Satirical Business Poetry
Bertie Ramsbottom, also know as Ralph Windle (or is that visa-versa!?) has been single-hoofedly responsible for the splitting of sides across the globe, with his humorous poetry about business, business speak, and the occasional futility of his human business adversaries!
From this page, armed with this brief introduction to the infamous sheep, you can read, online, his humorous poems, ballad poems, and motivational business poems.
The Poet Laureate of the Boardroom
Called many things in his time, Bertie Ramsbottom is most widely known as the Poet Laureate of the Boardroom, becasue of his published business poetry in the Financial Times
Bertie Ramsbottom is the pen-name of Ralph Windle.
Bertie is best known as
The Poet Laureate of the Boardroom...
...So-called by the Financial Times for his long weekly series in the FT and Harvard Business Review.
Books include...
The Bottom Line - A Book of Boardroom Ballads
The Ultimate Guide to The Organisation
The Poetry of Business Life
and as recently as December 2004 he was performing his work to Oxford Heads of Colleges, Bursars and City luminaries at
The Said Business School.
His works have been performed in many locations, including:
The National Press Club, Washington DC
Harvard
Oxford
The London Savoy
with musical versions by New York composer, Joyce Suskind.
But, as Oxford, Washington, the BBC and other insiders know, (and hence his name) he began life as the canny Cotswold sheep commentator on human affairs. The Bertie Ramsbottom Book of Improbable Sheep ('your felicitous muttonings' as the great Frank Muir described them) has been widely performed on both sides of the Atlantic.
It was as Poet Oveate, and in complicity with the then Poet Laureate John Betjeman who was unhappily ill at the time, that Bertie stepped in, in 1981, to celebrate the Royal Nuptials. His 'Bertie at the Royal Wedding', which drew warm thanks from Prince Charles and the Palace ("your woolly loyal address and oveatical poetic offerings" as they are described in his thank-you note) has been re-echoed in the 2005 sequel.
Click here for samples of what critics and fans have said about Bertie's work around the world.
