Effective Leadership

For the better part of a decade I’ve been coaching youth baseball.

I was pulled into this endeavor for Love of the Game. The reality is that when you're too old to play, you learn that giving back to the game you love comes in the form of coaching. It requires you to manage many things, but when you see the impact in your players - it's all worth it.

However, I soon realized the bigger purpose: to make a difference in the lives of my players. We effectively use baseball to teach life skills that will translate in to success in anything these boys do. In fact, it's the expressed goal of our organization to produce successful young men, not just great baseball players.

South Oakland A's Baseball Academy is a place where I, and a host of other coaches, work for that goal each & every new season. We promote individual development & team success that centers on basic fundamentals:

1. Develop Your Individual Skill Set with Intent
2. Do Your Job: Everyone has a Role to Play
3. Be Accountable: Especially When You Fail
4. Focus on Team Success

I now have players reaching the age where they have to consider the factors that directly relate to their ability to play baseball at the next level:

• Have you Reached your Potential in your Skill Development?
• Is anyone Working Harder than you?
• Are you achieving results On & Off the field?
• Do your Academic Achievements support your College Goals?
• How to Communicate Your Value to a College Coach?

Fundamental to this process is ACCOUNTABILITY.?

Our current President keeps pushing to expunge the student debt for large sums of people, but I have yet to hear a good reason why?

The way I was raised: if you borrowed money, then you pay it back - we were accountable for the choices we make.

Lost in the debate on this subject is the fact that colleges & universities are producing a Defective Product. If you have to spend $200k on a degree that results in a career making $40k/year, then that's a defective product.

There are two parties in that equation that have a question to answer:

1. How does the college or university explain its value proposition?
2. How does the student justify the selection of a that degree?

To complicate this reality even further, many of these institutions have massive endowments(Top 10 shown below):

Common Sense: those who created the problem should be the ones to pay for resolving the problem they created and continue to perpetuate.

Since it’s an election year, the President is clearly doing this to buy votes. Never mind the fact that the Supreme Court already determined this to be unconstitutional, suggesting it to be accountability malfeasance.

The only party left to be held accountable is the institutions.

Since the President keeps touting a loan forgiveness in the amount of $2B, it seems to me that the solution is easy:

Take the institutions with the Top 10 most wealthy endowments, figure out how much money you want to GIVE AWAY TO STUDENTS who studied Art History thinking it might provide a livable income, and make those with the means pay for this loan expungement. Looking at the amount of money they are all sitting on in their endowment funds, it's clear they can afford it.

Where this all goes sideways, of course, is who pays for this large expense incurred by people making bad decisions and institutions producing a defective product.

The cost of this giveaway certainly shouldn’t be levied on those of us who took out loans, earned a degree and paid back the loans we were responsible for. It also should not fall on the shoulders of people who never took out student loans – the workforce of America: electricians, plumbers, carpenters, truck drivers, etc.

It is unconscionable to levy a fine on the backs of those outside of this problem for the benefit of those who created it?

There's something rotten in Denmark, and this fails the smell test. It's devoid of any semblance of fairness, but in Washington DC its still appropriate for political purposes.

It’s always easy to waste other people’s money in a fashion that’s illogical, wasteful and lacking of common sense.

What's wrong with ACCOUNTABILITY?

Effective leadership requires exercising good judgment, applying critical analysis, effective communication, risk assessment and creative problem solving. This is the foundation of a successful approach that we teach our baseball players and to be successful, they need to be equally accountable to themselves and the team. ?

It seems to me that Effective Leadership is not being applied in this process.

However, I have a group of 16-year-old baseball players that, if you can wait 10-15 years, would all be better at leading this country than the "LEADERS" making decisions for us today…