1 The Legend of Cú Chulainn: Exploring Organization Theory’s Heroic Odyssey Donncha Kavanagh and Majella O’Leary in Myths, Stories, and Organizations: Premodern stories for our times, Yiannis Gabriel (ed), Oxford University Press: Oxford. 2004. p. 116-130. “We’ve become enamoured of a heroic view of management – even in government – the knight on a white charger, the manager who’s going to come in and fix everything – and what you get is not management, but hubris.” Henry Mintzberg, The Guardian, January 26, 2003. THE CÚ CHULAINN LEGEND Ireland’s vernacular literature, the oldest in Western Europe, is divided into four cycles of prose sagas. One of these – the Ulster cycle – relates the stories of the heroes associated with Conchobar Mac Nessa, king of Ulaid (Ulster). These stories are mythological although they may be based partly on events that happened in Ireland around 500 B.C.E. The greatest hero of the Ulster Cycle is a warrior named Cú Chulainn (pronounced coo culen ) and many of the stories recount his exploits. Cú Chulainn was born to live a heroic life and is often compared to Achilles or Hercules: he is invincible, although fated to a short life with lasting glory. His father was a god – Lugh – while his mother was a mortal woman called Deichtine, a conjunction of the human and the superhuman that is found in many mythologies (for instances, see Winstanley and Grint in this volume). Cú Chulainn plays a primary role in the Táin Bó Cuailnge (the Cattle-Raid of Cooley), which is the foremost epic of the Ulster cycle. The story begins with ‘pillow talk’ between Queen Medb (pronounced ‘Maeve’) of Connacht and her husband Ailill who are arguing over who has the most possessions. Ailill eventually wins because Medb has no match for his magnificent White Bull.