In leadership training, we spend an awful lot of time on the role of the leader.  In leadership training and development we deal with the burden of leadership.  It seems that the one assumption that we fail to entertain is the possibility that it may be more difficult to follow than to lead.  While social science has a long and sometimes perilous tradition of taking parallels, metaphors, analogies from the physical sciences, a recent study by fourth-year Cornell physics graduate student, Leif Ristroph, and New York University researcher, Jun Zhang, should get us thinking that maybe that “following the leader can be a drag.”