Shakespeare in the Boardroom

Act I: A skeptic attends a Paris conference
One day in September 2010, Walt McFarland sat down with 23 other people—mostly men, mostly in their late 40s—for the final class of a master’s degree program taught by the Oxford Saïd Business School and the HEC Management School in Paris. The presentation, about inspiring organizational change within a company, was led by Richard Olivier, son of the late Shakespearean actor Laurence Olivier, who was there to walk the execs through The Tempest.

McFarland wasn’t familiar with the play, but he knew a thing or two about change. Over his career he’d helped several major U.S. federal entities including the FBI and Congress reorganize their management systems: He worked with 100,000 employees during the IRS modernization in the late 1990s and helped formulate the Department of Homeland Security after Sept. 11. “I’d been to a lot of presentations like this. Things can get pretty beaten down and cynical when it comes to change,” he says. “This was not my first rodeo.” But minutes into the program, as Olivier was explaining the story of the magical duke Prospero, McFarland swears Olivier looked right at him. The moment was as “brief as the lightning in the collied night,” as Shakespeare might have said, but it changed McFarland’s life forever.

Act II: A legend’s son confronts his father’s ghost
In the mid-’90s, Olivier was a well-respected West End director who felt resentment toward his famous father, who died in 1989. “As a child it was hard to understand that he preferred playing Othello to being with me,” he told the London Times in 1999. Olivier had spent his career avoiding Shakespeare—“that was my father’s territory”—but in 1997, he was invited to direct Henry V at London’s Globe Theatre, an honor he couldn’t pass up. In rehearsal, he and his leading man, Mark Rylance, “wondered, what if, instead of an audience watching the play, we … allowed them to live through the play and apply it to their own lives?” Olivier explains. Henry V is about an inspirational political leader—the king famously rallies his troops before a battle with France—so they conducted a three-day workshop with several local public officials. “At the end, they said they’d learned more about leadership from Henry V than any other program that they’d been on in their career,” he says.