Well-versed in business: Whidbey Island man offers poetry to corporate world
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It's a wet and windy winter evening in Seattle. Inside Benaroya Hall, in an upstairs space, a couple of hundred people relax in the warmth and listen to David Whyte, a Whidbey Island poet.
Whyte's voice is all soothing tones, a product of his upbringing in Northern England and two decades in the Northwest. He has a way of repeating things for emphasis, a gentle reminder to the audience that wisdom is coming.
Whyte continually moves his hands. With his right index finger, he makes a quick circle to describe a bird's flight through a Himalayan mountain pass. The next moment, both hands rise to outline a pasture.
"In this high plain, it is as simple as this," he says. And then again, more slowly: "In this high plain it is as simple as this. Leave everything you know behind."
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Unofficial corporate poet
Somewhere in Boeing's sprawling complex hangs a poem by the 45-year-old Whyte. Boeing commissioned the work to mark the launch of the 777 jet. The company first brought Whyte to speak to executives a year before its 1996 merger with McDonnell Douglas.
For 15 years, Whyte has consulted with companies around the world. With a client list that reads like the Fortune 500 - AT&T, American Express, Bristol Meyers Squibb, Procter & Gamble - he is the unofficial poet of corporate America.
Depending on the assignment, he can do about an hour's worth of standup poetry or make it an all-day affair complete with countryside strolls.
Why do companies need Whyte? Because, he says, Wordsworth, Blake and Whitman have a key to business locked in their verse. Because Beowulf can make the world better for working.
"The constant stress, the constant production of results, with no rest, no celebration, leaves people just ghosts of themselves," Whyte says. "Poetry tells us about life - where the stakes are high. It teaches us to have conversations with our work. It helps us look work in the eyes."
If this sounds a little far out, don't fret. Seven years ago, Whyte published a book on all this, "The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of Soul in Corporate America" (Currency Doubleday). The 337-page book sold 105,000 copies and launched Whyte as a business guru.
With his new book, "Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity" (Riverhead Books), Whyte takes his ideas further.
It's common for all this talk of poets to leave new groups a little lost, looking about the room like college students in the wrong class. Listen closely to Whyte's message about finding what we're really good at - whether it's your current job or not - and it almost sounds like a call to quit.
"It's just a shock for them to experience something like this," says Hilary Howarth, associate director of executive programs at the University of Washington Business School. "You can read it in their body language - a lot of them have their hands across their chests. But then they start to relax. They start to listen."
Spiritual business gurus
This is the point where the logical, some would say nonpoetic, mind asks, "What's the deal?"
According to the theory, corporate America changed so much the past 20 years that workers lost their moorings. Management structures flattened, making all employees "part of the team." Technology reduced the time people spent interacting with each other. Workdays became longer, jobs more stressful.
This thinking spawned an industry. In the past few years, a new crop of experts joined the circuit, pitching Shakespeare, Moses, even "Star Trek" character Jean-Luc Picard as avenues for enlightenment. There are dozens of books with "soul" or "spirit" in their titles. There's a "Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work."
When Naropa University, a Buddhist school in Boulder, Colo., held a conference two years ago on workplace spirituality, a couple of hundred corporate managers drove up from Denver to participate.
"There is a movement toward this type of model," says Pieter Oosthuizen, the school's marketing director. "It works for the bottom line. In the long-term view, employees will be happier and productivity will go up."
But Jill Rosenfeld, who covers consultants for Fast Company magazine, says the rise of the spiritual business guru goes deeper than just productivity.
"The Internet changed the way we work, what we think work is, how we relate to other people," she says. "People want work to mean something."
The lesson of Beowulf
Remember the story of Beowulf? It's creepy and old, a tale about a brave warrior and a nasty monster named Grendel. It's Beowulf's job to destroy Grendel and then kill the monster's mother in her watery lair.
Whyte sees Beowulf as a "sixth-century management consultant" who dives into the lake, directly into his fears, to save the Danes. He confronts his fear (Grendel) and the mother of his fear, too. It's a pretty glorious way to think about wearing a suit and sitting at a desk.
"There are specific thresholds in everyone's work where you're asking the great questions," he tells one group. "Is this right for me? Are we doing the right thing? Are we doing something that's right for the world?
"You have to answer them. You have to be there."
Whyte says he has tried to answer these questions himself. He studied to be a marine biologist, inspired by the TV shows of Jacques Cousteau. After college, he went to the Galapagos Islands, where he realized he was a poet, not a scientist.
Much of "Crossing the Unknown Sea" is autobiographical. Whyte's own business, run out of a tiny office in Langley, includes the books and consulting but also four volumes of poetry and guided literary tours of Ireland. The corporate work allows him to pursue his true occupation, writing poetry.
Although he's never held a desk job, Whyte uses his experiences to teach about business. One night, the boat he was working on in the Galapagos came off its mooring and floated dangerously close to land. Even though Whyte was the one who woke up to steer the vessel away, he believed he, too, was to blame because he knew there could be trouble but kept quiet because he wasn't the captain.
"In order to assume our captaincy, we should not genuflect before the imposing array of other captains," he says. "Taking any step that is courageous, however small, is a way of bringing any gifts we have to the surface, where they can be received."
Then Whyte was almost crushed by a massive wave. Months later, his Irish-born mother told him she had had a dream about the event and saw herself saving him (which he believes she did). He sees this event as a reminder we are never successful only on our own.
Unsticking executives' minds
Whyte sits alone on the stage. He's talking about Boeing, where six years ago he first tried to get executives to think more creatively and "unstick their minds."
Initially, Boeing executives didn't know quite what to make of him. "A rumor went out immediately after that session that David was in there teaching executives how to read poetry," says Eldon McBride, a Boeing executive who helped design the training program.
But things settled down.
"No one was laughing at this guy," says Howard Norman, a former assistant dean at UW's Business School who sat in on the talks. "Not every company gets at these problems by studying ancient myths. They have telecommuting and child care. They improve the 401(k). With David Whyte, you could see that these guys were really grappling with what he was saying."
In the Boeing internal magazine, Chief Executive Officer Phil Condit said simply, "David Whyte makes you think."
Sitting in front of the crowd in Benaroya Hall, Whyte tells a Boeing story. A 707 took off while he was talking to some executives. Rather than glance nonchalantly at the runway, everyone bolted to a window to watch the plane.
"I realized that none of them know how the damn things take off any better than we do," he says. "They are wing people and fuselage people and cockpit people all working independently of each other. And they all ran to the window and said, 'My God, it's doing it again!' "
While he speaks, Whyte's hands keep moving, mimicking the trajectory of the soaring plane.