Some Year-End Shakespeare for Leaders
As a harrowing 2023 draws to a close, business leaders are feeling beat up. Inflation, interest rates and other post-pandemic hiccups have stalled markets, made best-laid plans unviable, and thrown careers off course. A 400-year old sonnet suggests a way to stay sane, and do more, in ‘24.
If you have an Instagram or Tik Tok account, chances are you’ve been unable to avoid a recently trending video featuring Dame Judi Dench (“M,” for James Bond fans) reciting a poem.
Dame Judi appeared on BBC One’s The Graham Norton Show in late October, alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger and other celebrities, promoting her memoir, Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays The Rent.
After discussing how much Shakepeare most of us have at the tip of our tongues without realizing it— Norton offered “how all occasions do inform against me” (from Hamlet Act IV, Scene 4), to resounding applause—the host asked the actor if she “could do a bit of Shakespeare for us… a bit of a play or a sonnet,” comparing her to “a Shakespeare jukebox.”
Dame Judi chose a sonnet, which she proceeded to recite from memory, in its entirety, over a minute.
(View it here.)
“Unbelievable!” said Schwarzenegger as the audience lept to its feet. “There’s more dialogue than I had in all my movies all together.”
Commenters on YouTube and other platforms were bowled over by the actor’s ability to recall fourteen lines of Elizabethan verse seemingly off the top of her head. Some celebrated her moving, accomplished delivery. Others applauded the class and chops Dame Judi has brought to stage, television and film productions over her 66-plus-year career.
Overlooked in the hubbub? The meaning of the words themselves.
It would not diminish Dame Judi’s choice of material or performance to suggest that, just maybe, Norton tipped her off in advance in classic talk show tradition.
Whatever the case, her choice of Sonnet 29 seems inspired and timely.
Unlike most of Shakespeare’s other sonnets, which largely seek to express various aspects of romantic love, #29 focuses on what we now call “mindset.”
The poem opens with a lament from a man who has, in today’s parlance, failed to meet expectations. He lacks success and influence, envying others who are faring better, and no longer doing things he loves to do:
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
How many have felt this way recently, as the gyrations of the post-pandemic economy has reversed fortunes, forced careers to change tracks, and turned professional plans on their heads?
More than many are willing to admit.
A 2022 article in the Journal of Vocational Behavior noted how the pandemic had led to “life-altering employment shifts.”
While many had found the nature of their work positively adapted to their personal needs (e.g. work-life balance), they had also witnessed a decline in attention to their “talent- and value-based career orientations.”
In other words, a variety of factors—from emergency tactics, to difficulties hitting targets, to a lack of focus on human capital development—had left many feeling stranded, or worse.
Much of the problem fell specifically at the feet of remote work, which negatively impacted not simply mentorship opportunities (“COVID Hits Career Progression,” blared a BambooHR report).
Less media attention has been given to a disruption economists began observing in the early days of the crisis: how difficult business development had become. The impact of an environment in which new relationhips were hard to develop fell hardest upon those who could least afford it: smaller businesses who tended to be “financially fragile.”
The post-pandemic boom has lifted some boats, but not all. Inflation has played havoc with asset pricing, throwing up roadblocks for anyone tasked with doing deals in sectors like finance and real estate. The knock-on effects on our “best-laid plans” (Robert Burns, not Shakespeare—a common mix-up) has been widespread, particularly among mid market companies saddled with too much inventory, too few people, and too low productivity.)
We’ve had many conversations this year with growth-stage company CEOs and other leaders who’ve found the cumulative impact of this pain to be all but overwhelming.
“It’s hard to go up as a midsize business when your country’s central bank is trying to bring the whole economy down,” one client declared last spring.
Challenges range from not being able to finance growth—the combination of high interest rates and falling inflation has made many projects non-viable—to a surge in retirement of senior leaders and the inability to find the right talent to backfill.
Hand-wringing over “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (Hamlet again, Act III, Scene 1) rarely delivers much value. What can be done more constructively?
The next section of Sonnet 29 provides guidance:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
In other words, it’s time to focus on personal relationships. Our closest loved ones, friends and family.
We shall not be so bold as to attempt a definition of love here. Let’s lean once again on the Bard, Sonnet 116, a favorite at weddings around the world, which notes how love, whatever else it might be, is constant in the face of adversity.
“Love is not love,” it declares:
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken[.]
Sounds about right. Relationships can be tested in tough times, as financial stress create other stresses, and a rise in corporate relocations forces changes in living arrangements.
But as our grandparents and great-grandparents learned almost a hundred years ago during the Great Depression, love relationships can also be the only constant while so much else is changing.
Hardship may delay marriage plans, but as one study has found, it also helps forge relationships more likely to stand the test of time.
So we come to the couplet that ends Sonnet 29:
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
We cannot remind ourselves enough: the love of others is our greatest wealth.
It’s hard to imagine better guidance heading into 2024. We may indeed be cursed, in the sense of the apocryphal “Chinese proverb”, to live in interesting times.
But some ideas are good enough to last four centuries, make us slow down a well-taken minute, and bringing us to their feet. So:
- Stay close to your closest at home.
2. Keep building core work relationships.
Not only will they get your head through this cycle. When things turn around, they‘ll be your greatest asset.
Stephen Butler is a management consultant with Framework, and co-author of the forthcoming Why Is a Verb: How Well-Managed Teams Turn Purpose Into Productivity (Scribe).
