There has long been academic debate as to who wrote the work attributed to William Shakespeare.  (The word “academic” is important; see below.)

Most recent attention has focused on Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. There is a whole cottage industry devoted to these so-called Oxfordians. I won’t go into all their arguments, but here’s a summary:

• How could some rude glover’s son from Stratford know all about the English court, Italian mores, and so on?
• Nothing survives in Shakespeare’s hand… perhaps because he wrote nothing.
• de Vere had a long-term relationship with Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Southampton, prime movers in  the Globe Theater in one way or another.
• de Vere was an established poet.
• de Vere traveled extensively in France and Italy, scenes of many Shakespearean plays.
• There are parallels between de Vere’s life and some Shakespearean plots, particularly Hamlet.
• de Vere was very cultured, educated, and sophisticated.

There are a few problems with this theory, not the least of which was that de Vere died in 1604, which sort of leaves out some plays… like Macbeth and The Tempest, dated well after 1604. de Vere’s supporters construct an elaborate — and not entirely impossible — structure around how the plays were actually written before de Vere’s death but not published or even staged until afterward.

So what does this all have to do with management?

The First Issue: Occam’s Razor

Occam’s Razor suggests that the simplest solution that fits the facts is most likely to be true. That doesn’t guarantee that it is true, but the more convoluted a solution, the more unlikely.

Or, in more modern terms, never attribute to conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence.

Saying that someone other than William Shakespeare wrote those plays, epic poems, and sonnets requires a very complex construction to explain away all sorts of contradictions, from the 1604 issue to the fact that folks like his playwright contemporary — and non-friend — Ben Jonson was in on the conspiracy. It’s one thing for the players to keep a secret, since their livelihood depended on it, but it’s another for a competitor who didn’t like Master Will to play along. (On the other hand, one of Jonson’s snipes at Shakespeare can be stretched to suggest Jonson is mocking the attribution of plays to “Shakespeare.”)

Lesson: When a co-worker or someone on your team describes a complex scenario to explain why sales are down or a product is late, be very skeptical. Exhaust the simpler explanations first.

The Second Issue: Listen to the People on the Factory Floor

The people closest to the production of something generally are more knowledgeable than management about the mechanics of production. (There’s a fancy Lean Six Sigma term for this.)

If a project is late, ask the project manager and (in the case of software) the developers. Steven Sinofsky at Microsoft did a brilliant job of this in figuring out why it was taking so long to ship versions of Windows, and got the very successful Windows 7 out the door on time.

If sales are down, ask the people actually out trying to sell the product. They won’t have all the answers, and may well couch it in ways to protect their jobs, but their feet-on-the-ground insights are invaluable… and likely “spun” by their management.

If you’re trying to design something, listen to the users — and, even better, watch what they actually do. Their managers can’t tell you what they do, or even what they think they do; managers can only tell you what they think they want their employees to do.

In the Shakespeare controversy, ask the actors. Any competent actor or director experienced with playing Shakespeare will tell you that it’s clear that the author was a man of the theater, someone who understood in infinite detail how to move an audience, how to get them to laugh, cry, and see themselves in the mirror held by the playwright and the players. There’s nothing to suggest that de Vere had serious familiarity with the theater other than as an occasional playgoer.

Here’s where the “academics” thing comes in. Academics generally see Shakespeare as a poet, a word stylist; lacking a deep involvement themselves in rough-and-tumble theater, they tend to ignore that astonishing playability of Shakespeare’s work. Indeed, many of Shakespeare’s characters are what theater folks call “actor-proof,” meaning that they work on stage no matter how bad the performance. I have seen Malvolio, Sir Toby Belch, Romeo, Juliet, Bottom, Oberon, Polonius, and numerous other characters performed abysmally by actors who had little understanding of what they were saying… and yet these characters were still affecting — and drew huge laughs where they should have. Of course, they missed loads of subtleties and nuance, but they were still good enough to “get by” and not destroy the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief. Note that I’m not suggesting every Shakespearean role is actor-proof, as numerous mediocre performances of Hamlet prove.

Lesson: Pay attention to the people closest to the action.

The Third Issue: Trust Your Ears

As I noted, de Vere was a poet.

He was, in fact, a terrible poet. His verse is to Shakespeare’s as The Archies were to The Beatles.

Now perhaps he got better as he got older, but even Shakepeare’s earliest work, such as Titus Andronicus, is far beyond anything de Vere wrote under his own name before Shakespeare (or, if you must, “Shakespeare”) came on the scene.

Lesson: If you’re listening to someone and something smells fishy, it probably is.

By the way, this last item points to a significant problem in hiring at large companies these days. A manager who trusts her instinct in this regard may wind up hiring only people who look like her with regard to age, gender, ethnicity, and so on. A good interviewer has to spend most of the interview consciously trying to revise or justify the first impression. First impressions are powerful — for both good and ill. Or as de Vere Shakespeare said, this “soliciting cannot be ill, cannot be good.”

But what’s in a name, anyway?