What does a sonnet have to do with strategy? What do a city's patterns of social and economic growth tell us about business development? What can a 1,600-year-old mummy tell us about our own work and life? These are all ways that executives in Wharton's Advanced Management Program have broadened their perspectives and gained skills in recognizing patterns in the world around them.

To see new opportunities or recognize when the world is changing, managers need to refine their abilities for pattern recognition. Professor Ian MacMillan points out to AMP participants that companies such as Chase Manhattan, General Motors, and PanAm fell victim to smarter rivals who recognized the potential to transform their markets. Chemical Bank was so superior to Chase Manhattan in its innovation and operations that it acquired Chase, keeping only its famous brand name. PanAm disappeared completely, and GM is still struggling.

Completing the Pattern

"The key to an entrepreneurial way of thinking, as Professor Ian MacMillan has pointed out, is not simply the cliché of knowing how to 'think out of the box.' It is something more specific. Can you quickly assimilate a disparate set of data and see a pattern emerging and then anticipate the completion of the pattern?" said Al Filreis, Kelly Professor of English at Penn who teaches a session on poetry in the Wharton AMP. "Wharton thinks that students in advanced management and any advanced students need to hone those skills. That is why it is important for AMP participants to be exposed to humanists and arts and sciences people."

In Wharton's AMP, the process of pattern recognition is explored by experts in history, anthropology, poetry, and other disciplines. An anthropologist, for example, can look at a single human footprint in Kenya and draw out a whole story of a people who lived tens of thousands of years ago. By looking far beyond the borders of business, the program encourages executives to take a fresh look at how they recognize patterns in their own work.

While these skills are important for executives at any point in their careers, they are particular vital to the senior managers in the AMP. "They can be good at certain content and basic knowledge but still fail because they don't know how to interpret what is in front of them," Filreis said.

Recognizing the Power of Form

While some managers may see poetry as a diversion from business, in the Wharton classroom it is used to help managers focus attention on the form of their communications. "I teach them things they didn't know they need to know by giving them a radically different area of discussion — poetry," said Filreis, a leading scholar of modern and contemporary poetry. "It is really a lesson in paying attention to communication. We could have looked at a standard business report and talk about strategies for understanding what is between the lines, or alternative interpretations of the same document. But instead, I give them poetry."

An intense discussion of a modern sonnet highlights how the form of a message influences communication. "You can't just be good at content," Filreis said. "You have to be conscious of the form or medium. Things like tone are controllable, but we rarely think about form when we write. We think if the content is right, people are bound to get it. If you have the greatest content in the world and it is not delivered well, it is worthless. Poetry is a means of communication that is devoted to the question of form."

This helps executives pay more attention to not only what they say, but how they say it. "We all know that when delivering a package or a gift to someone, it makes a difference if you put it in a fancy package with a bow, but when we get to language, we often don't carry that over as a lesson."

Unraveling the Mysteries of Mummies

In addition to poetry, a session on urban history with Professor Stephen Conn looks at the social and economic history of Philadelphia. The students see the remnants of 18th century, 19th century, and 20th century development. They explore the social impact of economic decisions and learn to recognize the layers of development that are built one upon the next. "They can see the city and interpret it like a map," Filreis said. "If you look at a building, you see a nice building, but what does it have to do with anything? Stephen Conn teaches participants how to read a city and understand its development."

In the past, AMP participants also have looked at 1,600-year-old mummies from Peru with anthropologists to understand the messages from ancient civilizations. "What is their cultural context?" asked Janet Monge, adjunct assistant professor of anthropology at Penn and Bryn Mawr College. "The wrappings of these Peruvian mummies contain various objects. The ones closest to the body are the ones that are most important, mostly associated with family and food, and the ones farther out are more associated with work. They centered themselves around family and layered their lives in this way. They always kept this in sight. How many of us center ourselves in that way?"

Executive also look at skeletons to identify other patterns related to biology — how they died, what age they were, what their families were like. They learn that most people were dead at the age of 30. Why? This leads to a discussion of global patterns of diseases.

Monge says that looking back more than a millennium is a much longer view than most business leaders take. They often don't have the luxury of looking much beyond the next quarter. "Most executives are spending their careers looking at two years or five years at the most, but archeology deals in time frames that are a couple of thousand years."

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