In the classrooms of the modern business school, the language of numbers reigns supreme. There are spreadsheets glowing on laptop screens, regression outputs flickering in lecture slides, and equations marching across whiteboards like disciplined troops. The quants are in charge.
What about the human being inside the spreadsheet?
At the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, that question has been given a rather unusual answer. The school has appointed a Poet Laureate, the first such position in any business school globally, naming the distinguished South African poet and scholar Dr Athol Williams to the role.
The idea may sound improbable at first glance, a dash of literary whimsy in an environment known for case studies and capital markets. Look a little deeper, however, and it begins to feel less like whimsy and more like wisdom.
As Professor Mette Morsing, the school’s Dean, put it when announcing the appointment, “Poetry in a business school provides a so far under-appreciated, yet rich, vehicle to sharpen perception, strengthen critical thinking and deepen empathy…”
Leadership is not merely the mastery of balance sheets. It is the relation to people. And people, inconveniently for the quants, do not behave like equations.
They feel. They fear. They hope. And that is where poetry comes in.
The Missing Language of Leadership
Modern management education teaches students how to analyse almost everything, and that should include themselves.
Students become fluent in the language of markets and metrics. They learn to optimise portfolios, structure incentives, and build valuation models with mathematical elegance. Yet the language required to navigate trust, loyalty, grief or moral courage rarely appears on the syllabus.
Poetry, by contrast, lives precisely in that terrain. Athol Williams has long argued that poetry opens a deeper form of perception. In his own reflections on the craft, he describes poetry as “both a mirror and a window” – a mirror that helps us reflect on our lives, and a window that allows us to imagine new possibilities.
It is not difficult to see why this matters in leadership. A CEO confronting a moral dilemma, a manager guiding a team through uncertainty, or a founder navigating failure does not need more formulas. They need judgement, compassion and perspective.
“What we’ve done in business, in particular, is we’ve removed this human element,” explains Dr Williams. “We think it’s all money and technology, but it’s those things, plus people. Great leaders are ones who can relate to other people in meaningful ways. Poetry is a powerful resource that leaders can draw on.’
A Poet Who Knows the Price of Integrity
Athol Williams is not merely a poet invited to sprinkle metaphor over management lectures. He is also an ethicist and anti-corruption campaigner who has paid a personal price for his convictions.
In South Africa, Williams became a prominent whistleblower during the investigation into state capture and corruption. His testimony at the Zondo Commission exposed wrongdoing at the highest levels of power. The experience forced him into exile from his homeland.
It also deepened the themes of justice, courage, and moral responsibility that run through his work. In one of his poems, Williams writes about confronting injustice and refusing to remain silent. The verse carries the quiet insistence that ethical choices are rarely comfortable ones. The poem does not read like a management case study, but its lesson is unmistakably about leadership.
The boardroom, after all, is not immune from moral compromise. Leaders face moments when profit collides with principle. The spreadsheet may provide data, but it cannot supply courage. Poetry, however, sometimes can.
The Power of Words
The idea that poetry might belong in business education is not as far-fetched as it first appears. Some of the most iconic figures in business have spoken about the role of the humanities in shaping their thinking.
Steve Jobs famously described technology as something that becomes truly powerful only when combined with the humanities. “Technology alone is not enough,” he once said. “It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our hearts sing.”
Jobs himself was deeply influenced by literature and calligraphy. The aesthetic sensibility that shaped Apple’s products emerged as much from artistic inspiration as engineering precision.
That blending of disciplines is precisely what business schools increasingly recognise they must cultivate. Because the world leaders are stepping into is not a neat equation. It is a complicated, messy narrative.
“Poetry pushes our students to wonder about ‘reality’, says Professor Mette Morsing, “bringing tacit assumptions to light, and engaging curiously with worldly ambiguity.”
Shakespeare in the Boardroom
Oxford is not the first place to introduce literature into the study of leadership. At Washington University’s Olin Business School, Shakespeare has been used in MBA classrooms to explore power, ambition, and ethical dilemmas.
Plays like Macbeth and King Lear offer vivid explorations of leadership gone wrong. Students analyse characters who rise to power, misuse it, and confront the consequences. The lessons are uncannily contemporary.
Macbeth, driven by ambition and seduced by prophecy, becomes a cautionary tale about moral compromise. King Lear, blinded by pride and poor judgement, offers a study in the dangers of surrounding oneself with flatterers.
At Warwick Business School, Shakespeare has likewise been used to illuminate complex leadership scenarios. Through the playwright’s characters, students encounter dilemmas that feel surprisingly familiar to anyone who has navigated corporate politics.
After all, Shakespeare understood organisational dynamics long before the phrase existed.
The Literature of Leadership
In France, NEOMA Business School has gone further still. The school offers a 15-hour course for first year Masters in Management students to explore how literature can illuminate management practice.
