Press
Whatever you do, don’t call David Whyte a corporate poet. He is a
poet who works in the land of the bottom line. He has built a business through
the unlikely merger of profits and pentameter by offering seminars sprinkled
with the verse of Dante, Coleridge, Eliot and Blake, among others, as well
as his own. Mr. Whyte’s workshops have titles like “Exploring
the Shadow that Informs our Work,” “In the Service of Life: Personal
Destiny and the Soul’s Desires” and “Through the Eye of
The Needle: Reimagining and Remembering Ourselves in the New Workplace.” In
them he uses lines that he has memorized from about 200 poems to explore
creativity, power and the soul at work. “I don't have an all-embracing
vision which people have to buy. I’m simply trying to work with the
struggles we all deal with every day while we're trying to live out our personal
destinies and make a living at the same time.” Returning to the world
of verse from the land of the bottom line fits with what he tells executives: “You
cannot choose either the artist or the pragmatist inside you. There’s
a place for both.”
-The New York Times
“In North America, we spend more time at work than we do with our
families or in our places of worship or in the natural world. And so if we
are not asking questions that are germane to what is real for us in life,
then we are in very big trouble as individuals. . . " (Whyte said).
Boeing President Phil Condit said that he has yet to see an effective description
of what Whyte actually does. “Newspaper articles talk about David reading
poetry to Boeing executives,” Condit said. “But David is much
more of a storyteller, someone from outside our system saying that there
are other ways of looking at the way we do things. David Whyte causes you
to think.”
-Boeing Manager Magazine
It seems Whyte has already bowled over British captains of industry. Tony
Morgan, Chief Executive Officer of the Industrial Society, met Whyte earlier
this year. “I turned up on the second day of a conference of complexity
and strategy to find that he had spoken the previous day, and everyone I
met was raving about him. The delegates were like a who's who of British
industry — and Whyte stole the show.”
-The
Times, London
A change-agent with a difference, Whyte uses poetry to “try
to bring to life the experience of change itself.” This, he
says, is important because “understanding our literate and artistic
traditions calls on the very part of us that we are asking to be reintroduced
back into our work.” As competition gets cut-throat and companies cut
jobs and costs to stay in business, revitalizing the workforce is fast becoming
absolutely vital. But, says Whyte, “it is impossible to build a creative,
vital, adaptable workforce unless every member of that team is asking germane
questions about their own lives.” Not surprisingly, blue-chip America
is taking notice.
-The
Economic Times, New Delhi
(Whyte’s corporate) audiences are often quiet at first, sometimes
doubtful of results, curious about finding a poet, of all things, in their
midst. But in the end, participants leave convinced. Whyte’s success
is an unusual byproduct of a movement that many businesses began pursuing
some 20 years ago. Ironically, in the midst of hard-driving expansion and
mergers, companies found that certain traits and sensitivities at the personal
level were an important ingredient in managerial success. Corporations began
seeking managers who were alert about their own feelings and the emotions
of others. “Poetry is magnificent at doing that,” says Whyte.
Its language is universal enough to make people aware of similar ideas and
experiences in their own lives, he says. It opens their thought, removes
limits, and allows them to conceive — often for the first time — new
and unexpected answers to old problems. Dealing with the vast, bewildering
shifts in today's mercurial business climate requires an individual to understand
himself or herself and take a more penetrating look at the world. The language
of poetry, Whyte says, is extremely precise in dealing with the areas of
the human psyche that are involved in the process of “the fiery corporate
change.” Poetry, he maintains, calls upon a part of the human character
that is at home in the corporate world.
-The
Christian Science Monitor
A dynamic speaker, Whyte doesn’t lecture but recites dozens of stories
and poems, including some of his own, to help bring to life the experience
and emotion of change. Whyte says such poems help managers and other employees
to rethink their daily habits and assumptions, thus stirring up some creative
juices. One senior executive: “My first reaction was: What a waste
of time,” he says. “I thought to myself, what could a poet possibly
contribute?” But the executive now says that Whyte “helped us
to think differently than we ever had before. We had to look inside ourselves.”
-Business
Week
