“Poems have no value,” told me a French friend, high ranked executive in a public enterprise. I disagreed. Thus came the idea to introduce poetry in my course – it’s been three years already. Poetry in a business school ? “You’re taking risks,” noticed a colleague. What would the students say about it? I had taught some creativity methods during my early years as professor and the results weren’t very exciting.
Thinking out of the box is a poetic exercise. Despite the contemporary will of exiting one’s confort zone, students in many schools as well as enterprise managers still find it difficult. Today, many of the anonymous comments left by my students are enthusiastic (e.g. “Love it, it made me think differently”). I’ve got the chance to often teach to international students and I’ve noticed that the more diverse a class is, the better for this kind of seminar.
I spent the last summer in Greece, hosted at the Electrical and Electronic Engineering School of the NTUA by Yannis Maistros. We were discussing about his field of expertise and the idea about making a seminar for a Masters program. He was telling me about linguistics, the criteria of data analysis and the challenge of addressing creativity within this framework. Personally, I don’t know much about linguistics, so I suggested a seminar on innovative design instead, including both organized and poetic thought, which he also liked.
Thus, tomorrow and the day after I’m organizing this seminar at the NTUA. You can find the open invitation for participation here.
