Planning is a big part of every executive’s business life, but reading Robert Burns isn’t. And that’s a shame, because if planning has a poet laureate, Scotland’s famous bard is it.
Executives, for example, can gain a great return on time invested sitting down with To a Mouse. Formally entitled To a Mouse, On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough, the 48-line poem published in 1785 offers pure business wisdom. Whether or not you should enjoy it with a wee dram of whisky and some haggis is open to debate. But the fact that it offers great management lessons based on Burns’s experience as a farmer is not.
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In the fall of 1785, Burns was plowing a field, probably with a horse-drawn, hand-held plough. As the story goes, he mistakenly ran over a mouse’s nest, leaving the rodent in question homeless for the winter. As an ardent animal lover (read On Seeing a Wounded Hare Limp by Me, Which a Fellow Had Just Shot At), he was so distraught by this sad turn of events that he composed his famous poem about it on the spot.