CONTENTS
Banking with Art: Investment Banker John Barr, President of the Poetry
Foundation
Leadership the Hard Way: Ten Months in the Bush
Evangelizing for Customers: Hewlett-Packard’s Susan Schindelar
Banking with Art:
Investment Banker John Barr, President of the Poetry Foundation
When
John Barr speaks about risk, it’s natural to assume he’s talking about
finance. After all, Barr’s been active in investment banking for more
than 30 years – first as a director at Morgan
Stanley, now as managing director and chairman of SG Barr Devlin
(SGBD), a unit of Société Générale (SG). But
when Barr sat down to speak with Wharton's Michael Useem,
director of the school's Center for Leadership and Change
Management, and Mukul Pandya, editor of
Knowledge@Wharton, the
topic was risk but the context was poetry – particularly about the way
that art can influence business.
Earlier this year
Barr, whose poems have been published in six collections, was named
president of The Poetry Foundation, which was itself re-named from the
Modern Poetry Association after receiving a $100 million gift from
philanthropist Ruth Lilly. The Foundation recently celebrated its 50th
Poetry Day public reading in Chicago, where the newly appointed U.S.
Poet Laureate Ted Kooser read some works. On February 2, 2005 Barr will
be a featured speaker at
Wharton West’s Leadership Conference in San Francisco. As a
businessman-poet Barr may be unique, but he’s not unusual: other such
Renaissance people have included the international banker T.S. Eliot,
and Kooser himself, who is a retired insurance executive. What follows
is an excerpt from a longer interview.
Useem: There’s
a long tradition of people in business, including T.S. Eliot, writing
poetry. You took it a step further to be involved in The Poetry
Foundation, serving as President. Why did you take on these roles in
addition to your very busy life as an investment banker?
Barr: To me
this is the culmination of the two rivers of my life that have run in
parallel courses, and that never before converged. A career in business
that now includes about 32 years on Wall Street has always been a source
of joy to me. Unlike my father who worked for a railroad, I love my work
and was really delighted to find that a line of work that involved
people I respected and clients I could serve. So this career has been
personally rewarding. The other river of my life has been poetry and I
really couldn’t imagine my life without that. It’s been a central thing
to me ever since high school. So I’ve been writing for 40 years and
publishing for the last 20 years and I’ve had a number of books that
have been brought out by various people – but I never thought I’d get
the chance to put the two together. So when the opportunity rose just a
year ago to potentially be the first president of the foundation where
the money and the poetry come together, I thought, "Wow, this is worth
moving to Chicago for."
Useem: You’ve
used the phrase before, tickling the dragon’s tail, and you’ve used the
story of physicists who were fooling around with two pieces of uranium
and managed to bring them too close together, resulting in a brief burst
of radiation. So it’s a question of how you see business and poetry
complement and inform one another, and is there a danger of getting too
close – with a result that is explosively not what you want.
Barr: I think
it is reasonable for us to ask that the Poetry Foundation run itself as
efficiently as a small, well-run, for-profit enterprise. There’s no
reason poets can’t tie their shoelaces just like everybody else. And the
people here, on the staff, all have a passion for poetry, but they bring
something else as well. So we’re going to have a Website editor who
knows all about the Internet; and we have a magazine editor who runs
Poetry Magazine and knows the business of publishing. The point is I
think we are internalizing, in our employee group, that same phenomenon
of two globes of uranium that we’re trying to bring together for energy
but not for destruction. So far, so good – but I think the way it could
go wrong is if we had a heavy-handed approach where we treated this art
like any other business, without sensitivity to what’s special and
different about art generally and poetry in particular. That can be
destructive. But there’s plenty of poetry-heads around here, including
my own, that don’t want that to happen.
Useem: How can
business learn from the arts, from Shakespeare, from poetry, from
creative writing of all kinds? Wallace Stevens [a vice-president of
Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co. who would win the National Book
Award for Poetry] maintained two separate identities, but you are known
within the business world as a poet in addition to serving as an
investment banker. How do the ideas of poetry inform what you do as an
investment banker, and how could those ideas as a poet inform others in
the business world as well?
