The NYT reveals that many successful business leaders are avid readers, and writers, of poetry. No surprise there.

However, they correlate this love to the want of books, and then to the need for libraries. One could almost use this tortured logic to say the people who house the largest collection of books are likely to be the most successful. I think they are missing the forest for the trees (pun not intended), but nevertheless a more significant message is not lost in the article:

Poetry speaks to many C.E.O.’s. “I used to tell my senior staff to get me poets as managers,” says Sidney Harman, founder of Harman Industries, a $3 billion producer of sound systems for luxury cars, theaters and airports. Mr. Harman maintains a library in each of his three homes, in Washington, Los Angeles and Aspen, Colo. “Poets are our original systems thinkers,” he said. “They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand.”

Exactamundo!

The poetry of information security is the act of looking at environments and reducing the complexity to something that can be understood and therefore secured.