Leadership Lessons from Shakespeare

Arts and Creativity club started off with a big bang today. The club's speaker series was the blockbuster event for the weekend.

Today's speaker was Rajeshwar Upadhyaya. Rajeshwar is our instructor (I cannot just say instructor, he is a good friend, philosopher and guide) for the Leadership Development Programme at ISB. I have been through a good number of programs like this, but this one has been the best. To simply say, its been fantastic

Here is a summary:

The topic for today was Leadership Lessons from Shakespeare. The talk began with the story of Odysseus and the most beautiful woman the world has ever seen. Thats Helen - The face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Illium. (The story is in the first few paras of the link, if that gives you any incentive to read). The ultimate goal here was to drive concepts of lateral thinking that went into creating the Trojan Horse.

The world itself has gone through a number of paradigm shifts since the rennaissance, industrial revolution and world war. There were various stages like the early agrarian, industrial (newton) and post industrial(einstien). The current day scenario is that you can control your actions and predict things. This takes us somewhere closer to the falsifiability of laws.

Edward Gibbons strongly believes that the Roman Civilization collapsed because of the rise of Christianity.

Then we have the curse on Oedipus

Shakespeare's plays have portrayed characters that are very holistic in nature. They are psychologically astute and have evolved over the course of the play.

Einstien once said "One hour depends on which side of the bathroom door you are", which clearly shows that Time is an experience.

Hamlet - such a well known character, is still very puzzling to many people. Ophelia is driven to insanity, which kind of brings out the fact that suicides are probably accidental, or maybe the character really wanted it.

For a fact, all shakespearean plays show that all male characters alienate the woman in their lives at some point in the play.

Tempest brings out the colonial and post colonial psyche. Prospero is kicked out of the country. In some way, this is similar to India being rules by an MNC called East India Company for 90 yrs. The magic wand in the play is technology. Ariel is India and Caliban is Bharat. MJ Akbar, sometime in the past has written about this dual perspective.

Anthony and Cleopatra talks about the expat behavior in a native country.

Macbeth - mostly european and american is aggressive stance, self fulfilling prophecy. Macbeth has this famous quote - "Fear not, Macbeth; no man that’s born of woman shall ever have power over thee". And when the witches tell him this, at the bottom of his heart, he gets a desire and this state of mind is explained by the state of the forests in the play. This is actually compared to misinterpretation of vital data when Macbeth meets Macduff. Ultimately, we see that overambitious, arrogant people, with hubris and self love fail miserably.

Caesar was a true example of arrogance, self love and narcissism. "Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more" is a very famous quote. Actually, in Caesar, there was no idealogical reason to murder him. The reason was petty, which finally led to a tragey for Brutus. This is alo remotely connected to the castration complex explained by Freud.

Then we come across different kinds of leaders who are categorised in different levels from 1 to 5. The level 5 leader is full of will and humility. He is nthe people first guy and is very introverted. Level 5 is a post 1995 phenomenon and has been widely talked about in "Good to Great". Another book called the "Clash of Civilizations" talks about alternate views on sustainable leadership.

Also, there are various stages in leadership - Peripeteia, Angulimaal Point (talk to me about this, its very interesting), Anagnorisis (something like the last attempt), then finally death. Now, all this is controlled by the emotional and spiritual quotient. Some key mentions here are Darwin Smith and Patanjali's AshtaangaYoga.

With this and a few questions about the leadership levels, the talk ended.