"Through work, human beings earn for themselves and their families, make a difficult world habitable, and with imagination, create some meaning from what they do and how they do it. The human approach to work can be naïve, fatalistic, power-mad, money-grubbing, unenthusiastic, cynical, detached, and obsessive. It can also be selflessly mature, revelatory and life giving; mature in its long-reaching effects, and life giving in the way it gives back to an individual or society as much as it has taken. Almost always it is both, a sky full of light and dark, with all the varied weather of an individual life blowing through it."

from Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as A Pilgrimage of Identity

David Whyte has been bringing his unique blend of poetry and insight into the world of work for more than twenty years. His work in organizations around the world takes many different forms, from formal dinner talks and conference keynotes, to retreats and seminars. He has an especial affection for his long term work inside specific organizations, often over years, building a critical mass of executives and leaders who have learned through his work, the language, metaphors and urgent necessities of conversational leadership. His sessions have been woven into long term executive leadership programs with organizations such as Mattel, Standard Chartered Bank, The Gap, The Boeing Company, Thames water, Novartis, Astrazenica, RWE and the Royal Air Force. He is a faculty member of Templeton College, Oxford University, where he is an Associate Fellow.

His collaborations include work with Richard Olivier, using Shakespeare's plays, especially Hamlet, as a template for the exploration of some of the difficult dynamics of contemporary leadership. His work has been featured in Leader to Leader, Fast Company, and The Harvard Business Review.

For booking information, please contact Julie Quiring at Many Rivers, 360.221.1324.

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Poetry, Work & Vocation

Work is a very serious matter indeed. We freight our work with meaning and identity, and fight hard and long for some kind of purpose in our endeavors. Vocation can never be defined solely by the organization for which we currently work, though it should be the beneficiary of our best powers. Vocation is a moveable, often unspeakable frontier, between what we want for ourselves and what the world demands of us. It is this interior foundation married to the necessities of the outer world that make up a life’s work. Organizations need to understand this wellspring of human creativity in order to shape conversations that are invitational to an individual's greater powers. The insights available to us through good poetry can provide a compelling vision, grant needed courage and stir the dormant imagination of individuals and organizations alike.

Conversational Leadership

Over twenty years David Whyte has developed a body of work and a series of seminars focused on the conversational nature of leadership in today’s world. He notes especially that most executives are promoted out of their original core technical competency and into the field of key human relationships, relationships that are mostly sustained through holding necessary and courageous conversations.

Understanding the Nature of the Conversation

David brings the insights, focus and courage in the poetic tradition to bear on these necessary conversations and lays out the precise steps that individuals must take when they attempt to start a real conversation and then keep it alive through time and tide in the life of an organization. His work is compelling and many have said riveting, his recitation and explication of poetry creates a real physical sense that individuals are grappling with the unspoken truths of life and leadership that are often left unspoken and that many have difficulty even articulating.

He especially looks at the necessity for a private but courageous self-examination and self-knowledge. He looks at the way this foundational interior conversation enables those in positions of responsibility to make sense of the hundreds of exterior public conversations, which can entrap and besiege them. His work is not only sustaining and nourishing for individuals irrespective of the organization for which they work, but also revitalizing and emboldening for those who work together day after day and who wish to bring a fresh perspective and a fresh language to their shared endeavors.