Why Reading Poetry Can Make You a Better Leader
Business books are fine, but poetry is the key to innovative thinking
A poem is a story concentrated into a careful handful of words, each of which is curated to hold utmost meaning. With diction and form, structure and sound, a poem navigates you through an emotion-laden experience in hopes of leaving your mind with a complex bounty of thoughts and, often, a new perspective. A poem is almost always multifaceted; it is, as Clare Morgan describes in her book What Poetry Brings to Business, a “puzzle with multiple, inexhaustible, co-existent — and interchangeable — ‘solutions,’ each more or less dependent on the others for validity.”
Frequent poetry reading develops your perceptiveness and thinking capabilities, nurturing problem-solving skills for complex, multifaceted, and ambiguous problems.
Because the format of poetry requires unpacking and consideration, reading or writing poetry tremendously benefits business people and entrepreneurs, in a number of different ways.
