THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, January 30, 1995 TAG: 9501280151
SECTION: BUSINESS WEEKLY PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Forum
SOURCE: BY BENJAMIN I. TROUTMAN
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
`One does not work to live; one lives to work'
- Max Weber, social scientistDavid Whyte is not a typical business author. He is not a management consultant, professor, or successful executive.
He is an English-born poet. He makes his living teaching poetry to corporate America.
His book fits within a small group of recent books which challenge the traditional business ethos.
It distinguishes itself by using literary classics, such as Beowulf, myth, and a rich variety of poetry to explain the deeper reaches of the human psyche. In short, to plumb the depths of the soul.
At first glance, the book may seem esoteric and of little relevance to pragmatic and result-focused executives.
But for those with a little patience, the rewards of reading this book will be great.
Like Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul, it stresses the value of stilling our frenetic pace and seeking a connection to our deeper drives and needs.
Through this reflective search, we may rekindle the creative fire burning within us that has been smothered by corporate conformity.
In a sense, Whyte is doing for corporate America what Robert Bly and Clarissa Pinkola Estes have done for American men and women: Opened their experience to a deeper, darker, subterranean world that is the source of human creativity and the material out of which we wrench the meaning of our lives.
The elemental and primordial power of water as source of all life flows like a river through the course of his book as he contrasts soul life, ``inner ocean of longing and belonging,'' with the ``dehydrated'' workday.
He speaks of essential human needs that get blunted by the work world and of the loss of individual character and distinctiveness:
The iridescent colors of individual character are too often watered to a gray wash of slogans, wall plaques, and thoughts for the day.
Yet the sound and the fury of an individual's creativity are the elemental waters missing from the dehydrated work day.
Whyte believes much of our current disquietude, alienation, and unhappiness is a result of the ``split between our work life and that part of our soul life forced underground.''
He enjoins us to open ourselves ``to a mature appreciation of the hidden and often dangerous inner seas where our passions and our creativity lie waiting.''
Whyte reminds us that every human action can ``move us in the direction of good or evil'' and of Kafka's assertion that ``a good book should be an ax for the frozen sea within us.''
I believe Whyte has written a good book that can open individuals to deeper levels of self-understanding and to the redesign of the workplace which honors both productivity and the human spirit.
William Carlos Williams has noted that ``it is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.''
Whyte's book is an invitation to use poetry to enhance our lives and work. MEMO: Benjamin I. Troutman is an associate professor of educational leadership
at Old Dominion University. Formerly the deputy superintendent of
Portsmouth schools, he also directs the Principals' Center of Hampton
Roads. by CNB