# 126: Poets as Managers
Story behind the Passage
Hardly any day passes without a conversation about the future. Most people I talk to think about the future of business. Some think about their personal future. Others try to not think about the future at all because it scares them. For me, the latter thought is quite strange. As far as I remember, I always thought about the future, no matter how young I was. Of course, that sometimes means you forget about the present but as long as you enjoy what you are doing in the present, that does not matter much. As an entrepreneur, you have to think about the future because it will have an impact on your business. And that, I think, is the kind of entrepreneurial thinking that Covid has also brought to employees in large organizations. They noticed that remaining in shock is not a good strategy for the future.
Such a conversation today made me think of Pink’s book. I have read several of his books and one thing that you can usually be sure of is that he is ahead of his time — of our time. His thesis that “Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” is one that even today, as businesses are slowly opening up towards the creative industries and the arts, many people do not get. What he means by “right-brainer” is that creative people such as artists, whose strengths are ‘located’ in the right part of the brain, will rise as opposed to exclusively left-brain thinkers who mostly employ rational thinking. For readers of my blog, it comes to little surprise that I support this thesis. But whenever I have conversations about the impact of the pandemic on people’s work, I truly realize that my support of the argument is not just theoretical, it is backed up by every-day practice.
My Learnings
“Poets, those unheralded systems thinkers, are our true digital thinkers.” The quote is not by Pink but from a 90-year old global tech business leader sharing his wisdom about the future. With respect to his outlook that poets will be “tomorrow’s” business leaders, he might have been a bit too optimistic. But the time has come, at least, when this is not as strange as it used to be in the past. I remember, not even ten years ago, the first consulting companies started actively recruiting people from outside business studies, including the humanities. Still today, for many this sounds completely strange how people without an MBA would contribute to business solutions. It is so refreshing to read that a business leader with so much experience would prefer hiring poets over MBAs.
Of course, this is not an either/or scenario. Nobody is saying that all business leaders should be replaced by poets, i.e., right-brainers. What I am suggesting instead is that more poets gain interest in business and more left-brainers gain some of the poets’ strengths. I am not saying this is because I think poets are the best and smartest people in the world. I am saying this because, as the passage also indicates, especially now that the digital age has fully arrived, right-brainers are firefighters when it comes to saving businesses and solving problems. Yes, some people might not even feel the magnitude of their problems yet. But as soon as their own jobs start getting downsided, they will notice that something is terribly wrong.
This delayed insight is something very human, of course. We try to postpone things that we do not like to deal with. “Oh, we have time, we can go on printing papers that nobody reads anymore, we will make it, no worries, digitalization will pass.” I have no idea how such a fierce resistance to change can be maintained by some people but it happens. The point is: What makes them think this way is that they simply cannot imagine that what they are doing could ever be done differently; that it could ever be replaced by another human or a machine. And they cannot imagine that what they might have invented yesterday could already be outdated tomorrow or in need of modification. All this is so far away that it does not exist in their “world.”
The poet, in contrast, has one major disadvantage that now turns into his advantage: He was never allowed and never allowed himself to take anything for granted. He has one thought or idea and as soon as he starts thinking about it, he immediately starts questioning it, and then moves on and on in this constant feedback loop mode of thinking and rejecting. Since he is a poet, i.e., an artist, however, he does not leave it at the thinking part. He also creates something — with his pen, with his hands, it does not matter. Then, tomorrow, it can happen that he wakes up with a completely new idea and starts something new. The fascinating thing is also that it is not always up to him to decide what to think about. He has to make money and the less money he has, the more creative he gets in creating and selling anything.
So, what I am saying: For the poet, the creative manager, the new normal for others is the old normal. You expect that unexpected things happen every minute and then you just work with what you have in the present moment. Since you are who you are, you enjoy this. You do not even know what a structured approach would be. You do not care how ‘standard’ or ‘conventional’ would look like. You simply follow your intuition. Naturally, this also means you are applying your strengths because you would not enjoy doing things you do not like. This is exactly what businesses today need to do: Reinvent themselves based on their core strengths. These strengths are not their old products. Usually, they first have to find these strengths in order to then figure out which products or services can best represent these strengths and create value.
And how do you start this process of reinvention if you missed the train, actually many trains already?
As always, it starts with the first step. Hiring a poet can actually be one. If you have no solution at all to your problem, even just talking to a poet will give you a new perspective. But there is one thing that only you can bring in: You have to be open and willing to put everything you know to the test. This and only this will save you, even if the situation is worse than worse. If you look at the problem together with a poet or from the perspective of a poet, it might still take you somewhere. You can start practicing right now with the following example that my friend shared with me today:
“If the CEO of a carriage factory asks you for advice on how to build better carriages while the automobile has already been invented and is being produced in factories nearby, what would you recommend?”
Reflection Questions
1) Are you a right-brainer? If not, how couldyou train your creative brain?
2) Think of your company/employer in five years from now — what is your major strength that is likely to be needed in the future?
3) What would you suggest to the carriage factory CEO?