JOLLY DAYS

Steve Jobs Hearts William Blake

It's something of a show-stopper that CEOs have libraries, let alone read. But that is what this article indicates:

“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.”

Hope Sidney Harman didn't miss that poets also express the complexity of our buzzing, blooming world, rather than simply providing Cliff Notes about the resplendent ambiguity of reality.

The article says that Steve Jobs is a fan of William Blake.