Leaders and followers

I just updated the template of my blog. I didn’t change how it looked actually. But people following my blog can now add their name to my follower’s list. Since sheep are such good followers I might get some sheep signing up too.

Like who wants to admit to being a follower?

Eli, my stepson, went to leadership training camp this summer with the reserves. He was in this class of like a hundred young men all training to be leaders. Now when we’re out, the family, in the car, say, and a situation comes up that requires some hot and fast decision making Eli starts telling all of us what to do. He’s twenty-five. He’s excitable. What does he know?

Sometimes in these situations he reminds us of the power he now possesses of leadership trying to convince us his inexperienced twenty-five year old ass is the one we should be following.

Also, this summer, Larry coached Jacob’s baseball team. He had this co-coach who ran a lucrative printing business but who knew squat about baseball. He looked like Jeff Bridges but with darker hair and eyes which when I told him he already knew about. But whenever Larry would be coaching the kids the co-coach would be talking in this loud parallel voice at the same time sometimes saying similar things and sometimes saying completely opposite things that made no sense if you knew baseball.

I don’t think he ever asked Larry’s opinion or advice. He just always acted like he knew everything already. He was a very good recycler though. He knew which products went in which recycling receptacles at the ball parks. I have to concede that.

It made me wonder how he ran his business because isn’t one of the key attributes of being a business manager recognizing who is an authority on what and then using that to your advantage. And then aren’t you supposed to get rich from it and then be secretly laughing under your breath that the smart people whose knowledge you’re managing to your advantage don’t get to enjoy as many vacations as you or to renovate their kitchen with stainless steel chrome appliances as often?

When Eli returned from leadership training camp he looked like he’d had the crap kicked out of him. Which may very well have been the case. If too many chefs spoil the stew, wouldn’t too many military leadership candidates ruin their shoes? (bit of a rhyme there)

By the final and deciding game of the first round of the playoffs the tension between the two co-coaches came to a head. It was the third out of five innings. The team was down four runs. The Jeff Bridges look alike insisted on a pitching change that would put his son, who had struggled all season to throw strikes, on the mound. Larry questioned his autocratic approach. Jeff Bridge’s temper refused to answer. Larry, in an attempt to manage his piqued temper, removed himself from the game collapsing on a folding chair on the sidelines between Jeff Bridge’s wife and myself.

The chair was actually one of theirs’ and was broken. The back support part wasn’t attached properly so Larry’s back was falling out of the back of the chair and he was turning around to check it out when Jeff Bridge’s wife began reprimanding him for not being a team player and not knowing how to make compromises. I was so sure when she was talking to Larry like that that it must be the same way she talked to her husband all the time.

I thought there must be some really weird kind of déjà vu going on for her with Larry being in the position she must usually find herself in with her husband and her –by virtue of the fact she was lecturing Larry for it - being in the position her husband must usually be in, but her saying the words to Larry that she would usually say from her regular position to her husband.