Can #poetryday Save Our Souls?

Seamus HeaneyOn Thursday Umair Haque, self-described author, blogger, thinker, and reformer, suggested #poetryday on Twitter as an antidote to the usual "endless series of tweets about (no offense) trivial stuff" that ordinarily fills his stream.

For some of us -- poets and readers -- everyday is poetry day, but the more I thought about it and saw how others were responding to it, the more I started to think he may be onto something.

I'm not convinced that "poetry is the opposite of the profit motive," as one responder wrote, but I do believe with Seamus Heaney that poetry is "an anthropological necessity because if you didn't have poetry, everything would slip back into media speak."

We need poetry and the attention of the poet because, in Heaney's words, it "helps us to live our lives in the face of destruction."

"I keep getting this funny feeling that our degeneration and the fact that we treat great poetry like stupid rambling might be connected," Umair wrote in another Tweet.

Poet and lecturer David Whyte has been talking about the need for reconnecting with poetry for nearly two decades.

"Corporate America desperately needs the powers historically associated with the poetic imagination not only to see their way through the present whirligig of change, but also, because poetry asks for accountability to a human community, for rootedness and responsibility even as it changes," Whyte wrote in The Heart Aroused, his 1994 book about poetry and the need for more soul in the workplace.

We may never get the news from poetry, as William Carlos Williams posited, but turning away from poetry may prevent us from achieving what Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky called "the goal of our species."


(Disclosure: The author is an award-winning poet who also blogs about poetry at seapoetry.wordpress.com.)

The New Sustainable Economy and You

Maybe people really are hungry for a change. Not the hopey-changey stuff of political change, but the real, tangible change represented by rebooting our economy.

My post yesterday reviewing Hugh MacLeod's Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination and Umair Haque's The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business got more hits than Mark Wahlberg in The Fighter.

And that got me thinking about a talk I gave last year at Temple's Fox School of Business and Wharton's Social Impact club.

The talk was about three things:

1.) The state of our current economy and the opportunity to build a better economic system.
2.) What such change can mean for you (the audience was b-school students).
3.) What social entrepreneurship and social enterprise mean and why it can make a difference.

Ultimately, my talk was about value creation, the kind of value creation Hugh and Umair are talking about.

Here is the slide show from that talk:

Related articles

• Review: Evil Plans and The New Capitalist Manifesto (thegreenskeptic.com)
• A Definition of Social Entrepreneurship (brighthub.com)
• Why We Need Social Entrepreneurship in the Middle East (inc.com)
• Is Social Entrepreneurship sustainable? (e27.sg)
• "Social business could play a big role in the Middle East and North Africa" and related posts (povertynewsblog.blogspot.com)

Review: Evil Plans and The New Capitalist Manifesto

Ever since the financial collapse of 2008, I've sensed a groundswell of an emerging new vision for our economy.

I'm not talking about specific, quick fixes or big government interventions, but a wholesale rebooting away from an economy based upon free credit, cheap oil, and toxic assets.

I'm talking about a new, values-based and highly creative way of doing business, living our lives, and building our world. A better way that unleashes the power of human creativity to do what our species does best: adapt and innovate.

Two new books exemplify this new vision of the world: Hugh MacLeod's Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination and Umair Haque's The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business.

On the surface, these two books appear to have little in common: Haque's is "covered" in crinkled brown paper wrapper, as if the reader should hide this dangerous book; MacLeod's is bright yellow with one of Hugh's trademark purple cartoon monsters practically shouting its subversiveness to the world.

Inside, despite very different writing styles and design, the two authors reveal much more in common.

MacLeod's premise is we should "unify work and love," do what we love and we will create real, lasting value. He believes "we are here to find meaning. We are here to help other people do the same. Everything else is secondary."

Haque asks "What are the wellsprings, deep and true, of a more enduring, meaningful, authentic prosperity?" He believes the future of capitalism requires a "more authentic, sustainable, meaningful value for every dollar, rupee, or renminbi spent."

Neither author delivers a blueprint for the future for readers to follow. Rather, they challenge all of us to create our own "evil plan," our own vision of the world we want to live in.

As Haque suggests, "to destroy less, to create more."

Or as MacLeod puts it in one of his chapter titles, "The 'Creative Life' Is No Longer One of Many Economic Options; It's Now the Only Option We've Got."

Buy these books and read them and go create your own future.

Clean Tech: Unlocking the New Green Economy

"How do we begin reorganizing the industrial economy?" Umair Haque asked in his Edge Economy essay "A Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution."

Haque answers his own question: "By using markets, networks, and communities to alter the way resources are managed: to weave a fabric of incentives for sustainable growth and authentic value creation into the economy – a new economic fabric that's meaningful to people."

I've been thinking a lot about this call to action while developing my new idea to "organize" (to use Haque's term) the green energy financing space. And I've been wrestling with the following questions (among others):

What would it take to infuse new DNA into the way green energy is financed?

Can we redraw the boundaries of value creation in the 21st century?

Can we expand the access to participation in this space?

Can we create a company that is based on the values of integrity, openness, transparency, and "a fierce embrace of what's good" (as Haque writes elsewhere)?

Can we create a company that develops incentives for people to reorganize and manage resources in a way that reduces the barriers to entry for most people?

I'm becoming obsessed by these questions and am trying to create a response to Umair's challenge.

I hope that what I'm working on with a few very smart people will help reduce or eliminate the "clear, durable, structural barriers to efficiency and productivity" in this space.

The pursuit of answers to these questions is one of the reasons I'm leaving Ashoka at the end of this month. I need to focus my time and energy on trying to explode the boundaries of value creation and unlock the new green economy.

Call me a fool, wish me luck – or come along for the ride.