Barr: I think
that a life of poetry – as a reader or a writer – gives one an
appreciation of the fullness and complexity of things. The process of
writing a poem is really one of synthesis and inclusion – T.S. Eliot has
written about that very well. You basically find a group of words in a
certain sequence that have the magic within them of capturing and
containing a moment of external reality. There’s a mystery to that, and
there’s also an inclusion that goes beyond anything that we might be
able to simply put in a rational sentence.
That sense of art
expanding to the limits of the human experience makes for a better
decision-maker in the business world, because it tends to offset the
tendency to reduce every business question to a simple algorithm or a
simple proposition that we can boil down and make a decision about. So
all of us I think are constantly managing two contending forces: one is
to simplify so as to understand and decide, which is much of what a
businessman does, in my experience; at the same time not injuring the
complexity of the full fabric. And I think that my life in poetry has
kept me alert to that. In serving clients, I’ve done a better job
because I’ve appreciated that there’s more in the room than just a voice
on the telephone.
So that’s what it has
done for me. I would hope it did that for other people – I don’t think
there’s a simple transposition where I could go to Macbeth, read
the morality tales of how he came to power and then transport it to the
board room. It hasn’t worked that way for me. But I think that in a
sense of art-inspiriting approach to a broader business mind, it’s
helped me that way.
Useem: Many
people in all walks of life, not just business, say ‘I just don’t have
the talent or training to appreciate the subtleties of Shakespeare or
the meaning of great poetry.’ What would you say to a person who is a
little bit skittish or hesitant to turn to poetry, or to creative arts
more generally?
Barr: I think
it has to do with risk, and I think it has to do with comfort. I’ve
spent long periods of my life not understanding the poems in the New
Yorker magazine. In fact I’m still not sure, even though I live and
breathe poetry. Some poems are elusive on purpose and some are dealing
with subjects that are hard to talk about. But my encouragement to
people with that opinion about poetry is that effort is rewarded, and
there’s always some kinds of poetry that are going to be obtainable on
the first hearing. Billy Collins has done a great service to poetry
because he writes wonderfully, but people can understand him on the
first hearing.
So there’s no ‘one
kind’ of poetry any more than there is one kind of business. I would
greatly encourage – for what it does for your life – the effort of
finding some part that you’re comfortable with. It’s also partly a
matter of being comfortable with ambiguity – and I think that makes for
a better person, a better-functioning person. Certainly poems never come
to rest; they often deal with things that are inherently contradictory,
and they’re trying to find a resolution in the way they work through the
art. I remember my father, who was not a literary man, asking, 'Why do
we need to go to a play, why don’t we just read what it’s about.' There
was that point of view, that attitude. And I think the point is that the
complexity of the play itself puts us into the fullness of it but
remains at the same time ambiguous. If we’re comfortable with the
ambiguity that’s inherent in art we’ll probably be comfortable with the
ambiguities that we’re bound to encounter in business.
Useem: If a
reader is drawn to the kind of thinking you just expressed, drawing upon
poetry or other areas of the arts to become more effective in what
they’re doing – whatever their walk of life – where would you have them
start?
Barr: If it’s a
matter of poetry, I would start with art that you can enjoy. The teaser,
the side door into art is through pleasure, amusement or entertainment.
Samuel Johnson once said the end of art is to instruct through pleasing,
and that has stuck with me all my life. It means you shouldn’t go to the
Museum of Modern Art and stand there puzzling in front of art that you
find forbidding or cold or inscrutable. You should find some art that
you enjoy, and it could be, well, Huckleberry Finn. There’s art that I
love, and I go back to those things again and again. And if you’re not
getting it, I sure wouldn’t beat yourself over the head with it.
Specifically, I’d mention a couple of poets that I think are accessible
to anyone: Billy Collins and Mary Oliver are both wonderful poets living
and writing today with large audiences; their books are best sellers
within the poetry world. And if you like them, there’s plenty more where
that came from.
Pandya: You spoke generally about approachability, but we’re
also talking about how poetry has influenced your understanding of
ambiguity and complexity and its connection to business. Given that
Knowledge@Wharton is targeted at business readers, are there
particular authors that you found particularly compelling in
understanding that complexity, while still having some application to
the business decisions that you face?
