
To lead people, walk behind them.
– Lao Tzu
Success and power can easily hinder our good intentions, making our egos rise like skyscrapers and constantly generate that insatiable need for more. Many of those who fall into this trap, simply never look back, who they are leaving behind, creating unbridgeable gap between themselves as a “leader” and their peers.
But it has never become more clearly as in nowadays modern organizational structures that a good leader cannot be someone who imposes false authority: leader needs to inspire, guide, set an example for other coworkers. A good leader needs to have and foster a dynamic personality, be able to seize the opportunity, recognize talent and bring the best out of people.
I usually think of good leaders as magnificent puzzle solvers: they have that ability to utilize available human resources and reorganize their team in such way that each problem/situation can be managed – like solving the puzzle.
Now, how that relates to poetry?
Poetry can awaken those subtle human qualities that we need to develop in order to become good leaders. It helps us live and understand human experience which is a crucial part of creative process: taste of life and our perspective of the world motivate us to generate more ideas and innovative solutions.
Organizational life can be draining and sometimes makes us hardly cope with everyday activities. Poetry reconnects us with those forgotten parts – instead of just surviving the working week, it can help us remember who we are and how to thrive, focusing on our best qualities.
In my opinion there is a quite similarity between leaders and poets. Leaders just as poets initiate thoughts and conversation about ideas, causes, motivation and engagement. Both poets and leaders have that ability to touch our souls, minds and connect us on the most intricate levels.
Our world is too complex with overlapping issues and processes: poetry has that magical ability to simplify things and life in general. In other words, reading and writing poetry can support any leader to better conceptualize the world and communicate it.
Furthermore, poem can provide wisdom and insight in the most difficult times. I hope that poem below will inspire your work, persistence and help you seize your value in every team, every relationship, every situation:
Focused Effort Prevails by Henry W. Longfellow
The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
We have not wings, we cannot soar;
But we have feet to scale and climb,
By slow degrees, by more and more,
The cloudy summit of our time.
A Poem by Rudyard Kipling
For all those days when your feel insecure, discouraged or even lost;
For all those days when disbelief starts to bite you inside and every idea, every step you take seems pointless – read the verses below:
If
…you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build’em up with worn-out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a [Founder], my son!
-Rudyard Kipling, 1895
Poetry and storytelling: part I
No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.
-Lewis Carroll
In these series of posts “Poetry and Storytelling” I will try to explore possibilities of using poetry as a tool for effective way of storytelling, especially for entrepreneurs and small businesses.
On the one hand entrepreneur as a storyteller and entrepreneur story as a cultural phenomena is already intrinsically established in the group consciousness (especially within the emerging social media networks), yet poetry as a narrative technique and genre is rarely considered as a mean of explaining entrepreneurial journey.
Through literature we can find a lot of evidence where entrepreneurial skills, behavior and entrepreneur’s relationship with the world comes in the form of narrative fables like picaresque tales which McKenzie, B (2002) in “Understanding Entrepreneurship: A Definition and Model Based on Economic Activity and the Pursuit of Self-Identity”, so beautifully demonstrated. The study describes the use of oral narrative by entrepreneurs to exchange important information and induces a new definition of entrepreneurship: an economic activity undertaken by social individuals in their pursuit of self-identity.
O’Connor, E., in the paper “Storied Business: Typology, intertextuality, and traffic in entrepreneurial narrative”, states that “entrepreneur needs to be a storyteller”, an ‘epic hero’, capable of offering emotional connection to his audience, a character with whom audience can identify with, rejoice, suffer, celebrate, fail – simply experience everything. In other words, successful entrepreneur is giving tangible experience through his business story and that’s what makes his story and business alive. Use of mythology, eulogy, metaphor, epic and fairytales, permeated with humor and sudden twists is a winning recipe for a business story that captures attention.
Rationalists, wearing square hats by Wallace Stevens
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses—
As for example, the ellipse of the half-moon-
Rationalists would wear sombreros.
These verses clearly signify the importance of creativity as an entrepreneurial skill. Words are empowering and encourage us to think “outside the box”, outside our limited senses and borders given by societal norms.
This poem in particular was used by Price Waterhouse Management Consultants in an advertisement (Sunday Times, 22.10. ’95) to attract open-minded (entrepreneurial) individuals with creative abilities, ready to question and challenge everything that is predefined and ordinary.
Poetry evokes emotions, stimulates thinking and inspiration. In the posts to come, I will further research how successful entrepreneurs have used poetry to communicate their business ideas.
Organize your own creativity workshop!
There are few simple, yet effective exercises that we can apply and practice in our daily routine which will help us to cultivate that creativity spark and productive flow.
But first do some preparations:
Make time
One of the first key things to do is to make time for creative practice/exercise. In my own experience, when ever I feel constrained by time or my tight schedule – it’s simply additional pressure that kills every motivation for creative work. Your mind drifts away thinking about the errands and home chores you need to do…so it’s not going to work. Making time, being able to do things at your own pace is of vital importance.
