Lend me your arms

The Last Straw: I see in the New York Times that a former weapons adviser to Ronald Reagan is now running management seminars based on the plays of William Shakespeare.

Kenneth Adelman and his wife are described as "amateur Shakespeare scholars", who have turned their pastime into a business. But they now present 40 seminars a year at up to $24,000 each, which doesn't sound very amateurish. It sure as hell beats the theatre.

Shakespeare-based management training is apparently all the rage in corporate America, and the Adelmans' clients even include the US military. As reported in the NYT, a recent seminar on Julius Caesar included senior air-force personnel, dressed in Roman gear, role-playing and discussing the play's events under headings such as "team-building".

Participants were also encouraged to identify strategic mistakes: such as Brutus's decision to deliver his funeral oration before Marc Antony's, and even worse, to deliver it in prose rather than iambic pentameter (Doh!). But ethical issues featured too. For example, the report quotes a Lieutenant General William Looney (I swear) who concludes that Brutus was not an honourable man: "He was a traitor. And he murdered someone in cold blood." Somehow it comes as no surprise to learn that Donald Rumsfeld has done one of these seminars, which helps explain his famous soliloquy: "As we know, there are known knowns." Nor is it surprising that the seminars include one on Henry V, and that Adelman sees Prince Hal ("a profligate youth who becomes a masterful leader") as a "paradigm" for the life of the current president.

The hawks in the military would probably like President Bush to do the Henry V seminar, delivering those famous lines "once more into the breach" as he leads his men to war against the French (hint, hint). But if anyone wants Shakespearian paradigms for George W., here's one off the top of my head. Hamlet. A young man haunted by his father's ghost. Wrestling with indecision (the UN). But finally acting on CIA intelligence that King Claudius (Saddam) has married his mother, or has developed the potential to marry her. Good, eh? I'm not suggesting the application of Shakespeare to management theory is completely spurious. The vogue goes far beyond the military, and you can see its attractions. Studying drama is a good way to unlock creativity. OK, in the America of Enron, you'd worry that unscrupulous businessmen thinking up new schemes for fleecing shareholders don't need any hints from Shakespeare ("Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears"). But my point is that in Shakespeare's greatest plays, planning is useless, because everything goes wrong in the end. Like modern managers, his characters often rely on consultants - soothsayers, witches, and so on - who study all the available entrails before recommending the best way to ensure disaster. Yet even when the advice is good, it doesn't change the outcome. In Julius Caesar, the soothsayer gives a concise report ("Beware the ides of March"). But, like many managers, Caesar is suspicious of advice that is short and doesn't cost anything. So he ignores it, and suffers inevitable consequences in the marketplace.

What might a management seminar learn from Romeo and Juliet, for example? That Juliet is threatened with a hostile takeover, until Romeo appears on her balcony and proposes a merger? That Romeo initially overvalues Juliet's assets ("what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun"). That an independent arbiter, Friar Lawrence, agrees to oversee merger talks? And that several acts later, as usual, everybody is dead, except the Friar, who's probably still entitled to commission?

But here's a short, actual example of Shakespeare as a corporate tool, from the website of a US training company: "Macbeth was a good manager in the beginning. However, his appetite for power was so strong that he pursues an unethical path: slaying King Duncan while he sleeps." No. If watching Donald Trump's The Apprentice teaches us anything about business, it's that the king-slaying option was not necessarily a mistake. Where Macbeth went wrong was in his reliance on three independent witches, who foreshadowed modern management-speak by reporting in language nobody could understand.

Among this group's key conclusions was that "none of woman born shall harm Macbeth". The true significance of which prediction only emerges when, shortly before lopping the king-slayer's head off, Macduff casually mentions that he was delivered by Caesarean section. Sorry if you haven't been to the Macbeth seminar yet. I've just given the ending away.