How do managers of public agencies address the competing requirements for control and creativity? How do managers come to terms with innovation while not losing management authority, and champion it in others within public organizations?
This research examines the role of poetry in facilitating creative management techniques in the public as well as the private sector. David Whyte, a Seattle poet, has an answer to these questions. In The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America (1996), Whyte suggests that poetry be used as both a metaphor and a tool. If one's initial skepticism of this concept runs high, remember that poetry is not only one of the most innovative uses of the written word, it is also somewhat controlled.
Whyte makes a living by teaching the value of poetry to public agencies and private corporations; and, despite the fact that he has probably never set foot inside a business school, his analysis of the dynamic flux that exists in organizations today seems right on target. He also analyzes the personal reconciliation that must occur as creative individuals are forced to live within the bounds set for them by their employing organizations. Personnel managers live by the words that describe their thoughts and recommendations, and Whyte postulates that there is no more creative use for words than is found within poetry.
Whyte's first step is to have the reader decide whether or not the soul, his euphemism for human creative impulses, has a home in the workplace. Insisting that we cannot divorce ourselves from our souls, he rejects the notion that the soul is properly left at home or at a place of worship. Having established that creativity belongs in the workplace, Whyte moves from a general evaluation of poetry's metaphor for business into a specific analysis of examples of poems. He deconstructs the opening to Dante's Commedia:
In the middle of the road of my life
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