As most of the world knows, Tiger Woods was back playing golf for money this weekend.

Sunday, I was at the airport waiting for my flight and found myself watching the finish of the Masters tournament with a bunch of other folks outside an airport bar. With about two hours to go in the tournament, the best players were playing the last nine holes in various groups. Tiger Woods was among them, and the cameras were focused on him rather heavily.

(I find golf on TV rather weird these days. They jump cut from shot to shot, Tiger swings on one hole and then Phil swings on a second and someone else putts on a third and then there’s a commercial, and there’s no context to any of this. TV is no better at showing the thinking and strategic parts of the game than it is with baseball.)

Anyway, Woods was not hitting his driver very well, even by his standards. Tiger Woods isn’t terribly accurate with his driver, the big club, but he’s extremely creative about getting out of the trouble he gets himself into. But that’s a story for another day.

So Woods winds up and smashes a ball off the tee… deep into the piney woods. Woods in the woods, I guess. I don’t know whether he hit any of the spectators or had to have his caddie search for his ball; TV was off showing some other random shots. But when they finally get back to him, they’ve managed to get the camera behind his ball looking toward the green. It’s obvious he has an impossible shot through the trees; you can see a little bit of daylight through an opening perhaps 15 feet above the ground, but his chances of hitting it through there are small — even as good as he is at what’s called scrambling, or getting out of trouble.

At this point, he’s trailing the leaders by a few shots. And he has two choices:

1. Try and punch the ball through the opening in the trees — possible, certainly, but likely to have bad results if he fails.
2. Knock the ball out onto the fairway, basically at right angles to the direction he really needs to go — but a safe shot for a competent golfer, which he certainly is.

Only if he gets the ball through the opening in the trees can he win the tournament. Doing so doesn’t put him in the lead — he still has a lot of work to do — but he almost surely cannot win if he takes the safe route, which will cost him a stroke.

Now keep in mind that everyone who finishes in the top ten of a tournament like this makes a lot of money. The winner takes the biggest piece, but most people could live quite well for a year on what, say, the fifth-place finisher receives. And Woods was staring at the difference between, say, eighth and second-with-a-possibility-of-first:

1. Hits through the trees successfully, has a good shot at second or even first if he plays the remaining few holes well.
2. Safely pitches the ball sideways back onto the fairway, probably ends up fourth — where in fact he did finish.
3. Tries to hit it through the trees and fails. Best case, he gets a good bounce off a tree and winds up in the fairway pretty much the same as if he’d pitched it out to begin with, finishing fourth. Or it could bounce back toward him and give him a repeat of this situation, except now it’s cost him a stroke to get there; maybe he finishes sixth. Or, worst case, it could bounce off a tree the wrong way and go out of bounds or be unplayable, costing him three strokes (the one he took plus a penalty plus having to play again from a bad lie) and he’s eighth.

Which would you choose?

You’re a leader in a tough situation. You can take a big risk and — if everything comes out right — make a huge score, but create a mess if things don’t go well. Or you can play it safe, assuring a comfortable profit but not a dramatic victory.

Woods, of course, went for it. And missed, though he got a good break when his errant ball smacked a tree at exactly the right angle and bounced out onto the fairway. But that’s the Tiger in him — nothing matters except victory.

But was it the right choice? The best choice? Would you have done it?

As it happens, eventual winner Phil Mickelson found himself facing a slightly easier version of the same type of shot a few minutes later, deep in the pines after an errant drive, but with a somewhat bigger window in the branches to hit through. He went for it and wound up about six feet from the hole with a terrific shot. On the other hand, former champion and still-among-the-leaders Fred Couples took one of these dangerous shots trying to get into the lead and put it in the water; it doesn’t always work out.

Three leaders, three very difficult risk/reward shots, all went for it. One nailed it, one missed but got a lucky break, and one fell short (literally, as Couples’ shot hit just short of the green and rolled back into the water).

That’s the way it goes. None of them took the safe route. It cost Couples and Woods money, made Mickelson a winner.

You’re the boss. You’re facing a tough shot, high risk, high reward. What do you do?

Is this the right time to be a Tiger?

Does your company “take the pulse” of employee satisfaction once a year, or perhaps twice? Does it do so at regular, scheduled times?

