To Be

On the highest goal of a strategist:

Remaining a player

(with thanks to Jan Kott)

Strategic Questions

"To Be or Not to Be" is one of the most strategic questions broached by Shakespeare in his drama ‘Hamlet’.

The situation is roughly as follows.

Hamlet is aged about twenty-one and has always led a happy and untroubled life.

Then his father is murdered, which is terrible.

He finds out that his uncle is the murderer.

It's revealed that his mother is carrying on with this selfsame uncle.

Finally the ghost of his murdered father appears to him and it turns out that his father wasn't so great either.

What a tragedy.

The world which seemed so wonderful is now exposed as rotten to the core.

So what do you do?

One possibility is to renounce this wicked world and either enter a monastery or jump into the water.

The "Not To Be" strategy.

The other option is to encounter the world as a new player and to try and make the best of it.

The "To Be" strategy.

Shakespeare and I advocate first going for the To Be strategy and - should it prove fruitless - only then choosing Not To Be.

The first question which a strategic thinker should ask himself is thus:

 "Am I a player in the power fields which are relevant for me, or am I being played?"

Shakespeare in management

Outside the theatre there are two other related "Be" positions which are worth looking at.

The most important of these is the Too Be position.

You get Too Be when you overplay your hand;

If you claim a position for yourself, without gaining recognition.

In Dutch: the Hekking position, called after a alderman who always stood in front of his mayor.

In this way you weaken your position unnecessarily.

Someone who is weak, and acknowledges this fact, can at least still be regarded as a player with a sense of reality.

But someone who is weak, and acts as if he's strong, is not taken seriously as a player.

The second related position is Too Not To Be.

This relates to someone who adopts an excessively modest position, unnecessarily or even irresponsibly.

Someone who chooses a Stand By And Do Nothing mode, while he would certainly have been able to intervene, and steer events in a constructive direction.

In Dutch: "I'm called a hare"

A good manager must be able to play all the Hamlet roles and should have a fine sense of which is appropriate at a certain moment.

As a rule, he should go for: To Be.

This is the standard program on which a manager mostly runs.

Sometimes he should overplay his hand - a little, however - and adopt the Too Be mode.

But never for long.

And always in the realization that it's an undesirable role, which is dictated by circumstances.

Not To Be means the following:

being a player who is recognized as such,

but whom in this one instance is temporarily not participating.

He's sitting "out a round" as in a card game.

But he'll soon be back in the game as a normal player and making To Be moves.

Too Not To Be is thus reserved for fields of play from which you prefer to withdraw completely.