Barr: I might
start with William Butler Yeats, who many believe to be the greatest
English-language poet of the 20th century. He had a poem that
was published as he was approaching middle age; this is most of a
century ago, called The Fascination of What’s Difficult. The
point of my story is that Yeats had a life outside of poetry — he was a
founder of the Irish National Theater in Dublin — and the poem talks
about the aggravations of trying to put on a play, with actors quitting
and budgets overrun; and all the stuff that we all deal with in running
a business, and how he reconciles that. And he doesn’t really reconcile
it — he understands that the poetry is like a horse in a shed — it’s a
reference to Pegasus — waiting to break through the doors and run off,
and literally fly off as a winged horse. Any poet that has spent a life
out there trying to do things in the external world, like Yeats with the
Irish Theater, is likely to capture things that you just asked about. So
I tend to go with poets like that.
Useem: As you
have spent your career in investment banking. Simultaneously you have
been a practicing poet – has your investment banking experience informed
your poetry?
Barr: Not until
late in my writing career. I remember when I was a graduate student in
business school, I was standing in a room – it was like a boardroom with
walnut paneling – and I tried to write a poem about that instead of
studying, and it was dreadful. I threw it away, as I had thrown away a
lot of poems. So I couldn’t transport the literal business experience,
the trappings and furnishings of a business experience, into my poetry;
and really didn’t write about it in a direct way.
But to my surprise,
when I wrote a book called Grace that was published in 1999,
there is a fictional character that is a takeoff on Donald Trump, who is
my take on a hustler-businessman-promoter. So it came spilling out in
that book in the form of a fictional character that gave me an
opportunity to say everything that I wanted to say. So in my life
experience there’s no predicting where or when the real experience will
pop up in a poem – it could be many decades later or it could be on the
spot. You know some of great poems have been written on the death of a
father, or mother or son. So it’s not to say that it all has to incubate
down there for 40 years, but I do think you have to wait for the poem to
tell you when it’s ready.
Pandya: How do you encourage the development of creativity
and conviction both in poets – in your leadership role in the Poetry
Foundation – as well as in private sector business?
Barr: I would
say in both the key is to develop an appetite for risk. There is an
essential difference between business and art, or poetry, in terms of
the attitude towards risk. I think a businessman seeks as much return
for as little risk as possible. Quite logically, they look for
situations that offer asymmetrical returns – a lot of return with as low
a risk as is possible. An artist, to the contrary, has to embrace risk
to succeed. I think they instinctively realize that if you don’t look
for risk and seek it out in the way you write your poetry and in what
you are exploring you’re probably not going to produce anything of
interest for the future and for your readers. So I think my answer to
your question, to prompt creative behavior in both business and arts,
would be to encourage people to take as much risk as they’re comfortable
with.
Pandya: And how would you help people to gain that comfort?
Barr: I think
through success stories. In my case I played it safe for many years. I
was with Morgan Stanley for 18 years, I loved the fact that I was in the
warm embrace of a big firm with a world-class franchise. When I stepped
out on March 19, 1990, onto a windy street corner and said goodbye to my
bosses of 18 years – the only job I’d ever had – that was risk. I was a
partner in good standing; I wasn’t chased out. I think they were shocked
that I left, but I needed to do that. It was my declaration of
independence as a businessman, to go out on my own and do a kind of
business that I thought the clients wanted and I really wanted to
pursue. Two of my partners joined me in that effort, and it was
successful. But I couldn’t imagine more risk for me as a company man; it
was like stepping out of an airplane at 30,000 feet and then checking to
see if you have a parachute. I lived on adrenalin for six months and it
was the greatest thing I ever did in the business world. At the same
time, at age 47, I was just starting to write this book — and if you’ve
got a life mate with you who’s willing to believe in you, that helps you
to take that risk, too.
LEADERSHIP THE HARD WAY: Ten Months in the Bush
By Scott E. Power
In
1991, David Scott and I, ages 19 and 20 respectively, went camping in
northern Canadian. For ten months, we were in the bush, completely
isolated and cut-off from civilization without electricity, plumbing,
mail, communications, or emergency services. Every day for almost a
year, the pristine and wild nature of our environment demanded we manage
ourselves accordingly: use a map and compass to navigate; protect
ourselves from polar bears, black bears and swarms of mosquitoes;
prepare for contingencies like forest fire; hunt for meat; chop wood and
carry water. The temperatures ranged from -68 degrees below zero in
January to +98 degrees in August. Weather dictated daily activity and
safety was paramount. It was a life changing experience, but one that we
almost didn’t live to have.
