My boss has a coach...

Once every week he comes into the office; the business coach. My boss, Mr. Shachou has a coach to help him become better at business and to give him advice and guidance. This coach is an american businessman who has been involved in starting up a few big name companies in Japan and is well respected in the foreign business community. Now he has retired from all big assignements and makes money through this business coaching scheme he has going. He never worked inside the healthcare field we're in, but in plenty of other areas. He probably makes about twice as much as I do from the company a year on coaching my boss once in a week for a few hours, and I make reasonably good money to begin with...

The coach is actually not a bad guy, he does have a certain annoying Donald Trump mannerism to him and a certain air of self-importance that I have a bit difficult standing for prolonged times. But yeah, around once every week he comes in to the office to sit down with Mr. Shachou to listen to what is going on and generally coach him. The annoying thing is that sometimes I get called in to these sessions to give an update on some project that is ongoing and sometimes I kinda find myself stuck without any good opening to excuse myself and go back to my regular work.

There are two dynamics at work, from the coach and Mr. Shachou that triggers my general annoyance; the first is that Mr. Shachou for some reason I have yet to figure out, is desperate to seek the approval of the coach (I wonder if it's some father figure issue at work or something) so he doesn't bring up the difficult issues and just mentions all the great things he's done and how good he's following the recommendations from his coach from last week.

The second annoyance is how the coach is the master of being vague, throwing business cliches around him and make a face like he said something really really important when it's a very general obvious statements in terms of "having a well trained sales force is very important" or "the service of the logistic chain must be focused on the customer needs" (Mr. Shachou laps it all up though!) and since he has no knowledge of the industry and overall situation to speak of he never speaks of anything specific, but when he does it is usually something wrong, showing a basic misunderstanding of either the market or our situation, to which I quite aggressively correct him making Mr. Shachou stressed and worried that the coach has lost his balance and quickly changes the subject to bring him back up again.

But hey, can't blame the guy, it's good business for him!
(oh yeah, is it only me or isn't this picture creepy in a homo-erotic way?)