Leadership

The SoCalled Nobrainer

by Terry Barlow
11/14/17
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There is a particular professional sports team that was recently presented with a choice that it went on to consider a no-brainer.  They had two prospective players with seemingly equal if not identical skill sets.  The two performed more or less equally during their trial periods and the time arrived for one of them to be chosen, since there was no room or need on the roster for both of them.  At this point the coaches and general manager applied a principle that sounded very logical;  when two prospective players are competing for one position and their skill sets appear to be equal, always choose the younger player because he or she is likely to last longer and retain that skill set longer than the older one.  That way that particular need and spot on the roster won’t have to be addressed again for a while, and attention can be  freely given to more pressing needs.

Can you guess what happened?  I probably don’t have to write another word, but I will anyway.  Of course, the younger player was chosen and now has gone on into the season to become problematic, misfiring, so to speak in four consecutive contests, while his older, rejected counterpart has been relatively successful in his new assignment.  Give it more time, you might say, it will even out over the course of the season and the advantage may swing the other way.  It is admittedly a small time sample, but meanwhile, no matter how small the sample, the hopes for the season, or for the POST season I could say, have all but slipped irrevocably away.  And the supposed wisdom of always riding the energy and promise of the younger talent is suddenly suspect.  The moral of this story is that no such principle can be applied automatically; there are such things as exceptions and they crop up more frequently than we think.  Every individual situation where only one candidate can be retained and the other(s) released, deserves its own careful,  closer and more personal  look. (Proverbs 18,v13, Proverbs 14,v12)