Guest Series Part Five: To Control, Or Not To Control - That Is The Question

By Robert Holmes, WinWare, Inc.

Almost everyone is familiar with the question posed by the title character of William Shakespeare's play Hamlet — "To be, or not to be." It is, after all, one of the most famous quotations in literary history. By reading further into the soliloquy from which the quote is extracted, however, you see that the question is much deeper.

In Hamlet, Shakespeare was really referring to life itself: Should I continue to live this way, or should I end it by taking my life? But what if you take that same question and apply it to a single aspect of life or business? You can replace the word "be" with things like "control" or "manage," and all of a sudden the question becomes much less depressing and much more encouraging. In fact if we were to rewrite the first couple lines and tailor them to current business challenges, the answer becomes obvious:

To control, or not control: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the workplace to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous mismanagement, Or to take arms against a sea of poor workplace habits, And by opposing end them?