The following article about Tsuruoka, the most winning manager in the history of professional baseball, appeared in the Nikkei newspaper the other day.
 
Tsuruoka believed that a 50-50 split between allies and foes was a failure as a leader, and that a 7-3 ratio would be admirable. He took care to avoid gathering too many players with few opportunities to play, and devised a loving way of disciplining them. He looked back on his 23 years of managing the team as "the days of striving to turn five against five into six against four, and then into seven against three."
 
I was greatly relieved when I learned that even a legendary coach must have been troubled by jealousy that disrupted his team's progress, as I had had similar problems on several occasions. Everybody is the same, I thought, and I was not the only one. If you lose the competition and are not used as you wish, you will inevitably complain about your boss and even more so about your active colleagues. It is unfortunate, but perhaps unavoidable, that people in the same situation who are dissatisfied with each other will come together and have a negative impact on the organization as a whole.
 
When I was younger, I was once harassed by a senior colleague. At the time, I took the harassment seriously and was severely depressed by my own inadequacies. I'm sure there were some points that were not necessarily wrong, but oddly enough, they were exaggerated. I felt as if everything about me was being negated by that part of myself. Furthermore, he seemed to constantly be searching around for my faults and mistakes. When I talked to my former supervisor who knew about the situation, he advised me that it was due to jealousy towards me by my seniors. At the time, I could not understand this because I had lost all self-confidence in myself. Why are you jealous of guys like me? It was like.
 
When I was being harassed, I was still young and not really aware of the existence of jealousy. I thought that kind of thing was uncool and that it rarely happened. But after I gradually regained my confidence by leaving that organization, I felt that, after all, it was jealousy. It was frustrating, but what I learned from such experiences is not to get too involved with people who work hard to find mistakes, and not to take such people's stories too seriously! Otherwise, you will be controlled and your growth will be put on the brakes.
 
Jealousy among men may sound grossly deplorable, but I believe it is a far greater and more prevalent emotion than that of women. It has been a long time since we were told that men and women are equal. Unfortunately, however, it is still male-centered, and a vertical society of males is still rampant. The competition to move up the pecking order has become the most important purpose of life, and naturally, jealousy can be intense at times. It seems to me that there are strangely many old men who are in agony because their rivals are ahead of them. The jealousy of such old men is both uncool and very human.
 
However, if I can, I would like to keep my distance from the deadheat of old men. I can hear the heavy noses breathing, and I am not good at that kind of thing. Then, what do I want to be? I want to have my own criteria, my own axis of evaluation, which is not based on the hierarchy of a small herd, and with that, I can recognize myself, affirm myself, and say, " That' s all right." It would be wonderful if we could be like that. It would be nice to get out of the boring hierarchy, become independent from a company, and live on my own. As I write this, I suddenly think that it might be a kind of my jealousy from not being a member of a big organization. I'm kind of a petty old man myself, after all.