The Age Of Regeneration Has Begun
Can you feel it in the air?
Across industries and communities, people are beginning to understand that sustainability was never the destination. It was a bridge.
Every era of change needs a new language. Ours is no exception.
Leadership today is about asking:
What voice can steady complexity?
What rhythm can turn noise into clarity?
What presence can remind us why we gather?
Poetic leadership answers this call. It treats language as orientation – a compass in uncertainty. It works through resonance and alignment. It reminds us that leadership lives in the quiet discipline of revealing the poetry already within us.
Few embody this more than Vincent Avanzi – Chief Poetic Officer, poet speaker, speechwriter, and leadership coach.
A former auditor at Ernst & Young and global manager at Microsoft, he travelled to over seventy countries before founding La Plume du Futur / The Ink of the Future. He co-created The Poetry in Business Coalition and launched Les Poétiseurs, a collective of corporate poets who open sustainability conferences with verse and help leaders write manifestos instead of slogans.
He has published ten books, including Trouver son Point Génial (Marabout/Hachette), Poetic Leaders, and most recently Born in … PPM (Odyssée, 2025).
His work shows what is at stake: the rediscovery of language as the operating system of leadership.
True leadership gathers attention without asking for it.
Like minimalism in style, poetic leadership works through restraint and precision. Intention replaces noise. Clarity replaces spectacle.
This refusal to decorate is orientation – toward care and attentiveness. Presence itself becomes impossible to ignore.
How can leaders cultivate what you call “quiet authority”?
That quiet authority comes from your inner conviction of the soulful message you have to deliver. You are on stage in service of the world, not of yourself, but as a messenger of something higher. Present yourself in truth, stand still like a tree – a “poetree” – and let presence flow not from ego, but from love. Be aligned with what you are saying and doing. Authentic is poetic and magnetic. This is how I define “Poetic leaders.”
For Vincent Avanzi, words are not decoration – they are structure. Language is architecture. It holds culture together or lets it collapse.
A single phrase, repeated often, becomes a compass. A careless sentence can erode months of trust.
Avanzi has seen it: how silence before a line can reset a room, how a verse at the end can echo long after slides are forgotten.
Leadership in this sense is alignment, not control. Orientation, not information.
Words that breathe become the ground where meaning endures.
I like to start my conferences with a poetic speech that begins like this :
“Dear poetic leaders,
I have a question for you: Who wants to be N°1?
Why don’t we just try to be ONE instead,
Together, without numbers for once,
Each is our own uniqueness but united.
One dream, one will, one team, one win.”
My mission is to reveal our parts of poetry and cowrite a future in harmony. Then I take them on a poetic journey into the power of dreams, the impact of words and the audacity to be themselves.
Presence is discipline.
It asks for listening when the instinct is to speak. For silence when noise feels easier. For precision when abundance tempts.
True authority is steady. It resists acceleration and gives weight to every word and consequence to every pause.
Leadership becomes a craft of attention: aligning thought, word, and gesture into something others can trust.
How do you prepare yourself to embody presence before stepping on stage?
With authenticity, integrity and alignment. Embody your message and live your words. I preach in favor of a poetic life and a quest of harmony, and I try to live up to those standards. Be coherent, heartfelt, inspiring. Offer to the world who you truly are and what can bring positive change. Then, close your eyes, breathe deeply and focus on the objective of your stage mission.
Together, these moves form a rhythm of leadership with attentiveness and clarity.
If leaders could master only one of these, which would make the greatest difference?
“Curate the lexicon” because poetry is the art of words, imagination and emotions. It’s about finding the right word for peaceful communication and powerful inspiration. Words and ideas can change the world. So find your own word to enchant the world. Mine is harmony. Around it, I build a cloud of words and visions for a desirable collective future. That is poetic leadership: putting your singularity in service of humanity and a higher destiny.
Organizations often sound like unfinished music: overlapping voices, competing agendas, accelerating demands.
Poetic leadership listens differently. It hears rhythm in dissonance, structure in tension, clarity in silence.
Like a conductor, such a leader does not just direct. They compose the environment where each voice finds its place. Noise becomes rhythm. Complexity becomes harmony.
If leadership is music, what kind of score do you imagine?
I believe in bridging the gap between dreams and reality, yourself and the world, the present and the future. If leadership was a score, it would hold beauty and wonder: piano or harp melodies that make you fly and dream big, on a tempo that makes you move, dance, and walk toward a harmonious collective future. In essence, a symphony of harmony.
The pressures of leadership stretch far beyond boardrooms, economic uncertainty, geopolitical fractures, social unrest.
Inside organizations, the echoes are clear:
Employees disengage when work feels transactional.
Stakeholders lose faith when sustainability feels like performance.
Investors walk away when vision turns to spin.
In this climate, many tend to respond with more speed, more volume, more control.
But what people seek is actually alignment, resonance, presence.
Poetic leadership enters as answer. Language that can hold uncertainty, a rhythm that steadies turbulence, a vision that transforms compliance into culture.
Sustainability has long been ruled by metrics and targets. Necessary, but insufficient. Numbers calculate impact, they do not awaken desire.
Poetry reframes regeneration as more than a technical fix. It makes it a story we want to live in.
Words that breathe turn duty into choice. They give courage to strategies, resonance to data, meaning to complexity.
Regeneration will not root through systems alone. It needs language that inspires, metaphors that move, visions that align.
Why does regeneration, more than sustainability, need a poetic language?
Regeneration is a virtuous cycle, as in nature’s seasons. The path to sustainable prosperity follows three phases: science to understand, poetry to inspire, politics to transform.
The fight for new narratives is essential. We have to show desirable futures. Poetry plays a major role: powerful images, strong metaphors, poetic visions of a bright world. Without imagination, we are lost in the excesses of the present. That is why I like to talk of the 5P of Sustainable Prosperity: People, Planet, Profit, Purpose and Poetry.
What remains when the noise recedes?
The words that endure. The silences that steady. The verses that remind us we belong to something larger.
Poetic leadership is restoration of business.
Every leader, Vincent Avanzi suggests, carries a poem. The task is not to invent it, but to reveal it. And in doing so, give culture a rhythm it can live by.
If every leader carries a poem, what line can they dare to speak aloud?
As Dr. Keating said in Dead Poets Society:
“Poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for… the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”
An essential question for us all, to go from business as usual to business with a soul.
Write a short poetic manifesto of your contribution and commitment to our collective future. Share it. That is a first act of poetic leadership – pragmatic and magnetic.
As Charlie Chaplin said: “Poetry is a love letter addressed to the world.” And love is the best impulse to co-write a sustainable and desirable future.
For more about Vincent Avanzi, visit https://www.vincentavanzi.com/ and follow him on Linkedin.