On January 29, 1991, the first day of our trip, we made a nearly fatal
mistake. The 1956 single engine DeHavilland Otter bush plane landed us,
and 1500 lbs of gear, on a frozen lake, 100 yards off our mark.
Overlooking the significance of this important detail, we did not adjust
our azimuth accordingly. Consequently, the compass bearing was off just
enough for us to miss our final destination – a small rustic log cabin
over two miles away on the banks of the Little Beaver River; 120 miles
southwest of Churchill, Manitoba, the polar bear capital of the world.
Upon
our arrival that fateful day, the plan was to orienteer through the
frozen muskeg swamp. We estimated it would take 3-4 hours to break a
trail in the deep snow and arrive at the cabin. Instead, it took six
days. We almost froze to death when we were caught without shelter and
forced to build an emergency bivouac for protection. It was a clear
starry night, -68 degrees below zero, and we were alone. Dave and I
huddled together to share heat as we had been trained, fighting for our
lives. There was no one to save us.
That night changed me forever, and I have scars from the frostbite to
prove it. The next five days spent looking for the elusive cabin tested
our physical and emotional limits, taught us hard lessons about the
importance of detail in planning, the destructive side of ego, and the
power of humility in the face of uncertainty and isolation. These
lessons propelled us during the rest of our expedition. And, they have
guided me ever since.
Over the years, people have often asked me to speak about why our
expedition was successful and rewarding in spite of the extreme
hardships. In hindsight, it is clear there were four basic fundamental
reasons why we managed to lead a successful expedition:
1. Passion - From the moment we made the decision to do it, Dave and I
had great passion about our expedition. We could envision success, and
it consumed us for three years as we trained, executed and recovered. We
were full of energy, but our passion was more about vision than emotion.
When the stakes are high, a clear vision is required. There is no room
for irrational behavior. The best leaders are genuine visionaries,
passionate about their objectives, and their passion inspires others to
follow.
2. Preparation – Our training began twelve months before the trip. Dave
and I trained in survival, medical, and navigational skills, planned
logistics, secured rations, bought and tested gear, and completed
training expeditions in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area
Wilderness. We strove to prepare for every contingency and worst case
scenario. Preparation was the difference between success and failure.
Had we not prepared, we could have died on several occasions. Our
preparation and skill gave us a sporting chance for success. The best
leaders and managers always hope for the best but prepare for the
worst.
3. Patience – Generally, Dave and I managed to be patient in the face of
conflict and stress. We knew that anxiety, anger or panic would put our
safety in jeopardy. Patience and poise were vital to our overall
success. Of course, patience was not always easy to achieve. There were
many times when the winter doldrums made us anxious to escape. Reminding
ourselves of the long-term importance of our objectives helped us to
re-focus our efforts, be more patient and eventually achieve our goals.
The ability to exercise patience demonstrates strength of leadership,
confidence in one’s own abilities and those of others.
4. Perseverance – Dave and I had plenty of reasons to quit and escape to
civilization: frigid temperatures, swarms of bugs, epic storms, 24 hour
darkness, threats of polar bears and forest fires, physical and mental
exhaustion, daily drudgery of chores, hunting for food, no communication
or human contact. The ability to “dig-in” when times got tough, showing
mental and physical strength when necessary, helped us to stay the
course. Life and business are often difficult but the ability to
persevere characterizes exemplary leadership.
One
prime example of how passion, preparation, patience and perseverance
helped us lead and manage ourselves in the north was the building of an
auxiliary log cabin as a forest fire contingency plan. As the seasons
changed from winter to summer, forest fires became a huge concern. To
prepare, we decided an auxiliary log cabin was the best overall solution
since shelter is top priority in a survival scenario. The project
spanned two months, including 19 days of construction. Every aspect of
the cabin building process had to be carefully thought out and executed:
site location, cutting and transporting 400 lb logs, construction of the
walls and roof. The process was grueling, logistically difficult and
time consuming. Yet, a second cabin was vital to our long-term safety,
became critical to our daily lives and is still used today.
Leadership and management take on new meaning when living in a remote
wilderness environment where weather and polar bears rule. Wild places
force one to deal with facts and reality “on the ground” while
considering short versus long-term objectives. Ego and myth often cloud
judgment, are counter-productive and can even be life threatening. In
the wilderness, as in business, basic fundamentals of leadership and
management are powerfully effective.
