Power Plays: Shakespeare's Lessons in Leadership and Management

by John O. Whitney, Tina Packer

Explains why the issues fueling the intricate plots of Shakespeare's plays are the same issues that business leaders must contend with today.

What can Shakespeare teach us about effective leadership? Everything, according to John Whitney, former president of Pathmark Supermarkets and now professor at Columbia Business School, and Tina Packer, founder, president and artistic director of the critically acclaimed theater group Shakespeare and Company.

The issues fueling the intricate plots of Shakespeare´s four hundred year old plays are the same common yet complex issues that business leaders contend with today.

Contents

Prologue

I. POWER: FOR GOOD AND FOR EVIL
1. Power is a freighted idea: Understand it before you use it
2. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown
3. The trusted lieutenant: A delicate balance
4. The skipping king: Uses and abuses of perks, pay, and privilege
5. Women and power

II. ALL THE WORLD´S A STAGE: BUSINESS AS THEATER
6. All the world´s a stage: Playing the part
7. Lend me your ears: The art of persuasion

III. THE SEARCH WITHIN: INTEGRATING VALUES, MISSION, AND STRATEGY
8. Polonius´s paradox: Choices and consequences for man alone and man in society
9. The choice and master deceivers of their age
10. Banish not your Jack Falstaff: The value of mavericks in our midst
11. To be or not to be -it´s up to you: Hamlet´s fatal flaws

Epilogue: A woman
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index

Genres: Leadership, Business, Politics

316 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Whitney and Packer write a compelling book that uses Shakespeare's plays as a teaching tool for leadership. The book's writing style average on par with other business books I have read. The content is interesting melding Shakespeare with business. Thus, I give this book a 2.5.

The first part deals with Power and the importance of understanding it before using it. To the authors, power is relative so you have to know how ones power is derived and make sure that you know that power should accompany a purpose. A great leader always should keep the purpose of his power in mind so he can use the trappings of his power in service of the purpose instead of being blinded by it. He states the leaders who try to gain power for its own ends will never last because after he ruthelessly gains power then he has no purpose so he has to stay in power by force. Eventually the governed, ( be it the general populace or shareholders/customers of the company), will see that the head has no mission and he will be doomed to failure.

Furthermore in the power section, the leader always should have trusted lieutenants around him constantly. The leader and his lieutenants should always be bound together by a sense of purpose toward some kind of mission. The lieutenants should always be the leaders lieutenants and should be rewarded accordingly both in accolades and materially. But, the leaders should know that his lieutenants are always loyal to him. They propose to do this by creating an environment of openess and transparency to make it hard deceipt to flourish.

The last chapter of this section deals with women in the workforce. Women are gradually breaking the glass ceiling so women are forcing changes in the workplace. Traditionally, women used indirect means to govern (ie: Lady Macbeth) through their husband but not anymore. I think the perfect women leader would be Cleopatra because even though she weilded power just like man to rule her country she stayed decidedly feminine. In other words, she did not give up being a woman just because she is in power.

The second section of the book deals with leadership as a performance. Every leader has to be an actor because each man has a part to play always. The key to greate leader actor is to do method acting. One has to be authentic to play the part so that means expressing ones emotion that is underneath ones character in order to fulfill the mission at hand. Also leadership requires the art of persuasion. A great leader can inspire his people by creating an imagination of a better world, not now but in the future. In the art of persuasion especially in order to boost morale, a leader must communicate that his followers are part of a team in service for a great cause so their lives will have meaning and in executing their part, they will partake in great rewards. In facing an angry crowd, a leader must connect with them in an emotional level and channel their emotion toward his mission or his organization's mission. And a great leader must eventually have credibility of his actions but this requires experience as well as integrity in his actions.

The third section in the book deals with personal morality and ethics and the sometimes hard choices one is faced in while acting. I think more than the other two above, this is where Shakespeare really excels in because his plays are really psychologically complex. Incidentally, this is why my favorite class from undergrad was Shakespeare and Ritual.

The first chapter in this section deals with Polonius's Paradox which is to what extent does being true to one's self have to be tempered by societal demands. Some one who runs for office has to constantly balance his personal viewpoints with what his people want. If someone just does what he thinks is right all the time and not listen to the public, then he is branded a dogmatic leader and can be seen as out of touch (ie: most recent example of this is W. and the Iraq War). But if someone panders to public wants all the time, then he can be seen as not standing for anything (ie: Bill Clinton).

In business, Whitney shows this balance comes from the choice and consequences of the market place and people in it. One can be true to oneself all one wants but if no wants to buy the product that you are selling then you will not make money. Likewise, if you are selling everything that is popular under the sun then you will lack product differentiation and possibly suffer from lack of focus.

The next chapter he deals with is deceipt which in Shakespeare's plays are psychologically complex and lack definitive right answers. He charges that today's advertisers are deceptive because they do not tell the whole truth. Hello, that is what advertisers are supposed to do!!! They are suppose to showcase the good of the product and downplay the negative aspects of it. It is up to the public to educate itself well enough to know the negative sides of the product.

