Not a good coach

By Alex P. Vidal

“Coaches have to watch for what they don’t want to see and listen to what they don’t want to hear.”  – John Madden

IF President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. were a National Basketball Association (NBA) coach, he wouldn’t win a championship even if he had the best team.

Reason: he appears to be not a good coach.

When the president let go of vastly popular and very effective enforcer of the law, General Nicolas Torre III, last year in favor of DILG chief Junvic Remulla, who rotted for General Jose Melencio Nartatez, it was like letting go a star player for a nondescript cager.

It was like releasing Denver Nuggets’ Nikola Jokic, widely regarded as the best player in the NBA today, for Cleveland Cavalier’s Anthony Bennett, one of the the league history’s draft busts, in the middle of a championship game.

Also, President Marcos Jr.’s dilly-dallying attitude in sacking inefficient and overrated Remulla despite the latter’s lackluster performance is lending credence to criticism that he is a weak leader.

Despite popular calls from people angered by the recent political circuses in the Philippines, including the Bato dela Rosa arrest fiasco, for the president to give Remulla the boot and appoint either former senator Antonio Trillanes IV or former Surigao congressman Robert Ace Barbers, Mr. Marcos Jr. or BBM still hasn’t made a drastic move.

Doesn’t he know how to read the handwriting on the wall?

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Leadership, according to Uncoverie, is the ability to guide a group toward a shared goal by creating direction, alignment and commitment.

In practice, this means helping people understand where they are going, how they will get there and why the effort matters.

Many effective leaders operate without positional authority, purely because they demonstrate leadership qualities.

Their influence comes from consistency and judgment built on trust. This is why leadership and characteristics are closely linked: leadership is expressed through behavior over time.

Leadership involves decision-making under uncertainty and communication during change.

It requires judgment and emotional awareness alongside the ability to maintain focus when priorities compete.

People look to leaders for steadiness and clarity, especially when conditions are demanding.

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Life is always being badgered by a mind-boggling mystery. Our friends today are our enemies tomorrow. Our allies today are our tormentors tomorrow.

Those who heap praises on us to high heavens today will tear to shreds our reputation in hell tomorrow. We can’t step on the same river twice, according to Heraclitus.

We kill the goose that lays the golden egg. We bite the hands that feed us. We are adamant to give credit where credit is due. We offend the wrong people.

We have no love lost for the losers. We are in mad scramble queuing to the doorsteps of the winners. We mistake our friends’ generosity and humility for their weaknesses.

We kick and spit at people already down on all four. We look at life backwards and refuse to live it forward. We never learned from our mistakes.

NO MAN IS AN ISLAND. The reason why a seesaw was made for two persons is that when you go down, there would always be someone there to lift you up again!

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor-in-chief of two leading daily newspapers in Iloilo, Philippines.—Ed)