Today, as
a senior member of the business development team at Anthem, a global
brand consultancy in San Francisco, I still rely on the same four
principles. Whether it is a client who requires a breakthrough brand
strategy to increase their market share or a team related issue
regarding deliverables and deadlines, the basic essentials of passion,
preparation, patience and perseverance help me manage and lead more
effectively. Perhaps they will do the same for you.
Note: Scott Power can be contacted at
spower@anthemworldwide.com.
Evangelizing for Customers:
Hewlett-Packard’s Susan Schindelar
By John Joseph
When
Hewlett-Packard’s Susan Schindelar talks about making the company more
customer-focused, she uses the term evangelize. Her passion is in
improving the customer experience, and in HP’s consensus driven culture,
she says, “It’s important to get the right people on board. You have to
evangelize.”
As a Senior Director in HP’s Worldwide Consumer
Marketing group, Schindelar’s message is to speak with one voice to the
customer. This means delivering a consistently positive experience
across along all touch points and all products across the life cycle of
the customer. Achieving this isn’t easy inside a $21.4 billion a year
business which now includes printers, PCs, software, servers and tech
services. It requires broadening the firm’s historical focus beyond
hardware and technical superiority, or what insiders call “speeds and
feeds.”
Schindelar says that making the company more
customer-focused requires empowering employees to make the best
decisions to deliver an orchestrated experience. “If you leave each
business unit to do it themselves, they’ll all do it differently,”
Schindelar notes. “What you get is the same company shouting out with
many voices.”
To understand how consistent the messages were
across different HP products and services, Schindelar’s team mapped a
day in the life of the customer. They looked at every possible customer
interaction, from printing documents at work to listening to music at
home. With this information, Schindelar is now more able to drive home
the importance of a holistic view of the customer and work to bring
different business units together to design a better overall customer
experience.
Schindelar’s learned to evangelize early in her
career at the technology giant. She first worked at HP during a summer
internship while an MBA student at Wharton, and that led to a full time
job. After stints in various marketing posts, she landed in HP’s papers
business – part of their consumables
group. Not only did customers have to be convinced of the added value
of HP paper, so did some of her colleagues. “It was a rapid growth
period for the firm and HP paper was considered . . .well . . .just
paper.” I kept having to remind people at meetings, ‘What about the
paper?’” The constant drumbeat of her message eventually proved
effective. She convinced people that paper was another way for
customers to interact with HP. “They realized it was an enabler to
build the relationship while enhancing the customer’s experience.”
However, spreading the word is a challenge in HP’s
participative decision-making environment. Schindelar says, “You always
have to be networking.” She often taps past managers and colleagues for
help. “I bounce ideas off them. People point you to key decision
makers. Or they point you to who has the information to round out your
business case.”
Often, Schindelar finds creative ways to get the
message across. In an effort to drive the dialogue around the company’s
customer relationship management (CRM) infrastructure, she handed out
copies of a book she had picked up which provides case studies on how
corporations are tying their information systems to their customers and
suppliers. “I ended up buying copies of the book for my staff, my
manager, as well as my infrastructure and IT partners,” Schindelar says,
“I wanted to show how they could help us build stronger customer
relationships and the book lead to better conversations about CRM.”
Today, responsiveness to the customer and marketing
metrics have become very important, particularly with the combination of
cultures after the merger of Compaq with HP. According to Schindelar,
Compaq and HP had very different styles. Compaq had a fast get-it-done
orientation and HP was an analyze it and make sure you talk to enough
people kind of place. “You could see it in meetings,” says
Schindelar. “Compaq folks would ask ‘why do you need that extra
information?’ and HP employees would wonder ‘why do you need it by
Friday?’ It seems the combination of cultures, however, has been
fruitful. The balance between action and analysis, combined with CEO
Carly Fiorina’s emphasis on performance has helped make “customer
focus,” the focus of attention.
It takes a lot of perseverance but the evangelizing
is paying off, Schindelar has found.
“Customer experience and relationships are moving through the
company. The tides are turning – people are
getting it.”
Note: John Joseph is a doctoral student at
Kellogg School, Northwestern University, and he can be reached at
john-joseph@kellogg.northwestern.edu.
Copyright 1996-2004, Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management
University of Pennsylvania.
