Stephanie Denning makes a masterful case for poetry in business…
In business school, I had the good fortune of interviewing a Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts executive for a paper I was writing. One anecdote remains lodged in my mind. I concluded the interview by asking him to what he owed his success. His most unusual answer: Eloquence. He reiterated again, as if I hadn’t heard the first time, that the one much underappreciated but real success secret is eloquence. Not enough people read, he said, but especially, not enough read poetry.
I can see what he means. All you have to do is attend any business speaking circuit to confirm the suspicion that eloquence is an almost-lost art. Business language is boringly uniform, with all executives latching onto the same business jargon du jour: core competency, buy-in, holistic, agile, forward-looking, reengineering, excellence, scale, customer-first, and so on. When you happen upon someone who can communicate the same idea clearly, without using the clunky worn-out words and phrases, it acts like a magnetic pull.
The most successful business leaders have a unique way of deploying language as a tool, not using it merely as a medium. Someone who uses unique imagery, story, and tournures de phrases. Take Steve Jobs’s famous 2005 Stanford commencement speech. One analysis notes the effective use of rhetorical devices of the speech is precisely what made it so successful.