When John Barr speaks about risk, it’s natural to assume he’s talking about finance. After all, Barr’s been active in investment banking for more than 30 years -- first as a director at Morgan Stanley, now as managing director and chairman of SG Barr Devlin (SGBD), a unit of Société Générale (SG). But when Barr sat down to speak with Wharton's Michael Useem, director of the school's Center for Leadership and Change Management, and Mukul Pandya, editor of Knowledge@Wharton, the topic was risk but the context was poetry -- particularly about the way that art can influence business.

Earlier this year Barr, whose poems have been published in six collections, was named president of The Poetry Foundation, which was itself re-named from the Modern Poetry Association after receiving a $100 million gift from philanthropist Ruth Lilly. The Foundation recently celebrated its 50th Poetry Day public reading in Chicago, where the newly appointed U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser read some works. As a businessman-poet Barr may be unique, but he’s not unusual: other such Renaissance people have included the international banker T.S. Eliot, and Kooser himself, who is a retired insurance executive. What follows is an excerpt from a longer interview.

Useem: There’s a long tradition of people in business, including T.S. Eliot, writing poetry. You took it a step further to be involved in The Poetry Foundation, serving as President. Why did you take on these roles in addition to your very busy life as an investment banker?

Barr: To me this is the culmination of the two rivers of my life that have run in parallel courses, and that never before converged. A career in business that now includes about 32 years on Wall Street has always been a source of joy to me. Unlike my father who worked for a railroad, I love my work and was really delighted to find that a line of work that involved people I respected and clients I could serve. So this career has been personally rewarding. The other river of my life has been poetry and I really couldn’t imagine my life without that. It’s been a central thing to me ever since high school. So I’ve been writing for 40 years and publishing for the last 20 years and I’ve had a number of books that have been brought out by various people -- but I never thought I’d get the chance to put the two together. So when the opportunity rose just a year ago to potentially be the first president of the foundation where the money and the poetry come together, I thought, "Wow, this is worth moving to Chicago for."

Useem: You’ve used the phrase before, tickling the dragon’s tail, and you’ve used the story of physicists who were fooling around with two pieces of uranium and managed to bring them too close together, resulting in a brief burst of radiation. So it’s a question of how you see business and poetry complement and inform one another, and is there a danger of getting too close -- with a result that is explosively not what you want.

Barr: I think it is reasonable for us to ask that the Poetry Foundation run itself as efficiently as a small, well-run, for-profit enterprise. There’s no reason poets can’t tie their shoelaces just like everybody else. And the people here, on the staff, all have a passion for poetry, but they bring something else as well. So we’re going to have a Website editor who knows all about the Internet; and we have a magazine editor who runs Poetry Magazine and knows the business of publishing. The point is I think we are internalizing, in our employee group, that same phenomenon of two globes of uranium that we’re trying to bring together for energy but not for destruction. So far, so good -- but I think the way it could go wrong is if we had a heavy-handed approach where we treated this art like any other business, without sensitivity to what’s special and different about art generally and poetry in particular. That can be destructive. But there’s plenty of poetry-heads around here, including my own, that don’t want that to happen.

Useem: How can business learn from the arts, from Shakespeare, from poetry, from creative writing of all kinds? Wallace Stevens [a vice-president of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co. who would win the National Book Award for Poetry] maintained two separate identities, but you are known within the business world as a poet in addition to serving as an investment banker. How do the ideas of poetry inform what you do as an investment banker, and how could those ideas as a poet inform others in the business world as well?

Barr: I think that a life of poetry -- as a reader or a writer -- gives one an appreciation of the fullness and complexity of things. The process of writing a poem is really one of synthesis and inclusion -- T.S. Eliot has written about that very well. You basically find a group of words in a certain sequence that have the magic within them of capturing and containing a moment of external reality. There’s a mystery to that, and there’s also an inclusion that goes beyond anything that we might be able to simply put in a rational sentence.

That sense of art expanding to the limits of the human experience makes for a better decision-maker in the business world, because it tends to offset the tendency to reduce every business question to a simple algorithm or a simple proposition that we can boil down and make a decision about. So all of us I think are constantly managing two contending forces: one is to simplify so as to understand and decide, which is much of what a businessman does, in my experience; at the same time not injuring the complexity of the full fabric. And I think that my life in poetry has kept me alert to that. In serving clients, I’ve done a better job because I’ve appreciated that there’s more in the room than just a voice on the telephone.

So that’s what it has done for me. I would hope it did that for other people -- I don’t think there’s a simple transposition where I could go to Macbeth, read the morality tales of how he came to power and then transport it to the board room. It hasn’t worked that way for me. But I think that in a sense of art-inspiriting approach to a broader business mind, it’s helped me that way.

Useem: Many people in all walks of life, not just business, say ‘I just don’t have the talent or training to appreciate the subtleties of Shakespeare or the meaning of great poetry.’ What would you say to a person who is a little bit skittish or hesitant to turn to poetry, or to creative arts more generally?

Barr: I think it has to do with risk, and I think it has to do with comfort. I’ve spent long periods of my life not understanding the poems in the New Yorker magazine. In fact I’m still not sure, even though I live and breathe poetry. Some poems are elusive on purpose and some are dealing with subjects that are hard to talk about. But my encouragement to people with that opinion about poetry is that effort is rewarded, and there’s always some kinds of poetry that are going to be obtainable on the first hearing. Billy Collins has done a great service to poetry because he writes wonderfully, but people can understand him on the first hearing.

