The Utility of Shakespeare in Business Courses
Wayne Smith (COBAE): wayne.smith@csun.edu
I occasionally teach a 400-level, elective course for business management seniors titled
"Decision-making and Creativity". It's taught from a multi-disciplinary perspective where the
students learn and apply various quantitative and qualitative techniques.
One part of the course employs the reading of a Shakespearean play, one play per team (about
six teams of about five students each). This assignment helps students achieve a number of
valuable outcomes, but I'll just focus on the reading aspects here. I call this assignment "From
First Folio to First Principles". As an aside note that many academics are also consultants "on
the outside". We usually save this kind of applied learning for "executive education"; I am
simply adapting such "consulting" work for "clients" in a "business" to teaching and learning for
students in a class.
Essentially, each student team is assigned a play, and will give a final, oral presentation to the
entire class incorporating not just a distillation of the play but also drawing analogies to current
examples from the world of business leadership and management (I intend to show examples of
students' presentations from this course at the 2015 CSUN faculty retreat). Interested readers can
read more about this assignment at:
http://ocw.smithw.org/2013fall/mgt458-12919/assign-shakespeare.pdf
There are several reading challenges. The first challenge is becoming accustomed to "a different
language": Middle English. A side-by-side (Middle-English/English) translation can help here,
and such texts are readily available. As a start I also have the students watch at least one video,
often from the complete collection of BBC 'first folio' plays held by the University Library, or a
modern movie; this helps with the absorption and assimilation process (both linguistically and
culturally). Graduating seniors will soon be immersed in the argot and "house styles" of their
idiosyncratic firms and industries: they need to adapt...and quickly. Actually the bulk of the
students are already poly-lingual; it's often the faculty members that are mono-lingual (me).
The second, and more difficult, challenge is to "map" key concepts from the play to
organizational and societal modernity. To this end I help students understand the different
"levels" of reading ("macro", "meso", and "micro", for example) and how they need to think
about professional, managerial, and executive life at those levels too. For example, "war" might
be likened to "competition", "suicide" to "self-destruction", "fortune" to "randomness",
"freedom" to "agency theory", etc. "Antony and Cleopatra" concerns "mixing personal with
professional", "Hamlet" concerns "leadership, writ large", "Othello" touches upon "racial
discrimination", "MacBeth" concerns how "vice-presidents" (doppelgangers) provide "advice",
"King Lear" describes the hazards of "succession planning", and "The Merchant of Venice"
concerns (among many things) "matters of finance, diversification, and probability"), etc.
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Finally, I provide specific examples of a few soliloquies (akin to "memos", "speeches", or
"motivational memes") to prime the students' application of their various readings to help bring
to bear the theories and practice of decision-making and creativity to address issues of
importance in contemporary organizations. Two accessible and useful examples are in King
Henry V. See, for example:
http://ocw.smithw.org/2013fall/mgt458-12919/exercise-shakespeare.pdf
To be successful with the project, the students *must* do close readings, take extensive notes in
their own style, participate in active, in-group discourse over several weeks, and make unique
contributions in class. I help the students by giving them samples of use and application; each
semester the students always find new themes and new analogies that, frankly, I didn't see in my
own reading and understanding of the plays. That's *just the kind of intellectual contribution*
we would expect CSUN seniors to make subsequent to a difficult, assigned reading. Postgraduation I receive more positive feedback from students on this specific assignment than on
any other assignment I've given in any class in the past thirty years.
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