“Follow Me” is the motto of the US Army Infantry School. A statue of an infantry soldier carries the same name.
The statue was dedicated in 1960 as “The Infantryman.” Four years later it moved to the new Infantry Hall and was renamed “Follow Me.” Retired Maj. Gen. Jerry White of the National Infantry Foundation said the statue “would be the rallying cry for the Infantry.”
On April 17, 1966, the Boston Celtics named their star center, Bill Russell, head coach. He kept playing. He became the first Black head coach in a major US professional sports league.
Red Auerbach had announced that he would step down after the season, and he handed the job to Russell. Russell coached and played for three seasons. The Celtics won the championship in 1968 and again in 1969.
In 1970 Robert K. Greenleaf published an essay called “The Servant as Leader.” It introduced the term servant leadership. He wrote: “The servant-leader is servant first.” He also proposed a test: “Do those served grow as persons?”
The idea came from Greenleaf’s reading of Hermann Hesse’s novel The Journey to the East. In the story, a servant named Leo does the group’s chores. When Leo leaves, the group falls apart. Later the narrator learns that Leo was the leader of the order.
Jump ship. To jump ship is to leave one company for another.
Move on. A person who moves on leaves a job. The phrase carries no blame.
Job hopper. This is someone who changes jobs often.
Poach. To poach is to hire someone away from another company.
Free agent. This is a person who is not tied to any employer.
Hired gun. This is an expert who is brought in for one job.
Golden handcuffs. These are pay or benefits that make it costly to leave.
Don’t burn your bridges. Leave on good terms, because you may need these people again.
In 1956 William H. Whyte published The Organization Man. He set aside the workers and white-collar people who “only work for The Organization.” “The ones I am talking about,” he wrote, “belong to it as well.” They had chosen “to take the vows of organization life.”
Whyte had written about the same managers in Fortune in 1953. One company president told him: “We never plan to transfer, and we never make a man move. Of course, he kills his career if he doesn’t.”
The NCAA transfer portal opened on October 15, 2018. It is a database for college athletes who want to change schools. In 2021 new rules let Division I athletes in football, basketball, men’s ice hockey and baseball transfer once without sitting out a year.
More than 15,000 athletes from all sports entered the portal in its first year. In 2021 the Ole Miss football coach Lane Kiffin said: “We have free agency in college football.” The Clemson coach Dabo Swinney said: “It’s total chaos right now.”
In 1997 the management writer Tom Peters published “The Brand Called You” in the magazine Fast Company. “We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc.,” he wrote. “Our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.” He also told readers: “Forget your job title.”
In Ocean’s Eleven (2001), directed by Steven Soderbergh, Danny Ocean and Rusty recruit eight accomplices for one job. Each is a specialist. There is a con man, an explosives expert, a surveillance technician, an acrobat and a pickpocket. The target is the money of three Las Vegas casinos.
After the heist, the team “contemplates their victory before going their separate ways.” The film is a remake of the 1960 Rat Pack film. It earned $450.7 million worldwide.
A tiger team is “a team of specialists assembled to work on a specific goal.” A 1964 aerospace paper by J. R. Dempsey, W. A. Davis, A. S. Crossfield and Walter C. Williams used the term and defined it.
The paper described “a team of undomesticated and uninhibited technical specialists, selected for their experience, energy, and imagination, and assigned to track down relentlessly every possible source of failure in a spacecraft subsystem or simulation.”
In 1965 the American psychologist Bruce Tuckman published “Developmental sequence in small groups” in the Psychological Bulletin. He was then at the Naval Medical Research Institute. The paper named four stages in the life of a group: forming, storming, norming and performing.
In 1977 Tuckman and Mary Ann Jensen added a fifth stage, adjourning. A summary on infed.org, drawing on Donelson Forsyth’s textbook, describes it this way: “Adjourning involves dissolution. It entails the termination of roles, the completion of tasks and reduction of dependency.”