So there’s no ‘one kind’ of poetry any more than there is one kind of business. I would greatly encourage -- for what it does for your life -- the effort of finding some part that you’re comfortable with. It’s also partly a matter of being comfortable with ambiguity -- and I think that makes for a better person, a better-functioning person. Certainly poems never come to rest; they often deal with things that are inherently contradictory, and they’re trying to find a resolution in the way they work through the art. I remember my father, who was not a literary man, asking, 'Why do we need to go to a play, why don’t we just read what it’s about.' There was that point of view, that attitude. And I think the point is that the complexity of the play itself puts us into the fullness of it but remains at the same time ambiguous. If we’re comfortable with the ambiguity that’s inherent in art we’ll probably be comfortable with the ambiguities that we’re bound to encounter in business.

Useem: If a reader is drawn to the kind of thinking you just expressed, drawing upon poetry or other areas of the arts to become more effective in what they’re doing -- whatever their walk of life -- where would you have them start?

Barr: If it’s a matter of poetry, I would start with art that you can enjoy. The teaser, the side door into art is through pleasure, amusement or entertainment. Samuel Johnson once said the end of art is to instruct through pleasing, and that has stuck with me all my life. It means you shouldn’t go to the Museum of Modern Art and stand there puzzling in front of art that you find forbidding or cold or inscrutable. You should find some art that you enjoy, and it could be, well, Huckleberry Finn. There’s art that I love, and I go back to those things again and again. And if you’re not getting it, I sure wouldn’t beat yourself over the head with it. Specifically, I’d mention a couple of poets that I think are accessible to anyone: Billy Collins and Mary Oliver are both wonderful poets living and writing today with large audiences; their books are best sellers within the poetry world. And if you like them, there’s plenty more where that came from.

Pandya: You spoke generally about approachability, but we’re also talking about how poetry has influenced your understanding of ambiguity and complexity and its connection to business. Given that Knowledge@Wharton is targeted at business readers, are there particular authors that you found particularly compelling in understanding that complexity, while still having some application to the business decisions that you face?

Barr: I might start with William Butler Yeats, who many believe to be the greatest English-language poet of the 20th century. He had a poem that was published as he was approaching middle age; this is most of a century ago, called The Fascination of What’s Difficult. The point of my story is that Yeats had a life outside of poetry -- he was a founder of the Irish National Theater in Dublin -- and the poem talks about the aggravations of trying to put on a play, with actors quitting and budgets overrun; and all the stuff that we all deal with in running a business, and how he reconciles that. And he doesn’t really reconcile it -- he understands that the poetry is like a horse in a shed -- it’s a reference to Pegasus -- waiting to break through the doors and run off, and literally fly off as a winged horse. Any poet that has spent a life out there trying to do things in the external world, like Yeats with the Irish Theater, is likely to capture things that you just asked about. So I tend to go with poets like that.

Useem: As you have spent your career in investment banking. Simultaneously you have been a practicing poet -- has your investment banking experience informed your poetry?

Barr: Not until late in my writing career. I remember when I was a graduate student in business school, I was standing in a room -- it was like a boardroom with walnut paneling -- and I tried to write a poem about that instead of studying, and it was dreadful. I threw it away, as I had thrown away a lot of poems. So I couldn’t transport the literal business experience, the trappings and furnishings of a business experience, into my poetry; and really didn’t write about it in a direct way.

But to my surprise, when I wrote a book called Grace that was published in 1999, there is a fictional character that is a takeoff on Donald Trump, who is my take on a hustler-businessman-promoter. So it came spilling out in that book in the form of a fictional character that gave me an opportunity to say everything that I wanted to say. So in my life experience there’s no predicting where or when the real experience will pop up in a poem -- it could be many decades later or it could be on the spot. You know some of great poems have been written on the death of a father, or mother or son. So it’s not to say that it all has to incubate down there for 40 years, but I do think you have to wait for the poem to tell you when it’s ready.

Pandya: How do you encourage the development of creativity and conviction both in poets -- in your leadership role in the Poetry Foundation -- as well as in private sector business?

Barr: I would say in both the key is to develop an appetite for risk. There is an essential difference between business and art, or poetry, in terms of the attitude towards risk. I think a businessman seeks as much return for as little risk as possible. Quite logically, they look for situations that offer asymmetrical returns -- a lot of return with as low a risk as is possible. An artist, to the contrary, has to embrace risk to succeed. I think they instinctively realize that if you don’t look for risk and seek it out in the way you write your poetry and in what you are exploring you’re probably not going to produce anything of interest for the future and for your readers. So I think my answer to your question, to prompt creative behavior in both business and arts, would be to encourage people to take as much risk as they’re comfortable with.

Pandya: And how would you help people to gain that comfort?

Barr: I think through success stories. In my case I played it safe for many years. I was with Morgan Stanley for 18 years, I loved the fact that I was in the warm embrace of a big firm with a world-class franchise. When I stepped out on March 19, 1990, onto a windy street corner and said goodbye to my bosses of 18 years -- the only job I’d ever had -- that was risk. I was a partner in good standing; I wasn’t chased out. I think they were shocked that I left, but I needed to do that. It was my declaration of independence as a businessman, to go out on my own and do a kind of business that I thought the clients wanted and I really wanted to pursue. Two of my partners joined me in that effort, and it was successful. But I couldn’t imagine more risk for me as a company man; it was like stepping out of an airplane at 30,000 feet and then checking to see if you have a parachute. I lived on adrenalin for six months and it was the greatest thing I ever did in the business world. At the same time, at age 47, I was just starting to write this book -- and if you’ve got a life mate with you who’s willing to believe in you, that helps you to take that risk, too.