Some decades ago (I’m not sure exactly when, but obviously before the feminist revolution), there was a series of public service advertisements built around the slogan, “Send me a man who reads.” The ads suggested that reading was one of the surest ways of getting ahead in life.

An article in this past Saturday’s New York Times recalled those ads to my mind. The article described how the libraries of leading CEOs revealed the keys to their success. Successful CEOs, it seems, are not only enthusiastic readers, but have very eclectic tastes.

Some of the CEOs mentioned in the article were devoted to poetry. This is not altogether surprising, because poetry encourages creative thinking and fresh approaches to problem solving.

Sidney Harman, founder of a $3 billion corporation that bears his name, was quoted as saying, “I used to tell my senior staff to get me poets as managers.” Mr. Harman favors poets because he regards them as the original systems thinkers. “They look at our most complex environments,” he observes, “and then reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand.”

I can think of at least one contemporary poet who would agree with Mr. Harman on that. Richard Wilbur, who was a combat soldier during World War II, once said that he started writing poetry as a way of imposing order on chaos. Consider these two stanzas from one of his earliest published poems, “First Snow In Alsace”:

Absolute snow lies rumpled on
What shellbursts scattered and deranged,
Entangled railings, crevassed lawn.

As if it didn’t know they’d changed,
Snow smoothly clasps the roofs of homes
Fear-gutted, trustless and estranged.

Like the snow, rhyme and meter soften the horror of war. They also aid us in our efforts to piece together some meaning from tragedy.

Other poetry-loving CEOs include Steven Jobs of Apple. According to the Times, Jobs’ own history of book collecting attests to his “inexhaustible interest” in the works of William Blake.

If seems a bit incongruous that the CEO of a company on the cutting edge of 21st Century technology would be fascinated by the works of an 18th Century English mystical poet, it’s not. Indeed, one can easily imagine how the CEO who just gave us the iPhone might have been inspired by these lines from Blake:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

Dee Hock, the father of the credit card and the founder of Visa, was devoted to the “Rubaiyat” of Omar Khayyam. Why? I suspect it’s because Omar recognized nearly a thousand years ago that people wanted instant gratification. For example:

And as the cock crew, those who stood before
The tavern shouted –- “Open then the Door!
You know how little while we have to stay,
And, once departed, may return no more.”

Even more to the point is this later quatrain:

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and –- sans End.

After reading this article, I’m tempted to tell young people who want to succeed in business that they shouldn’t waste their time going for an M.B.A. They should major in English instead.