De-stress
Once you make enough time, it’s very important to set the right “mood” in our mind, simply to get relaxed enough before thinking or brainstorming about new idea.Deep rhythmical breathing for a few minutes, visualization, light yoga or any type of meditation can do a wonder!
These steps allow us to be more gentle with ourselves – meaning that we don’t push ourselves too much if work/idea development doesn’t go the way we want. It can bring additional emotional burden that doesn’t help and doesn’t serve us.
Now, the real fun comes in:
1. Make your own inspiration box or board
One of the things I like to do is to create an inspiration box or an inspiration board: just the process of crafting and creating something you believe will get you closer to your goal is already a step forward. When you collect pleasant items that inspire you (quotes, pictures, poems – anything symbolic to you), that represent who you are, who you want to be, things you enjoy and you find uplifting – whenever you return to your box or board it will refresh your mind and new ideas will start to pop up!
2. Jot things down
Whenever you have an idea – write it down. No matter how silly, impossible, distant from the solution you’ve been contemplating, write it down. This unconstrained writing, where you simply don’t censure your thoughts is a technique called free-writing” or “free association”. You can go even step further and write it in the form of a poem. Surrealist poets were using similar techniques which Andre Breton described in the Surrealist manifesto published in 1924 as a
Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express…the actual functioning of thought…in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
This process can speed up our solution thinking abilities and help us focus on the task at hand.
3. Be curios about your immediate environment
When I was very little having dolls to play with was not simply enough. I was so curios that almost each toy I had to break into parts to see what’s inside and how it works. Of course I’m not suggesting you take first object in front of you and break it into pieces 🙂 but on the paper or in your mind you can think of its constituent parts and how the object in front of you is interdepended of its generic parts and where do they come from.
For example a window: It consists of frame (wooden, aluminum, ext.) and glass. It might have a blind as well. Glass is made from molten silica at very high temperatures.. and ext. It’s called the “generic-parts technique” and usually people with this habitual way of thinking are better at solving problems through creative insight.
I hope you find these exercises fun and that you might apply them next time you need some inspiration for your work.
And for the end:
An Excerpt form Choose life by Andre Breton
Choose life choose life venerable Childhood
The ribbon coming out of a fakir
Resembles the playground slide of the world
Though Sun is only a shipwreck
Insofar as a woman’s body resembles it
You dream contemplating the whole length of its trajectory
Or only while closing your eyes on the adorable storm named your hand
Choose life
How poetry can stimulate creativity?
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
– Robert Frost
Some interesting results of recent researches, like at the University of Liverpool – scientists have found that reading poetry and prose can actually stimulate our thinking and creative cognitive abilities much more than for example self-help books, which are nowadays popular way of finding solutions when we are in some sort of crisis or challenging situation. It turns out the more complicated poetry and prose were, the reader’s attention time span was longer and deeper, and it also stimulated their moments of self-reflection.
Researches in the aforementioned research used a group of volunteers, where with scanners, they have monitored the brain activity as the volunteers read works by William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, T.S Eliot and others.
After the reading, the volunteers were asked to “retell” the texts using their own words. Scans showed that the more “challenging” prose and poetry set off far more electrical activity: especially the activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, an area concerned with “autobiographical memory” and emotion, helping the reader to reflect on and reappraise their own experiences in light of what they have read.
Poetry is not just a matter of style. It is a matter of deep versions of experience that add the emotional and biographical to the cognitive.
-Proff. Davis from Liverpool University
Some earlier scholar works also attribute poetry to development of cognitive, learning and memory skills. In particular, McGovern and Hogshead in their paper “Learning about writing, thinking about teaching”, describe how poetry can promote writing skills, learning, fosters analytic and creative thinking and problem solving.
Csikszentmihalyi in his paper “Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention”, published in 1996, proves that discussing a poem is an exercise in problem finding, a skill essential to creative work in both the arts and the sciences.
Halonen in his paper “Demystifying critical thinking”, (1995) states that poetry often contains unconventional language or unusual treatment of a topic. Surprise becomes a catalyst for critical thinking as the audience works to resolve subsequent feelings of disequilibrium.
So, when I feel stuck, uninspired I just play with words, rearrange them or observe the environment and describe it in more lyrical way. I have noticed that my attention and emotion shifts – it’s like working on the puzzle: thoughts of possibilities are coming – poetry simply jump-starts our brain’s synapses.
Next time when you need a creativity spark, try to write a poem. Something different, something that you are not accustomed to. In this case there is no bad or good poetry. The aim is to start moving creative juices in our minds and poetry is a great tool for that. Even science agrees 🙂
Achievements by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Trust in thine own untried capacity
As thou wouldst trust in God Himself. Thy soul
Is but an emanation from the whole.
Thou dost not dream what forces lie in thee,
Vast and unfathomed as the grandest sea.
Thy silent mind o’er diamond caves may roll,
Go seek them – but let pilot will control
Those passions which thy favouring winds can be.
No man shall place a limit in thy strength;
Such triumphs as no mortal ever gained
May yet be thine if thou wilt but believe
In thy Creator and thyself. At length
Some feet will tread all heights now unattained —
Why not thine own? Press on; achieve! achieve!
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.
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.
Business in Rhyme 