Humanities & social sciences research - English literature
LIterature & Business
Dr Clare Morgan, director of the MSt in Creative Writing programme and Fellow of Kellogg College, has been researching, in conjunction with the Strategy Institute of The Boston Consulting Group, connections between poetry and business.
Her book What Poetry Brings to Business (University of Michigan Press, 2010) explores the ways in which reading poetry can help business leaders sharpen their capacity for strategic insight. The book argues that in times of turbulence, uncertainty, and increasing complexity, there are no easy answers or simple solutions, and business leaders need to be able to bring more than tried and tested approaches to the problems that confront them. Advantage goes to those first able to discern and respond to the “weak signals” that foreshadow the ways customers, competitors, and the basis of competition will change. Interpreting poetry can sharpen the intellectual muscles needed to see patterns and opportunities emerging across a more dynamic landscape.
What Poetry Brings to Business considers how poetry may have a positive impact on the ability to address complex decisions and on developing the capability for creativity and innovation. It is relevant to anyone interested in the potential for developing their capacities beyond the usual domain of business rhetoric. Organizations who want to improve communication skills, stimulate group working and invest in fresh approaches to corporate social responsibility may benefit from the possibilities this book unveils.
Actively researched across several continents, the investigative scholarship of What Poetry Brings to Business takes readers by the hand and leads them on a journey of discovery. What’s on offer is a picaresque tale of how poetry came to be focused on by a global organization, and the narrative twists and turns take readers across continents, time zones, societies and worlds. Whether in the charged atmosphere of a business forum or the secluded precincts of an Oxford college, what informs the book is a passion for what poetry can offer, and the ways in which is can begin to address some of the issues of central importance to those in the business community and beyond.
In addition to her cross-genre research into poetry and business, Clare Morgan is fiction writer and literary critic. Her publications include a collection of stories, An Affair of the Heart, and her short fiction has been widely anthologised including in the British Council's New Writing series and The New Penguin Book of Welsh Short Stories, as well as being commissioned by Radio 4. She has published on a range of writers including Iris Murdoch, A. S. Byatt, George Orwell and Virgina Woolf.
Dr Morgan's new novel, A Book for All and None is forthcoming with Weidenfeld and Nicolson in June 2011, and imagines an unexpected link between Virginia Woolf and Friedrich Nietzsche. Dr Morgan reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.