Students engage with classic works of fiction and philosophy, drawing leadership insights from authors who never set foot in a corporate strategy meeting. The aim is not to teach students how to quote Tolstoy in board meetings, but to cultivate reflection, empathy, and interpretive skill.
As the dean of NEOMA, Delphine Manceau explains, “at a time when organisations are evolving in an increasingly complex and uncertain world, it’s essential to provide future managers with the intellectual skills that go beyond technical skills.”
The course developed and taught by by Agathe Mezzadri-Guedj is proving to be immensely popular with students, who appreciate the dialogue between literature and management.
Literature forces readers to inhabit other lives. It compels them to confront ambiguity, and rarely offers neat answers. That ambiguity turns out to be excellent training for leadership, because real-world decisions rarely come with tidy conclusions either.
Georgia Tech and the Language of Reflection
Another notable experiment has taken place at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business, where courses have incorporated poetry and reflective writing into leadership development.
The Bourne Chair in Poetry, a position at an STEM institution is itself a kind of institutional poem: a declaration that numbers without stories are incomplete.
Students read poems, write their own reflections, and examine how language shapes the way they understand themselves as leaders.
The results have surprised even sceptics. Participants often report that poetry forces them to slow down their thinking. It interrupts the habitual rush toward efficiency and outcome, and invites reflection.
And reflection is the soil from which judgement grows.
Compassion in an Age of Algorithms
We are living through an era when artificial intelligence can write reports, algorithms can optimise supply chains, and data can predict consumer behaviour with startling accuracy.
In such a world, the competitive advantage of human leaders may increasingly lie not in analytical capability but in emotional intelligence.
Compassion. Curiosity. Connection. These are not qualities easily measured by a spreadsheet, yet they are essential for leadership in complex organisations.
Poetry, by its very nature, cultivates attention to human experience. It teaches readers to notice subtle emotions, shifting perspectives, and unspoken tensions. That attentiveness may turn out to be a surprisingly valuable management skill.
The Courage to Imagine
There is another reason poetry belongs in the business classroom. It nurtures imagination. Innovation is rarely born from rigid thinking. It emerges when someone dares to imagine a world that does not yet exist.
The poet’s craft is essentially an exercise in imagining possibilities. It reorders language to reveal new ways of seeing. In business, that same imaginative leap often separates incremental improvement from transformative innovation.
The entrepreneurs who change industries, from Steve Jobs to Elon Musk, often display a strangely poetic quality in their thinking. They articulate visions that seem improbable until they suddenly become inevitable.
In that sense, poetry is cognitive training for visionary thinking.
The Business School of the Future
The appointment of a Poet Laureate at Oxford Saïd may seem like a small gesture, but it carries symbolic weight. For decades, business education has wrestled with the question of whether it teaches leaders merely how to succeed, or also how to live well.
After the financial crisis of 2008, critics argued that business schools had overemphasised technical skill at the expense of ethical judgement. The response has been a gradual shift toward broader forms of education that integrate ethics, philosophy, and the humanities.
Saïd Business School’s experiment takes that impulse one step further. It suggests that the cultivation of leadership may require not only case studies and analytics but also moments of reflection where language slows down, the mind wanders, and insight quietly appears.
“You can’t predict what’s going to happen,” Dr Williams reflects. “The role could build bridges across the university….So I think it is visionary on behalf of Dean Mette Morsing to open the School and create some space for poetry. It presents possibility.”
“Poetry comes from within. So fits naturally into the School’s mission of having impact from within.”
When Numbers Meet Poetry
The quants need not fear the poet. In fact, they may need him. The quantitative tools of business – statistics, finance, analytics – remain indispensable, and help leaders understand the structure of markets and organisations.
But they do not tell leaders what matters. For that, a different language is required. Poetry speaks to the inner life of leadership: the choices we make when no formula applies, the values we carry into decisions, the empathy we extend to those affected by them.
In the end, perhaps the goal of business education is not simply to produce better analysts. It is to produce wiser human beings.
And wisdom has always had a poetic side.
About the author
Matt Symonds is Chief Editor of BlueSky Thinking, and host of BlueSky Media Connect, bringing together b-schools and universities to meet editors from FT, BBC, Bloomberg, WSJ, The Economist, NYTimes and other global / regional media.
He is the S of QS, co-founding QS Quacquarelli Symonds, publishers of the QS World University Rankings. Matt I also co-Founder and Director of Fortuna Admissions, a coaching dream team of former business school and university admissions professionals from top-tier institutions, including Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, INSEAD, LBS, Chicago Booth, Columbia, Northwestern Kellogg, Berkeley Haas.
Matt co-host the CentreCourt MBA & Masters Festivals with John A. Byrne and Poets & Quants. Author of the international bestseller, “Getting the MBA Admissions Edge” sponsored by Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Bain, BCG, he writes about Higher Education and management for BBC, Times of India and formerly Forbes, The Economist and Bloomberg.
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