As my FIL's dementia deepened, one of the last portions of his memory to go was the memory of poetry he had memorized in school. He didn't know his daughter, but he knew Horatio at the bridge...
When Phil Condit was CEO of Boeing, he ran a leadership development program for the very senior managers. Part of the week long program was poetry readings by David Whyte, a former management consultant turned author and poet. His goal was to help these folks (mostly engineers as he was) see that aesthetics are an important part of good design and of good business.
Poets are the experts at distilling events, emotions, and observations down to the minimum critical elements.
|