FunnyBusiness: Everything About Business Except The Bottom Line

Success is not guaranteed when Women Use Golf As A Business Strategy

Earlier this week Yvonne DiVita's Lip-Sticking Blog ran an article about five different ways companies can reach their female customer.  5 Neat Ways to Influence Jane to Shop at Your Website

One of the strategies is through sports. Golf is more than a game. It's a business strategy. A great one. I don't play golf. I think about it  a lot.
Mulligan Stew

Golf is a great business tool. Where else can you have five to eight uninterrupted hours with a client/vendor/prospect? As any male golfer will tell you, if you want to really get to know someone well, play a round of golf.

But like so many other things in business, just because golf is a wonderful business asset for men, doesn’t necessarily mean women can use this asset quite the same way.

Women executives obviously want to get to know their client/vendor/prospects as well as men do. Golf sure beats a business lunch where you are forced to sit in a noisy restaurant and time your conversation between stuffing food in your mouth, all the while praying the spinach salad with the poppy seed dressing isn’t stuck in your front tooth.

That is one explanation why membership in the Executive Women’s Golf Association ( EWGA) has jumped 38% since 2000. This impressive increase occurred while golf was experiencing relatively “flat” growth.
A few years ago, the New York Times looked at a business’s stock performance over a three-year period and compared it to the CEO’s golf handicap.

Turns out that better than average golfing executives also delivered better than average returns on investment to shareholders .The study hypothesized that better golfers were more successful in business for several reasons: (1) Time on the golf course allows for time to think clearly and strategically (2) Natural leaders tend to be natural athletes (3) Competitiveness in one area fosters competitiveness in other areas (4) Time away from work rejuvenates the mind, body and spirit, promoting greater effectiveness and success.

This success connection  between golfing and executive offices is not lost on women who are making the climb up the corporate ladder —okay, so most stall on the middle rung (that’s another story) — while they are still enjoying the climb, they want to have every tool available to them.

Golf it turns out is probably not going to be that winning tool.

As women executives will tell you, add a woman to the golf game and, the dynamics of a change. “Men get concerned how they play in front of a women more than they do about playing in front of other men, " said Nancy Manderfeld, President of the Minnesota Metro Chapter of the EWGA and a superb golfer.

“Men have a tendency to start the game by telling you all the reasons why they won’t be playing well that day: “I have a bad back and its sore. I haven’t played in a month. I only golf twice a year.”

Nancy says that combining golf with work has definitely been an asset in her work. But other strong women golfers feel they are either overlooked in corporate golf situations for less proficient men players.

Besides being overlooked, Sally says playing with men can be intimidating for many women because golf courses often assume women are at fault for holding up the game. “ The guys go stand on the tee box ,they chit chat, they’ll throw grass in the air to check the wind, they’ll take their sweet time trying to decide what club to use, then when I tee off the ranger comes up, he’ll speak directly to me saying I need to pick up the pace. It drives me crazy.”

Then there’s the delicate matter of winning. “Boys don’t mind losing to a boy. God forbid they lose to a girl,” said Sally.
Nancy agrees that “winning” has sometimes been embarrassing for the client/prospect/vendor. But she adds “they get over it.”

Maybe most do.  But it would also be naive to think there isn’t a downside business risk for women who do whup a client/ vendor/prospect on the golf course.

The last thing a business woman needs  to do is tee off her business associates—that’s very bad for business. Sometimes, for women, winning comes with a painful price.  It is afterall, par for the course.

If you have a business story, trend, perspective, observation or experience you’d like to share, send me an email. All sources are protected and names are changed to avoid getting any fired!

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Does your computer take more sick days than you?

How's your PC's Health?  

ZDNET ran an article about the state of health of PCs in the UK. They're not feeling too well.

PCs out sick more than users - News - ZDNet

The average UK PC is rendered unusable for the equivalent of around nine working days every year because the owner is cleaning up spam or fighting viruses. This is two days a year more than the average UK worker takes off as sick leave, according to Yahoo.

A survey of 2,500 UK e-mail users found that 70 percent of users had been infected by a virus in the past year and 42 percent say they found it less stressful fighting their way through rush-hour traffic than finding legitimate e-mails among the spam in their inboxes.

 

My computer isn't feeling so well either. In fact, it's on short-term disability and depending on the diagnosis from the the guys at The Geek squad, my sony vaio laptop with docking station may just be on the disabled list for longer than I want.

So are our PC's healthier than our friends across the pond? It's time for my first (given that I'be been blogging for about 72 hours ) survey on the state of your PC's health.

Are you susceptible to Viruses? Has your PC spent time in the PC infirmary this year? When your PC is ill, what do you do?

Take this brief survey .Click here to take survey  I'll post responses on a semi regular basis

Image credit: Flickr image by PolygOo

Tags: computers, business, technology, FunnyBusiness

Intro to columns

Welcome to Funny Business – a blog about business culture-- in the USA and the Universe!

This blog delights in telling tales out of school. It’s about what really goes on in corporate America, corporate England,corporate Israel, corporate Australia, corporate Argentina...well you get it.

I couldn’t make this stuff up. Not the shenanigans, not the showstopping, not the hidden agendas, and definitely not the policy statements.

