Dealing with Macbeth

A friend, feeling under threat from a direct-report colleague, asked me how King Duncan might have dealt with the situation more effectively, rather than be murdered by Macbeth. Of course, it is a universal question as well as a personal one.

I made seven suggestions:

1.       Study Machiavelli, who focused particularly in The Prince on the retention of power: ‘The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.’

2.       Bring about major strategic disagreement.

3.       Move Macbeth to another country.

4.       Appoint a Prince over Macbeth.

5.       Accuse Macbeth of treason and lock him up.  

6.       Abdicate the throne (who needs that kind of exposure anyway?)

7.       Murder Macbeth (before he murders Duncan).

Machiavelli warns: ‘Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.’

And, finally, lamenting that the great Russian poet Pushkin died young, Clive James recently proposed: ‘If you are a poet, do not get into a duel with someone who is a better shot than you are.’

 

Does Putin have a Fool?

So often leaders, especially strong leaders, surround themselves with yes-men (and yes-women). This can seem helpful to teamwork and a sense of direction.

But it can be extraordinarily valuable for the strong leader to include in the court a Fool. Someone who regularly sees things from completely different perspectives, without illusion, and who is empowered to speak up, saying the unsayable.

Shakespeare has Fools in so many of his plays – Feste in Twelfth Night, Touchstone in As You Like It, Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream among them. But the best model for our modern leader is the Fool in King Lear.

The Fool uses song as well as speech to give the king feedback. He is the only one permitted to challenge head on, to say to the aging Lear that he’s deluded and stupid. And yet Lear treats him as his friend.

There’s a long traditional of Fools in Russian literature, not least in Pushkin’s Boris Godunov.

I wonder if Vladimir Putin has a Fool? Not that he’d last long, one senses.