There seems to be a fashionable tendency in contemporary publishing for reading Shakespeare in order to find useful lessons for today’s managers. Using the Elizabethan theatre as the basis for a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the firm is, however, something that started in Italy some years earlier, with the magazine Hamlet.
This book is the result of the magazine’s wealth of experience.
It is a narration illustrated by the unmistakable hand of Milo Manara. Here, managers, consultants and other characters from the institutional world can be found alongside the most famous Shakespearian characters and also Inspector Callahan, Ahab and Bartleby, the three (or four) musketeers, the five Marx brothers, countless Marvel superheroes, Asimov’s robots and Dick’s mutants, as well as the Ulysses of Homer, Dante, Joyce, Borges, Kundera and The Beatles.
This ‘full-colour entrepreneurial novel’ takes the form of a labyrinth of words and images that reflect the complex nature of the contemporary firm, and more importantly the complex nature of society itself. The belief is that even in this great madness a method, an interpretation and a meaning can be found that all the actors playing out their roles and living out their own stories on the business stage can share.