I write poetry,* so when I saw the article Reading fiction helps your career, but reading poetry helps more I was delighted. I know, I know…most people don’t like poetry, because it takes a little work and imagination to understand, internalize, and apply. On the other hand, if you are a leader or manager, you can actually advance your career by reading poetry.
[*Get a FREE download of my book of poetry, God Sneezed, at your favorite e-book seller or by clicking here. Check out my other e-books at Smashwords by searching Jackie O’Donnell.]Here’s part of the article:
It turns out that poetry is especially beneficial to people who want to lead and manage. John Coleman wrote in the Harvard Business Review that “poetry teaches us to wrestle with and simplify complexity…Business leaders live in multifaceted, dynamic environments. Their challenge is to take that chaos and make it meaningful and understandable. Reading and writing poetry can exercise that capacity, improving one’s ability to better conceptualize the world and communicate it — through presentations or writing — to others.”
Fictional narrative expects the reader to keep turning pages to connect with a character and feel what they feel. Poetry demands that the reader decipher each line for understanding — the world, or the self, or others. Both poetry and fiction develop empathy, but fiction is better for that. Poetry, however, is the practice of simplifying complex topics. (Extra credit alert: To illustrate this, read Because I could not stop for Death by Emily Dickinson.)
Most people can make a good business decision if they have all the relevant data in front of them. But the most successful executives are excellent at making decisions with incomplete information. The less information you need to make a decision, the higher you can rise. Think Elon Musk deciding he can go to the moon. Or Mark Zuckerberg assuming he will be able to get millions of people to use his Harvard dating website.
Dana Gioia explains that this decision-making skill is about sorting complexity to come up with a guess at the truth. And in Knowledge@Wharton he says reading (and writing) poetry, rather than conventional fiction or nonfiction, is the most effective way to develop these skills.
Clare Morgan, author of What Poetry Brings to Business, cites studies that show readers of stories and poetry generate nearly twice as many alternative endings for the poems, and poetry readers develop great self-monitoring strategies that enhance the efficacy of their thinking process. Morgan says these creative capabilities help executives keep their organizations entrepreneurial, find imaginative solutions, and navigate moments when they cannot rely on data to make good decisions.
The world is full of examples of executives who read poetry. Steve Jobs collected the works of William Blake. Sidney Harman, founder of Harman Industries, always tried to hire poets into management, arguing, “Poets are our original systems thinkers. They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand.
Does this post make you want to read poetry? The more you are repelled by poetry the more you will benefit from it. So give it a try.