In 2018, a community of business professionals met for a week at the House of Beautiful Business in Lisbon, Portugal, an event that encourages residents to seek alternatives to the conventional, objectivist culture of business. From among the residents of the House, joined by other business humanists, decided to assemble a collection of poems to reflect their experiences. Their poetry was gathered into this book, celebrating the potential for a human, emotional, subjective perspective to counterbalance the current obsession with data, digital technology, and artificial intelligence in commercial culture. This community of unlikely poets came together to around the belief that business can be beautiful, but only when the people who practice it are willing to acknowledge the relevance of the whole human experience, rather than focusing on a narrow range of cognitive skills. These poems declare a resistance to the sacrifice of a beautiful world in pursuit of shareholder value.
After the House : Poetry of a New Business