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| Opportunities & Exposures: Culture |
Mergers and Ambiguities
John Barr
06/01/2005
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Fresh out of Harvard Business School in 1972, I began a career in the
public-utility group at Morgan Stanley. I traveled with a group of senior
partners to meet the CEO of a large client company in the Midwest. The CEO told
us about some tough negotiations he was having with the head of the state public
service commission, a guy he considered rather weird. “Do you know,” the CEO
said of his adversary, “he writes poetry!” My senior colleagues, demigods in my
mind at the time, all looked knowingly at me. I cringed. It was no secret to
them that I was not only a junior M&A specialist, but also a published poet.
Since then I have continued to read, write, teach and publish poetry while
working as an investment banker—and I make no apologies. My parallel lives have
persuaded me that a frequent exposure to the arts can make a better businessman
of me, or of anyone. William Carlos Williams, who had a dual career as a poet
and pediatrician, used to keep a typewriter hidden in his desk and pound away
between patient visits. I carry notebooks and compose lines on airplanes, in
hotel rooms, in taxis. This is from a poem I wrote about my writing
habits:
Since I start things on the margin
—cocktail napkins, cancelled
checks,
timetables trying to be reliable—
and since I save it all, I
know
there are good words buried and lost
in those fat accordion files,
words
that sounded good at the time,
that I promised to get back
to,
rhyme trains that never left Grand Central,
monikers that chattered
like silverware
at 30,000 feet, sounds struck
sheer of sense—coin of a
realm—
from a currency of air, pronounced . . .
The mind of a business
executive is geared toward framing a situation to produce a solution. A poet
also tries to make sense of a complex world, but is more comfortable with
ambiguity and reality in all its messy complexity. Robert Frost wrote that a
poem “begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with
the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a
clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and
cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.”
Having
worked in a world that prizes neat, logical solutions, I have seen that the
pressure to make a decision based on factors such as projections and cost
effectiveness often forces executives to short circuit a full analysis of the
situation. When I studied the case method in business school, my poet’s mind
stepped in and tried to look for a framework and context to the problem. I saw
that an appreciation of poetry can help an executive tolerate ambiguity and
postpone closure.
Those may not sound like desirable conditions, yet they
served me well in the wave of gas and electric company mergers in the mid-1990s.
Only in hindsight have many of us realized that too many investment firms
pursued deals for the sake of pursuing deals. My firm had a client who never
stopped thanking us for advising him not to merge. At the time of the
discussions, I saw a number of complex issues, including the personal motivation
of the parties involved, that made the question of merging more than just a
matter of hard dollar cost savings.Whether selecting a bond for a portfolio
or assessing a venture capital proposal, the investor looks for asymmetrical
relationships where he can earn the greatest return for the least amount of
risk. But the poet seeks out risk and embraces it, knowing that art that takes
no risk tells us nothing new. The executive who reads poetry may come to see
risk not as a necessary evil, but as the necessary pathway to success.
Poet
W.H. Auden captured the general attitude of poets toward businesspeople: Poetry
“survives in the valley of its making where executives would never want to
tamper.” Poet Hart Crane’s father was the inventor of Life Savers candy, who
thought God had played an outrageous joke by giving him a poet for a son. Poets
and executives do not read the same newspapers or frequent the same bars, yet
both draw water from the same well. Both use creativity as a means of
controlling chaos. Each can learn from how the other does it, and in so doing,
can escape some unconscious limitations.
John Barr, president of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, is the founder
of SG
Barr Devlin. He has published six collections of poetry.
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