The Heart Aroused

When author and poet David Whyte appeared in our Masters Forum series some years ago, he began with a story of how he got started working with corporations. He said that not long after he became a professional poet, an American businessman cornered him following a speech and said he wanted to hire him to work with his company. When Whyte asked why, the man said:

"The language we have in the corporate world is too small for the territory of relationship we've entered."

Whyte accepted the invitation. He said he was intrigued with the possibility of helping business folks move past jargon and begin to communicate with each other using words of the heart. His first book - The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America - centers directly on that theme.

Whyte told us the poetry we should read, think about, and even write ourselves, is poetry that'll lead to self-discovery, or re-remembering. For example, one of the poems he read - Lost by David Waggoner - asked us to re-think what it means to be lost. Lost compared to what? We may not always know where we are - and that may be a blessing rather than a curse - but the world always knows where we are, and what our part in it is.

Stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must not treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be know.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made the place around you.
If you leave it you may not come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

Another - Love After Love by Derek Walcott - describes the life we bury underneath our everyday behavior and the deal we can strike to get it back.

The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your mirror,
And each smile at the other's welcome,
And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you
All your life, whom you ignored
For another who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
The photographs, the desperate notes,
Peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Conversation:

In addition to poetry of the heart, Whyte talked about conversations of the heart. He called them courageous conversations. He said we shy away from them, but cautioned us not to do so. He said we need to involve ourselves in them from time to time to re-remember that which gives meaning to our lives. He gave us questions to help us think about some of conversations we might be ducking. He hoped turning the lights on for us in that way would prompt us to go forth and have the conversations.

• What is the courageous conversation I am refusing to have with myself with regard to my work, and the present life threshold on which I find myself?
  
• What is the courageous conversation I am not having with my partner or spouse, my children or loved ones?
• What is the courageous conversation I am not having with my immediate work group, or with my immediate supervisors, associates and subordinates? What is the courageous conversation I can personally initiate to start things moving in this immediate circle?

Afterwords:

"If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness." - Charles Darwin

"Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me." - Sigmund Freud

"One demands two things of a poem. Firstly, it must be a well-made verbal object that does honor to the language in which it is written. Secondly, it must say something significant about a reality common to us all, but perceived from a unique perspective. What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves." - W. H. Auden

"One of the things you get when you say you're a poet is, 'Oh, you're a poet! Well that's interesting. Our daughter, Tiffany, she's eleven, she writes poetry.' And my revenge fantasy is that I ask this guy what he does and he says, "Well I'm an investment banker." And I say, 'Really! Because our son, Timmy, was playing with some change on the floor the other day. It's such an interesting connection...'" - Billy Collins, Poet Laureate of the United States, 2001

Knowledge Arbitrage

Rich Karlgaard is publisher of Forbes Magazine. In a blog post from 2004 he said:

"Most business books are big fat bores, except for those that are skinny bores - those trite little tomes involving whales and cheese and lessons learned from kindergarten. Unless I know the author personally, I won't read a business book. If I do know the sucker, I like to drop the book on the pavement - in his presence - and back my car over it. I spent too many years reading such piffle, underlining and highlighting 'salient' points, taking notes and promptly forgetting everything I'd read within a week. Lessons from business books never stick. Much better learning tools are novels, history books and biographies. For me, at least, these can really teach. Why? I suppose it's because when your imagination is engaged, when you dig the lessons out yourself and connect them to your own life, the learning goes much deeper."

Then he named the best book on entrepreneurship, business, and investment he'd read in quite some time, and it wasn't a business book per se; it came from the field of religion. The book is The Purpose Driven Church. It was written by Rick Warren. Here's what Karlgaard says about it:

"Warren - in 1980 and from scratch - launched Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif. Under his leadership, the church has become the fastest-growing one in America. (Saddleback is a Southern Baptist evangelical church, by the way.) Weekends bring in an average of 15,000 worshipers. Saddleback has spawned dozens of so-called daughter churches throughout the country. Were it a business, Saddleback would be compared with Dell, Google or Starbucks."

He went on to underscore some of Warren's advice for growing a church, substituting the word business for the word church as he went along. For example:

• Don't try to make your business grow. Instead, work to make your business healthy. Because if it's healthy, it will grow.
• Don't compete for market share. Instead, compete with non consumption. "The church [business] must offer people something they cannot get anywhere else," Warren says.
• Full list here.
  

In the example above, Rich is using the simplest form of an idea that is best tabbed knowledge arbitrage; taking ideas and concepts that work in one situation and applying them to another. A second example - this one spectacular - is described in a 2007 article in The New Yorker by Atul Gawande, M.D. The article is titled The Checklist. It tells the story of how a young critical care specialist from Johns Hopkins Hospital, Peter Pronovost, borrowed the idea of a pilot's checklist - originally conceived by the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1935 - and used it as a vehicle to remind the doctors and nurses working in the I.C.U. of the steps they needed to take in order to avoid infections when putting a line such as a catheter into a patient. The results? According to Gawande:

"Pronovost and his colleagues monitored what happened for a year afterward. The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital, the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs."

You must be a curious sort to apply the concept of knowledge arbitrage. If you are, begin by scouring the non-business landscape to find an individual, organization, or idea that has been singularly successful. You should roam far and wide. In fact, the further out you get, the better the chances you'll make a connection your competitors wouldn't think of in a million years. Here are a handful that jump out at me:

• The U.S. Army National Training Center, Ft. Irwin, CA
  
• The Delancey Street Foundation
• The Lewis and Clark Expedition
• The U.S. Constitutional Convention
• Alcoholics Anonymous

When you land on one, study its history to learn as much as you can about the reasons for its success, and then ask yourself if there is anything useful you can import to your situation.

Conversation:

You can do knowledge arbitrage by yourself, but it's usually much more fun and fruitful when you involve others. Here are some suggestions for working as a group.

• Find an unusual place to hold the conversation. Use your imagination.
  
• Create intentionality by working on a big problem worth solving, creating a new business or reinventing an old one, transforming your culture, or some other such thing.
  
• Let the conversation create the path on which you travel. Roam far and wide, think abstractly, make up your own words, try not to use business jargon, make absurd connections, have fun, laugh, etc.
  

Afterwords:

"A great thought begins by seeing something differently, with a shift of the mind's eye." - Albert Einstein

"I try to vary my reading diet and ensure that I read more fiction than nonfiction. I rarely read business books, except for Andy Grove’s Swimming Across, which has nothing to do with business but describes the emotional foundation of a remarkable man. I re-read from time to time T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, an exquisite lyric of derring-do, the navigation of strange places and the imaginative ruses of a peculiar character. It has to be the best book ever written about leading people from atop a camel." - Michael Moritz, venture capitalist