Hindustan Times
Management in poetry, strategy in verse
It got uploaded last week, but this 2003 paper is the most unique I’ve read in many years. Not for the ideas it carries or takes forward — as every paper is expected to — but for the treatment. Written in verse, eStrategy by Arkalgud Ramaprasad at University of Illinois, Chicago and Jun Lin, then a doctoral candidate at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale is a paper that will appeal to the poet in scholars and managers.
As for poets, they just might appreciate the “real” world of business and strategy, from which the authors have borrowed ideas — cybernetics, semiotics, general systems theory, biology, psychology, thermodynamics, information theory, organisation theory, and strategic management.
“At the core of its thesis are the symbiotic relationships among three pairs of constructs: organisation and information, information generation and information dissipation, and strategy and entropy,” the authors say. “The semiotic engine drives these three symbioses. Everything, after all, is a construction of our mind.”
I particularly like the paper’s approach to organisation and strategy using information as the medium…
Organisation is information:
About entities, attributes, and relationships,
A construction of our mind.
Information is organisation:
Of signs, signals and symbols,
Through semiotics of our mind
In six clear lines, the authors bring out, delightfully, the inter-relationship between organisations and information. Next…
Organisation generates information,
Information creates organisation,
Through sensation, emotion, and cognition.
Organisation dissipates information,
Information destroys organisation,
Through action and reaction.
To balance generation and dissipation,
Creation and destruction,
Entropy and negentropy,
Is strategy.
Simplistic? Maybe, but the idea of using the medium of poetry, I suppose, is to give a “sense” of the subject rather than details that the mediums of prose or mathematics are far better at.
To me, the idea of using the poetic medium is also to help a reader “see” a concept, an idea, an event. To that extent, this paper is wanting. Living the jargon of management scholars, it fails to expand knowledge into visual images.
Trouble is, perhaps, the authors write for their peers, who “see” and operate under a different, perhaps a more complex reality than the rest of us. Decoding just one word ‘negentropy’, for instance, would add a lot of definitional variables, and clarity. But the poetry would be lost.
The authors faced tough choices and in the final analysis, I feel, have emerged from the ocean of poetry as well as strategy barely with their toes wet. If there is a new idea they propose, it eluded me; if there is a new form, I didn’t get it.
Writing management concepts in verse seems new only because we have stopped engaging with the medium. Else, chapter 12 (Shanti Parva, the largest among 18 chapters) of the Mahabharata by Ved Vyas (in my opinion, the greatest poet and storyteller — ever) carries strategy that can be used not only by businesses but by nations. Vyas and others after him who expanded the world’s largest poem (for statistical junkies it is seven times as large as Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey combined), have taken the poetic medium to heights that remain unvanquished so far.
If the knowledge of statecraft could be etched on minds carrying the oral tradition, one generation after another, over 5,000 years until it finally married technology and first got printed and now digitised, I see no reason why writer-thinkers like Ramaprasad (Ram to those who can’t pronounce his first name) can’t create thrilling tomes on management that deepen knowledge as well as its medium. Maybe this paper will prod other poet-scholars to revive an ancient tradition.
To me, any paper on strategy — in prose, poetry, mathematics, binary, Sanskrit — is incomplete without the referenced signature of Peter Drucker, the creator of management as a discipline. That’s a personal bias, but one I can defend in a room full of PhDs. Other strategy thinkers missing in this paper include Chanakya and Michael Porter.
That aside, eStrategy remains an interesting first attempt at the merger of management with poetry.
(3 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
Loading ...Posted by Gautam Chikermane on Sunday, February 22, 2009 at 6:53 pm
Filed under Research · Tagged Arkalgud Ramaprasad, Chicago, Peter Drucker
thanx 4 d info. intersting analysis.
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I would like to know more about the significance of writings on Strategy through poetry. For example, can all concepts in literature be illuminated through this medium and if it makes grasping the subject any easier. If the only objective is to give the reader a bird’s eye view of the concepts, then the poetic medium would hardly be a necessity.
Now, I have always considered poetry to be a thing of beauty. And I would guess the poetic medium is adopted to express the “beauty in strategy” as experienced by the writers (I assume they are passionate about their research and the subjects they study/teach). To conclude, I think that the idea behind the poetic medium is far from elucidating any concepts but to portray a sense of wonder and beauty that the authors experience in their work.
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Gautam Chikermane Reply:
February 23rd, 2009 at 6:33 pm
Hradayesh: I don’t disagree with you on the idea behind the poetic medium. Maybe, it is to express a “sense of wonder”, as you point out.
But in an academic paper, we expect knowledge to be taken forward. That I didn’t see in this paper. When the paper is written in verse, the sense of that knowledge needs to be expressed. Of course, I do understand the risk that the authors have taken in using as delicate a medium as poetry to grapple with hard business or strategy. But Ved Vyas has done it brilliantly. So, it can be done.
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