Quotessence
Home / Books / The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America

The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America

Book by David Whyte · 9 quotes · Has Beens, Courses, Organizational Development

Filter quotes by topic

AllHas BeensCoursesOrganizational DevelopmentPleasantRealmsSailingSoulStuckWayAbilityAccordAdversityAliveAllowingArtBankruptcyCapableChangeColeridgeColor

The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America Quotes

“Some things cannot be spoken or discovered until we have been stuck, incapacitated, or blown off course for a while. Plain sailing is pleasant, but you are not going to explore many unknown realms that way. We articulate the truth of a situation by carrying the whole experience in the voice and allowing the process to blossom of its own accord. Out of the cross-grain of experience appears a voice that not only sums up the process we have gone through, but allows the soul to recognize in its timbre, the color, texture, and complicated entanglements of being alive.”

WayHas BeensSoulWholeCoursesProcessVoiceSituationGoneAliveColorCrossesAdversityComplicatedStuckRealmsPleasantAllowingGrainSailingAccordTextureEntanglementTimbre
Book:The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America
Create image

“All the evidence from the science of complexity says that given certain clear parameters...communities or teams will become self-organizing. They will be attracted to certain flowing states of organization natural to the people who make them up. In complexity theory, these flowing states are poetically called strange attractors. ... A work team made up of collaborating individuals would...have, if you could measure and plot creativity, failure, and success, a strange attractor that depicted the edges and patterns of the team's behavior. This pattern would be constrained by the forces operating within the company and outside in the market, but it would be most affected by the focus and vision of the team. A strong vision and purpose acts as a kind of strange attractor, allowing individual creativity while acting as a natural constraint to behavior that is detrimental to the team. Without repressive rules, then, a cohesive team with a strong sense of its mission, ethics, and tasks can be allowed a lot of leeway to develop its own approach to problems.”

TeamworkOrganizational DevelopmentComplexity TheoryStrange Attractors
Book:The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America
Create image

“In some ways Coleridge committed a form of artistic suicide attempting to solve the complicated mystery he saw in the flocking starlings. In a harrowing self-indictment he later described himself as a 'starling self-encaged, & always in the moult, & my whole note is, tomorrow & tomorrow & tomorrow.' Slowly losing confidence in himself as a poet, he attempted to become an all-knowing philosopher-king. He ignored the simpler images central to his life as a poet and attempted to create an equally complex system of philosophy that would hold it all in place. He eventually produced the Biographia Literaria, an immense tome, impressive in learning, thought and scholarship, but in my heretical opinion as an unrepentant lyric poet, a tragedy of wasted effort and a loss to all of us compared to the vital geniums of his early poetry. This happens in a parallel fashion to many skilled managers who convince themselves that the organization's vision is their own vision. They suddenly find themselves in positions that are seen as rewards for rather than consummations of their skill; their natural abilities may not translate into the job they have been promoted to, nor may their interest, but because of the pressure of the career path, they may convince themselves into a phantom life under an overarching system that includes everything except their own desires.”

PhilosophyPoetryProfessional DevelopmentOrganizational DevelopmentColeridge
Book:The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America
Create image

“No matter how narrow our perceptions become in the daily obsessions of the organization, there is no such thing as a life lived only within an organization. There are other necessities calling us to a much greater participation than any corporation can offer. The most efficiently run, streamlined organization, the best-groomed, most-organized executive is interwoven with the ragged vagaries of creation, and despite our best attempts to anchor ourselves in the concrete foundations of profitability and permanence, we remain forever at the whim, mercy, and pleasure of the wind-blown world. Ironically, we bring more vitality into our organizations when we refuse to make their goals the measure of our success and start to ask about the greater goals they might serve, and when we stop looking to them as parents who will supply necessities we can only obtain when we wrestle directly with our own destiny. In a sense, we place the same burdens on our organizational life as we place on the rest of our existence. We feel there is something wrong at the center of it all, and we have to put it right. We are forever looking for a cure for our ills. We do this by placing ourselves in the position of manager, of thus managing change. Unless it is managed, something is wrong. But our real unconscious and underlying wish is to find a cure for the impermanence of life, and for that there is no remedy. Most of the difficulties we confront at work are no different from those human beings have been dealing with for millenia. Life is full of loneliness, failure, grief, and loss to an extent that terrifies us, and we will do anything to will ourselves another existence.”

NatureChangeLossGriefManagementImpermanenceOrganizational Behavior
Book:The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America
Create image