Krista, me and the kids went to the park today because the rains are due to return tomorrow and stay for eight days! That is a very good thing, but the kids are stir crazy so we gotta get them out and about now and then, you know?

We went at a new little park on the fringes of Evergreen (San Jose). A few minutes after we arrived a guy named George shows up with his twin daughters. My daughter, Debi (the social butterfly) introduces herself to the twins (did you know twins are a clique of their own? I wonder if that's how cliques got started, among siblings) and subsequently they start playing and Krista and I take turns patrolling Dave.

Dave is eighteen months and likes to wander. The parent on Dave duty tends to walk around a lot. The parent on Debi duty can stand still and chat with other parents. At one point, when I changed from Dave to Debi duty, Krista told me that George was in finance, so George and I got to talking about business.

George works for a large PC company and we talked about upper management and how most CEOs lack one of the two important qualities they need. The qualities that CEOs need are leadership and vision. Without both of these qualities, a CEO (or any manager for that matter) can't be good at his job. Here in lies the rub. I have never met a manager with both qualities. Sometimes a person can be born with a natural ability in one, but because they must learn the other the hard way, people rarely ever have both qualities.

The head of this large PC manufacturer (a couple of years ago) was blessed with vision and made a great decision (against all analyst's opinions) and succeeded. Unfortunately, this CEO is not so good at delegating. This meant that execution suffered because there was no one to actually know what was involved with the work.

The irony of this situation is: if the CEO was good at delegating, another (good business person) could act as COO and carry out the vision of the CEO. But the CEO wouldn't accept a COO because delegation was not a strong suit. Funny how that works.

To be successful, the most important quality we all need: is teamwork.

Eventually, we shifted the conversation to President Obama and were talking about how sincere he seems about his duties. I mentioned that what he lacks in vision he makes up for in his ability to build intelligent and talented teams of problem solvers. One of his strongest abilities is accepting ideas from others and making decisions based on input. He's a true leader.

At this point George started to compare President Obama to President Bush II, caught himself and said, "I guess there's really no comparison."

I laughed and said, "Yeah, its like black and white!" He laughed with me.

I told him that I've never been so lucky to be setup for such a punch line.

I should have thanked him for the opportunity.

What makes this story fun and ironic is: I'm white and George is black.