Do all the managers scramble in the six weeks ahead of the survey to provide “morale” or “motivation”? (And do half of them spell it “moral”?)

Does it work?

The same goes for employee feedback about their managers. Is it solicited only around performance reviews?

Does that change behavior for the long term?

What if no one* in the company knew when these surveys or feedback forms were going to be sent out?

If you’re a manager and that thought has you even the slightest bit uneasy, then you need to examine what you’re doing and try to fix it. Right now, it’s hard for employees to vote with their feet, but times will get better — and the very best, the ones you most need to retain, can always find new positions. And even if they’re not leaving because there’s nowhere else to go, morale and motivation affect performance, which in turn affects your own review — to say nothing of the lives of everyone involved, from your team to the other teams that interact with yours to the customers who might purchase your output.

There is no “time” for morale and motivation except the present time, every time. It’s not about events, or presentations, or gifts, or pithy and overworked sayings. It’s about how you relate to them, the level to which you extend trust, the extent to which you help when needed and avoid over- and micromanagement. It’s about having their backs, about recognizing that your job is to eliminate the roadblocks that make it hard for them to do their jobs.

Succeed here, and you won’t have to worry about “surprise inspections.”

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*When I say no one, I mean no one, including HR. It’s not hard to have these surveys and mails prepared to go out at any time. Let’s say a company wants to “take the temperature” twice a year. It’s trivial to design a program — I could write it in Excel in under five minutes — that you’d run once every two weeks, with a random factor that will come up “Yes” only, on average, twice a year. You send the surveys and such within minutes of the program coming up “Yes,” so everyone, including your own manager, has no advance warning. Of course, you’d suspend running it for eight weeks or so after it comes up “Yes” and you send the survey. (And the programmers out there recognize that you’d have to account for those eight weeks — and the two weeks at the end of the year when you can’t send anything useful — in calculating the odds for the random-number generator.)

My kids are watching The Blind Side as I write this. I’m sort-of watching and writing, but I saw it some months ago when I took my nine-year-old son to see it in a tiny (75-seat) theater in Friday Harbor in Washington’s San Juan Islands.

(The island in the San Juans where we have a place has no movie theater. It does have three espresso stands, four real restaurants and a few other places to eat, perhaps a dozen stop signs on an island twice the size of Manhattan, no chain stores, more sheep and cows than people, a plethora of eagles, ravens, and turkey buzzards, a nine-hole golf course where I actually managed to shoot a 46 last week, and an almost unlimited amount of peace and quiet. But I digress.)

In brief, the “blind side” is a quarterback’s back. A right-handed quarterback stands with his body facing right as he prepares to throw; anyone coming from his left arrives unseen, occasionally delivering a devastating hit. The film opens with the horrifying sack of Joe Theisman in 1985. I’m not a big football fan, but I was still in NYC at the time and happened to be watching the Giants game that Monday night. I will never forget the sight of Theisman’s leg bent in a Z shape from the compound fracture, and the moment the film started in Friday Harbor I knew what was coming and had to avert my eyes. I didn’t watch that hit in the film today, either.

But over the years, I’ve thought about that moment often. It happens all too often in the business world, where a team member fails to protect a colleague’s blind side. It’s even worse when it’s the employee’s manager delivering the hit that puts the employee out of the game, so to speak. Some managers appear to get a kick out of it, but most, like Lawrence Taylor (who delivered the hit with no intention of doing that kind of damage), inflict career-ending damage without meaning to. In fact, like Taylor, they’re often surprised and horrified by the result.

The difference is that in football, players play with the knowledge that they are at severe risk, that their careers could end at any moment. In the business world, that self-knowledge is largely absent.

If you’re a manager, it’s up to you to protect your employees’ blind side. You need to keep the blitzing executive linebackers away, even if you incur a penalty in doing so.

Do you do so?

How well do you protect your team’s blind side?

If you’ve never thought about it, watch what happens to Joe Theisman. You may want to avert your eyes 52 seconds into this (not very clear) clip. But whether you want to watch a closeup of his leg shattering or not, think about Joe Theisman and your team.

And protect their blind side.

As a manager, that’s your job.

(And in the spirit of full disclosure, while I shot a 46 on the second round of nine, I shot a miserable 56 on the first nine. I love the game, even though I’m pretty terrible at it.)

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?