Exclusive: At Oxford Saïd, The New Poet Laureate Wants MBAs To Feel Before They Calculate

John F. Kennedy once said that “when power corrupts, poetry cleanses.” More than 60 years later, Oxford Saïd Business School is testing that proposition in a place not usually associated with verse: the MBA classroom. 

In March, Oxford Saïd appointed Athol Williams as its Poet Laureate, a role the storied university described as a first for a business school anywhere in the world. The idea is not ornamental: Poetry, the school said in its announcement, can help cultivate the human skills leadership increasingly demands, including judgment, empathy, and the ability to engage complexity.

For Williams, the appointment is an acknowledgment of work he has already been doing: The senior fellow of management practice in strategy has been weaving poetry into his teaching since joining the Saïd School in 2023.

MORE THAN A POETRY CLASS

What makes Williams an unusual figure for the role is that he arrives not from the literary margins of business education but from its center. He spent roughly two decades in business, including as a senior partner at Bain & Company, and has built an academic life that stretches across strategy, ethics, philosophy, and public leadership.

Williams is emphatic about what this is not.

“I’m not looking to have a poetry class,” he tells Poets&Quants in an exclusive interview. “Just as I don’t like ethics classes, I think we’ve got to thread it through.”

That instinct is central to his view of management education. Business schools, he says, love to talk about complexity, but too often stop there, as if naming the condition were enough. The real question, for leaders and for educators, is what to do with it.

“Saying the world’s complex is kind of saying absolutely nothing,” Williams says. “The question is, given the complexity, what must I do Monday morning in the office?”

FROM COMPLEXITY TO CLARITY – AND ACTION 

Management education, Williams says, cannot simply teach students to admire ambiguity. It has to help them find enough clarity inside it to act. Williams starts with strategy, a discipline of trade-offs and value creation. He moves from there to philosophy and corporate responsibility, arguing that leaders must wrestle simultaneously with economic, social, and moral obligations, not outsource conscience to a CSR department and call it a day.

Then comes poetry.

For Williams, poetry is where leaders learn to move between analysis and feeling, between head and heart. Writing it can help students understand themselves and express ideas with precision. Reading it can sharpen their tolerance for ambiguity and deepen their attention to other people. In his account, poetry is not an escape from business reality. It is one way into it.

“If it’s true that we feel first before we even think,” he says, “then when we as humans interact, shouldn’t we be using tools like poetry, like music, like art, to connect first?”

WINNING OVER THE SKEPTICS

Not everyone buys in immediately.

Williams says classroom reactions tend to break into thirds. One group is instantly moved. Another hangs back, uncertain, waiting to see how it fits. And a third wonders, in effect, why the class cannot get on with “the real business.”

That resistance does not bother Williams much. In fact, it fascinates him.

“I’m often then drawn to the skeptics,” he says.

His method is practical. He asks students to write something, anything. Start simple. Then push further. How does it feel? Why does it matter? The point is not to produce the next Yeats or Emily Dickinson. It is to experience what language can do.

That is where Williams’ business credibility matters. He knows how to talk to a room full of MBAs because he can meet them on their own ground. He has worked in private equity, advised CEOs, and sat in the worlds that many students aspire to enter. So when he tells skeptics that poetry can make them better at influencing others, he is not making a soft appeal. He is making a career argument.

“Half of the victory in influencing others is telling a good story,” he says.

That may be the most important bridge in Williams’s case for poetry at a business school. He is not asking students to renounce ambition; he’s arguing that ambition without emotional range, moral seriousness, or the ability to connect is incomplete.

WHY THIS MOVE MAKES SENSE IN THIS MOMENT

Oxford’s official explanation for creating the role of poet laureate is that poetry can develop judgment, empathy, and a deeper capacity to engage ambiguity.

Williams agrees, but his own diagnosis is broader. He sees the moment as one defined by fraying connection: connection to one another, to institutions, even to the natural world. Technology extends contact but often at the cost of intimacy. Work can become more remote even as leaders are asked to manage more people, more difference, and more strain.

That, he says, is why poetry belongs now.

“I think what’s going to hold our societies together, what’s going to hold humanity together, what’s going to hold our businesses together, is the more we can connect with each other.”

He is careful not to oversell it. Poetry is not a silver bullet. Nor is he trying to force-feed it into every corner of the curriculum. His plan is lighter touch than that: a few lines in class, a poem folded into a discussion of corruption or leadership, writing workshops for those who want them, readings in the building, poems on the walls.

Bring poetry into the school, he says, and see what happens.

A QUIETLY RADICAL IDEA FOR BUSINESS EDUCATION

Business schools have spent years trying to produce more ethical, reflective, socially attuned leaders, usually by adding courses, frameworks, and slogans. Williams is proposing something both smaller and harder to measure: that leaders may need help becoming more fully human before they become more effective executives.

That may sound improbable in a finance classroom. Then again, so did the idea of a poet laureate in a business school – until Oxford made it official.

“I don’t see poetry as a luxury,” Williams says. “I just want to bring it into the building and see what happens.”

Read Athol Williams’s poetry here.

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