He also lumps self-deception as the greatest crime of deception. The problem with this claim is that self-deception is a belief of the person so it can't be self-deception of you actually believe it to be true. For example, in England's darkest days in WWII, Churchill could have been said to be deceiving himself as well as the British public that they were going to beat the Nazi's when in fact the Nazi's conquered most of Europe. So he equates deception with being an optimist and equates realism with the truth.

In the chapter, with Falstaff and mavericks, Whitney states the best companies are the ones that balances order with innovation in the form of someone who questions authority and the way things are done in the hopes of doing it better. To make a organization run, there must be order but without the disruptive force who is allowed to thrive within the organization, the organization becomes stale and uninnovative.

In the chapter of Hamlet, Hamlet suffers from inaction and too much thinking. In terms of business, the best organization knows who it is via mission and vision. It knows how to get it in terms of strategy and does it in its day-to-day via tactics. If your strategy is consistent with your mission and vision, then all an organization needs to do is to act and just change the tactics if it is warranted by the action.

[Herman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Actually finding leadership lesson from Shakespeare is 'Redundant', but John Whitney's anecdote based on his real experience at the real business world makes this book a bit worthwhile to read. John had been a professor at Harvard Biz School, then dived into the real biz world to work for several companies, and then he returned to the academia again...what an interesting career path he had. The book is not so much interesting as his career paths, though.

[Nina Morel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The only book I could really find on this exact topic. Very dated, though, because all the business examples and some of the gender attitudes are from the 90s. Would be good if updated.

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 3 out of 5]

One can delve into the classics to provide a pithy, memorable quote or an epigram for a chapter or a key idea as Freud brilliantly proved when he built on Greek myths in his exploration of the mind´s darker recesses. After all classics become classics because they illuminate life. Tongue in cheek, one can also use a favorite author or character as a guide to hell (Dante), to lovelife (see Woody Allen´s film Play it again Sam), self-improvement (Alain de Botton´s How Proust can change your life or Lou Marinoff´s Plato, not Prozac!), and, of course, management. Shakespeare is particularly favored by management and leadership consultants writing papers or books or organizing seminars.

Power plays was written roughly at the same time as Norman Augustine and Kenneth Adelman´s 1999 Shakespeare in charge: The Bard´s guide to leading and succeeding om the business stage. Both books use Shakespeare´s characters and plots as case studies in leadership, risk and change management, communication skills, innovation, business strategy and decision making, as well as yardsticks for contemporary business situations. Personally, I preferred Shakespeare in charge, but this may simply be due to the fact that I read it first.

The book is divided into three unequal parts. The first, best integrated and lengthiest part is on power, the second and shortest is on the stagecraft and rhetoric of power while the third is a rather miscellaneous but, on the whole, engaging ratbag on the balance between the individual and the team, business ethics, managing the creative individual and risk management.

Whitney and Packer tend to rely more on the historical plays (Richard II, Richard III, the two parts of Henry IV, Henry V and to a less extent on Henry VI and King John) and the tragedies (particularly Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Anthony and Cleopatra); there is very little on the comedies and the late romances -one important exception is that Packer manages to squeeze in an interesting analysis of Rosalind (As you like it) in her chapter on Women and power. The leadership styles, strengths and flaws of John, Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, Lear, Hamlet, Claudius, Othello, Macbeth, Ulysses, Coriolanus, Aufidius, Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Mark Anthony and Cleopatra, as well their relationships with their main lieutenants or consorts come alive in the authors´ analyses as the characters are evaluated in the context of their plays and compared both between them and to 1990s US business leaders facing similar dilemmas.

In my opinion, the most interesting analyses of the book include Richard II´s misunderstandings of the nature of power and his ineffectual use of power (The skipping king), the machiavellian use of power by Richard III, Henry IV, Henry V, Iago, Macbeth, Ulysses and Octavian, the miscalculations of Lear, Coriolanus, Aufidius and Iago, the fatal flaws in Caesar, Brutus, Mark Anthony and most particularly Hamlet(To be or not to be -it´s up to you: Hamlet´s fatal flaws is a very insightful chapter on strategy, uncertainty and risk management), Mark Anthony´s masterful funeral oration (Lend me your ears: The art of persuasion) and Prince Hal´s rejection of Falstaff (Banish not your Jack Falstaff: The value of mavericks in our midst, in which the authors reluctantly conclude Henry V was, ultimately, right to repudiate Falstaff).

The bulk of Power plays appears to have been written by John Whitney, who occasionally refers to his co-author´s insights or lets her speak for herself; the transitions between authors are not smooth and the book does not feel as if it were written by a team of true partners.

In short, this is an uneven book, its worst bits happen when Whitney strays too far from Shakespeare into his very personal views on the philosophical underpinnings of the free market and its relationship to religion and the law (Polonius´s paradox: Choices and consequences for Man Alone and Man in Society). These are the bits that drag some four star chapters down into a three star book. If you are at all moved by Shakespeare and you are interested in management, this is a book worth looking into for its better chapters.

[Lori Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

A should-read book on office politics which will happen to you and around you whether you participate in politics or not.