Laura’s Winning Ideas

My Haiku for this week’s work:

Tidy piles surround
Storyboards hold intention
Report underway

Shouldn’t all managers write poetry for their team? We need the break from our pace, a moment of thoughfulness. Then we return with a new perspective.

I admire James A. Autry, author of Love & Profit, The Art of Caring Leadership, 1991.

He wrote poems about work, and these are a few from his book:

UNTITLED

Sometimes you just connect,
like that,
no big thing maybe
but something beyond the usual business stuff.
It comes and goes quickly
so you have to pay attention,
a change in the eyes
when you ask about the family,
a pain flickering behind the statistics
about a boy and girl in school,
or about seeing them every other Sunday.
An older guy talks about his bride,
a little affectation after twenty-five years.
A hot-eyed acheiver laughs before you want him to.
Someone tells about his wife’s job
or why she quit to stay home.
An old joker needs another laugh on the way
to retirement.
A woman says she spends a lot of her salary
on an au pair
and a good one is hard to find
but worth it because there’s nothing more important
than the baby.
Listen.
In every office
you hear the threads
of love and joy and fear and guilt,
the cries for celebration and reassurance,
and somehow you know that connecting those threads
is what you were supposed to do
and business takes care of itself.

THE MEMO

It looked like any other memo,
corporate proper and neat,
with “to” and “from” and “cc” in order,
with margins straight
and text centered.
It came through inter-office mail
and appeared on our desks
just like any other memo.
It was the subject,
“Three of the greatest lies,”
that caught our eyes and made us read,
1. You can eat anything with false teeth.
2. I’ve never lied to you.
3. We think we got it all.
Then it talked of CAT scans
and something called a
squamous-cell lung carcinoma,
strange words to find in our in-boxes.

Of course, it was not the first memo
about a change in plans,
nor was it even the first memo about fear.
But we want action memos,
you see,
we want memos
that leave us with something to do.
And this was a memo
about waiting.

- James A. Autry

“I slept and dreamt that life was Joy;
and then I awoke and realized
that life was Duty.
And then I went to work–and, lo
and behold I discovered that
Duty can be Joy.”

- Rabindranath Tagore
Indian Spritual leader

Finally, a poem I found by Rumi, in a book called Rumi, Hidden Music, 2001. I decided this is about Proposal Specialists who produce Winning Proposals:

The Friend who cannot be seen is the most
subtle and precious.
The work that cannot be seen is the most
refined.
The cleverest of all is the one who does not
deceive himself
for he has deceived deceit.