To celebrate the appointment of Athol Williams as Poet Laureate of Saïd Business School, and to complement the zine produced by Renée Adams and her MBA and EMBA cohort, the Sainsbury Library is hosting a book display in the Lower Reading Room titled Leading from the Arts & Humanities.
The display highlights the influence of the arts and humanities across the library’s collection, with a particular focus on how poetry, art, theatre, and fiction can inform and inspire effective leadership.
All featured materials can be viewed via the links below (Oxford SSO required) or in person at our display in the Lower Reading Room. Synopses are drawn from https://blackwells.co.uk/.

Poetry & Fiction

• Invitation: Athol Williams’ collection will nourish your soul. It is an invitation to journey along a path of dreams, of discovery and of love. It includes popular poems such as ‘One Finite Life’ and ‘Taking Notice of Time’.
• Talking to a Tree: Poems of a Fragile World With the same honesty and boldness first seen in Heap of Stones, AE Ballakisten presents a collection of poems that instantly resonates with the ‘thinking-feeling’ reader. The book is appropriately dedicated to Nelson Mandela who embodies all that Talking to a Tree hopes for.
• E-Mail from the Soul: New & Selected Leadership Poems: William Ayot’s poetry, prose and performances have helped leaders around the world to pause, reflect and occasionally re-think; to re-engage with their imaginations and refresh themselves on the journey of leadership.
• Nice Work: When Vic Wilcox (MD of Pringle’s engineering works) meets English lecturer Dr Robyn Penrose, sparks fly as their lifestyles and ideologies collide head on. […] In time both parties make some surprising discoveries about each other’s worlds – and about themselves.
• The Art of Rhetoric: Hugely influential upon later Western culture, the Art of Rhetoric is a fascinating consideration of the force of persuasion and sophistry, and a compelling guide to the principles behind oratorical skill.
• The Penguin Book of Historic Speeches: Brian MacArthur brings together the words of over a hundred men and women – from Moses to Mandela – who changed the world through the sheer power of their oratory.
• Antigone; Oedipus the King; Electra: Sophocles’ greatest innovation in the tragic medium was his development of a central tragic figure, faced with a test of will and character […] it is striking that Antigone and Electra both have a woman as their intransigent ‘hero’.

Recommended by Athol Williams

• Dream Work: Dream Work, a collection of forty-five poems originally published in 1986, follows both chronologically and logically Mary Oliver’s American Primitive, which won her the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1983.
• West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems: In this stunning collection of forty poems – nineteen previously unpublished – Mary Oliver writes of nature and love, of the way they transform over time. And the way they remain constant.
• See a biography and some more poems by Mary Oliver at The Poetry Foundation.

Non-Fiction

• Shadow & Act: On every page, Ellison reveals his idiosyncratic and often contrarian brilliance, his insistence on refuting both black and white stereotypes of what an African American writer should say or be.
• Information is Beautiful: A visual guide to how the world really works, through stunning infographics and data visualisations […] making information meaningful, entertaining and beautiful.
• Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All: Too often, companies and individuals assume that creativity and innovation are the domain of the ‘creative types’. But two of the foremost experts in innovation, design and creativity on the planet show us that each and every one of us is creative.
• Crafting Strategy: Embodied Metaphors in Practice: The rationalist approach to strategizing emphasizes analytical and convergent thinking. Without denying the importance of this approach, this book argues that strategists must learn to complement it with a more creative approach to strategizing that emphasizes synthetic and divergent ways of thinking.

For more resources, see our posts about other recent book displays.