The Return of the Human Whisper

Fateme Banishoeib’s poetic primer for the unbalanced culture of business

Too often, books on leadership focus on technique out of context. Leadership is taken to be a tactical skill, a practical matter of gathering resources and investments, bringing people on board, and keeping them on task. Business leadership, in this view, is like the work of an engineer tasked with maintaining an intricate machine.

This mechanistic perspective has its value, but misses something essential in business: The human experience at the core of our enterprise.

Fateme Banishoeib has served her time in corporate mangement, and knows well the scientific mindset that structures the world of business, having been educated as a chemist. However, she also has the wisdom, to heed the call of poetry, a Whisper that reminds us of the rich subjective texture that can never be revealed in an analytic dashboard of business metrics.

In the first two decades of this century, business has seen the construction of astonishingly powerful tools of automation without any counterbalancing development of a vigorously qualitative approach to sustain the cultural and psychological needs of commercial organizations and the individuals who must live within them. Banishoeib’s new book, The Poetry of Leadership, offers a step forward in this field, as a tool for professional development through the cultivation of a metaphorical mindset.

Banishoeib offers her own original poetry of business, along with questions that guide readers along their own quest, retraining them to hear once again, over the din of data, their own Whisper of unmeasured motivation.

Once upon a time, business professionals supposed that they could manage whatever they could measure. Now, in a time when our quantitative measurements have outstripped our capacity for management, leaders must learn to turn inward again to rediscover their human capacity for coherence.

The Poetry of Leadership is a beautiful tool with which to begin that quest.