Hercules - the endgame

Task Eleven: Acquisition of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides

Hercules' penultimate task involved a quest for the golden apples of wisdom and beauty secreted in the remote and carefully guarded garden of Hesperides. To accomplish this task Hercules has to call on all the managerial and leadership lessons inherent in his ten previous tasks:

1. know your own strengths
2. tackle the root causes
3. look for the win/win
4. acknowledge and move on from your mentors
5. mobilize the system to your advantage
6. take a time-out when you are tired
7. challenge your customer
8. hire good people
9. play the politics when you have to
10. beware the unexpected consequences

Needless to say he succeeded - unerringly guided by the scrupulous application of these deceptively simple management aphorisms - and delivered the golden apples to his odious customer, King E. who promptly and ungratefully set him his final task.


Task Twelve: Capture of Cerberus in the Underworld

The ultimate leadership task represents overcoming the fear of fear itself. Critical to the successful accomplishment of all of Hercules’ tasks has been an inner belief in his own managerial competence and a confidence to test himself against the biggest and the best in the business. Cerberus, the three-headed hound guard of the gates of hell, represents the ultimate threat of career ending disaster and corporate suicide.

Hercules’ passage into the underworld to confront Pluto, its morbid CEO, and to capture the hound dog is marked by a surreal confidence in his essential ability, reputation and experience. He transcends the quite natural fears of the unknown, the unquiet and the unreasonable and quite simply outmatches Cerberus, pound for pound on merit. The result is his ultimate liberation from the corporate threats of rejection and redundancy. He is finally sling and arrow-proof.

In passing he secures the release from the underworld of his old friend and colleague, Theseus, thus repaying a long-standing debt of comradeship. Never forget the friends you make on the way up. His return in triumph to the kingdom of Eurystheus ensures the ultimate collapse of the customer-driven tyranny that has ruled his life.

The tasks are complete and at the same time irrelevant. Hercules himself ascends to the rarefied heights of consultant, management guru and wise mentor to a new generation of would be managers. His successor, Atlas, strives to hold up pillars of the known world. That’s another story.