David Whyte

"Leadership and Managing Thought"

I like to call attention to what I call "Big Ideas" that may be of interest to CEOs. Sometimes these ideas are found in the popular media (like Bo Burlingham's book, "Small Giants") and other times they are emerging concepts and not fully developed. An example of the latter is the work of Laurence R. Smith, the editor of the Journal of Innovative Management.

Larry Smith has been reporting and writing in the Journal for over 10 years on the many efforts of business to improve the quality of its products and services. In recent years the focus has been on the winners of the prestigious Baldridge Award for Quality and he has featured detailed case studies of a broad range of winning companies and organizations.

I suspect that in the process of writing about these winners Larry began to feel that something is missing in the Total Quality Management (TQM) movement because in recent issues he has reviewed the history of TQM in its different manifestations and begun a search for the deeper issues. In the Summer 2006 issue he explores the idea that TQM misses the first step in the process of improving quality -- it misses the need to improve the quality of THINKING itself.

Larry proposes that the quality of thinking can be improved in what he calls the "fuzzy-front-end" of the process of managing.

Thoughts precede actions. Results reflect the quality of the thinking.

Larry examines this idea by looking at a broad range of disciplines to learn what we know and what we don't know about "thinking". I can't reduce his exploration to a few sentences but I have a certain feeling that this is important. I recommend his article, "Leadership and Managing Thought".

We are not talking about being smarter, we are talking about thinking better.

Loren G Carlson, Chairman, CEO Roundtable, LLC

Report from CEO Roundtable
Loren G. Carlson

Book Review 1

The Heart Aroused
by David Whyte

Thousands of books on business are published every year. Only a few of these become best sellers and fewer still get read. In this column I offer my views on books that I think are useful to people in business. My opinions are based my experience in business and as Chairman of CEO Roundtable.

The Heart Aroused, by David Whyte, is an extraordinary book on business because the author is a gifted poet. He brings a poet's eye and ear, a poet's sensitivity, to the exposition of the deeper issues in corporations today: alienation, ethics, disorientation, despair, loss of control, chaos and paradox. Whyte helps us to see business more clearly by leading us down into the darker sides of corporate life and then providing the light that poetry and myth bring to these issues. Whyte has the courage of a poet to go into the depths of corporate life and examine the condition of the soul.

David Whyte's objective in this book is captured in its subtitle, "Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America." Is this a legitimate topic for a book on business? What does preservation of the soul have to do with the bottom line of business? Everything!

Whyte links preservation of the soul in the workplace directly with the increasing need in all of businesses for innovation and creativity. The survival of businesses is dependent upon innovation and creativity. According to Whyte, "Soul is the indefinable essence of a person's spirit and being. It can never be touched and yet the merest hint of its absence causes immediate distress. In a work situation, its absence can be sensed intuitively." Many more traditional and popular authors of business books have recently focused on the need for more successful and faster innovation and attempted to define the innovation/creative processes that work best. But, they have not dared to deal with the fundamental need for the soul. Preservation of the soul in the workplace, "means the palpable presence of some sacred otherness in our labors. Preserving a desire to live a life a man or woman can truly call their own". Innovation is a creative process born of soul searching.

Whyte dares to take us into the depths, to confront our demons (personal and organizational). It is as necessary to go into the depths as it is rise to the peaks for who can know joy that has not known sorrow. But this trip is not overly intellectual or academic. With Whyte as your guide you will soon allow emotional truths to accompany rational thoughts. This is a stimulating and satisfying journey, starting with learning about power and vulnerability in the workplace as experienced in Beowulf, proceeding through gaining a grounded creativity, putting fire in your voice, maintaining innocence while gaining experience, and finally, accepting that chaos and complexity are paths to simplicity.

I doubt this book was ever on a bestseller list but I recommend it to business leaders who are intuitively seeking a larger context for understanding the challenges and alternatives they face.

The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, by David Whyte was published by Currency Doubleday in 1994.

Come visit the Roundtable as my guest.

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