What About Dragons?

I enjoyed very much Wayne Curtis’ entertaining Viewpoint column on famed 16th-Century Italian sculptor Benvenuto Cellini (“Modern Managers Should Heed Renaissance’s Cellini,” April 17). It shows that some old ideas, far from being obsolete and outdated, still have relevance to and can be useful in today’s society. Many of Cellini’s ideas are still applicable to today’s business world, such as in the need to delegate authority.

However, if Cellini were still alive today he may have defined certain terms a little differently than we do, given the fact that he lived in an age of intense competition and violence.

For example, he may have defined a corporate takeover as the waging of armed warfare against a rival company, upward career mobility as going from duke to king, downward career mobility as getting stabbed by a rival and productivity analysis as the number of enemies one destroyed in the past year.

KENNETH L. ZIMMERMAN

Cypress