Get in the game!

Yes, its getting colder again in New Zealand, when our thinking turns to (who am I kidding, it's all some of us ever think about) the great and glorious game, Rugby.

And Teddy Roosevelt.

Doesn't everyone think of Teddy Roosevelt when they think about Rugby, or is that just me? Perhaps it was my upbringing (I have an Uncle who forever quotes the greats, JFK, Churchill, Martin Luther King and Teddy Roosevelt, so maybe it is just me)

Come the Bledisloe Cup (I am, after all Aussie by birth and an All Blacks supporter) 30 men will run onto a field, while dozens more deliver commentaries from inside glass booths, 70,000 spectators will roar from the boundary line and hundreds of thousands more offer opinions on every line out, every scrum, every try in the comfort of bars or their living rooms.

It's a national pastime and hey, who hasn't shouted "Are you bloody joking Ref? Did you leave you glasses at home?" at a pub TV? It's a right of passage.

Every day I work with leaders, a lot of whom act like spectators, or pundits giving a running commentary on issues and challenges which they should be making themselves accountable for. Full of advice for what "they" should do (usually with their eyes pointing up and to the left, to somehow signify "Senior Management"), they stare past the things they could step up and do themselves and offer opinions on what others should do.

And I think of Teddy Roosevelt (I would point out that he died in 1919, when it was still deemed acceptable to talk about ‘man’, when referring to all of humanity).

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

Citizenship in a Republic, speech by Theodore Roosevelt, The Sorbonne Paris,  April 23, 1910