When this blog began, I thought I would primarily be writing about office tales. That isn't exactly what happened. Turns out that people who have an office story to share often share it in their own blog. Many write under a pseudonym. Many get outted. Many get fired.  Some get book deals.

So over the past few years, this blog has evolved into what it is today - everything about business except the bottom line.  It's more about  trying to understand corporate anthropology.

I couldn’t make this stuff up. Not the shenanigans, not the show-stopping, not the hidden agendas, and definitely not the policy statements.

Take the vice president who invited her team for a holiday dinner even though her boss had sent a memo saying all holiday parties were canceled as part of the company’s aggressive cost-cutting measures. (The company had just announced 6,000 layoffs.) How did she pull off her holiday party? She had her administrative assistant charge the dinner and then she, the VP approved the charge. And where did she learn such devious behavior? From her boss of course, who had the VP charge their holiday get-together the week earlier.

That’s right. The guy who put a kibosh on everyone else’s holiday celebrating used the system to break his own rule. Is that what the HR department means when they talk about modeling behavior? Corporate America is my playground and I invite you to come into the sandbox to see what kind of fun people have been up to. There’s no end to the mischief making!

I do try to be honest. However, I'm not sure if I'm always fair.Can you be fair when you are writing from a point of view? Can you be fair if you're telling one person's perspective of a story?  I'm not trying to tell you the whole story here, just a story.

Here's my promise: I will do the best job I can to be honest, to adhere to the basic principles of blogging ethics. I will include a note at the bottom of all posts when I've changed some one's name, job, location or sex.

I will also include a note when the post has been edited beyond spelling and basic grammar errors which, if you read my blog on a regular basis, know that I have a definite love-hate relationship with commas.

No chance of getting dooced here. I work for myself. I don't write about my clients. ( Okay, I may write about them after we haven't worked together for around three years).

Have a story? I want to hear it! The success of this blog depends on people sharing their stories-- so whether its a boss, co-worker, corporate policy or just general corporate nonsense, let me hear from you --your identity and the identity of your place of employment will be protected. The goal is to tell the story, not get anyone dooced.

NOTE: This introduction was updated on August 4, 2007.

The Office Bio-Break: Why women avoid the office bathroom

Nowhere are the differences between men and women more evident than in their attitudes toward taking a "bio- break." A male worker will fold a newspaper under his armpit, announce to anyone within earshot that he's going down the hall, and then strut down the walkway like a matador going into the ring to conquer the bull. Twenty minutes later, he will re-emerge, victorious.

You'll never see a woman with a folded newspaper under her arm. In fact, as far as most women are concerned, they'd just as soon you think that they never need to take a bio-break - of any kind.

Kathy takes this to an extreme - rarely taking a bio-break at all. Kathy, her friend Lynn and I were having after-work margaritas, when Kathy excused herself rather suddenly, saying she hadn't been to the restroom all day. When she returned, she explained she has bashful bladder syndrome. People with this condition have difficulty using public restrooms. For Kathy, it was primarily work-related. Kathy's bladder may be bashful, but she's not bashful when it comes to discussing what it's like to work when you have this syndrome.

"For starters, I don't drink any liquids at work. I get all my liquid requirements after 6 p.m.," said Kathy, sipping her margarita.

"You don't drink anything all day?" I was thinking about my double-shot low-fat cappuccino with a half shot of sugar-free vanilla, followed by numerous glasses of water, tea and more coffee. "Don't you get thirsty?"

"I've trained myself," Kathy replied.

"You must need to take a bio-break sometimes!"

"On those rare occasions, I make sure to check out the shoes. If I recognize any of them - and especially if I spot my boss's shoes - I just leave."

"What do you do if you're already in the stall, and you see a pair of shoes that you recognize?"

"I stop what I'm doing and wait for them to leave."

I didn't have the heart to tell Kathy that after she has kids, the ability to stop the action in midstream will be a bit more challenging.

Turning to Lynn, I asked, "Do you have bio-break rituals?"

"I do prefer to have a vacant stall in between me and anyone else in there. . .Oh!" she added, "I do have one more ritual. When I see the shoes of someone I don't like, and they become very quiet when I walk in the bathroom, I deliberately take my time. I comb my hair, put on make-up - anything to make them suffer."

Over the next week, I talked to a lot of people about bio-breaks. Women, on the whole, take great lengths to avoid using a public restroom for anything that could create noises or odors. Those are strictly at-home activities. In those rare instances when nature refuses to live by the 9-to-5 rule, women will go to a different floor, or better yet, the bathroom in the Oval Room at Marshall Field's.

This brings me back to my male counterparts. I wanted to know why they were so comfortable using public bathrooms, when women are so public bathroom-averse.
The men, I found, were not eager to discuss bio-breaks with me.

Josh, a former co-worker who I definitely remember as a paper-toting bio-breaker, adamantly denied ever taking a newspaper along for a bio-break. But he did share a very interesting bit of information: "I'm sure you're correct that a lot of men do read the paper in there, because there are always lots of newspapers on the floor."

"You know, Josh," I said, "there are no newspapers on the floor in a women's restroom. Ever."

Next, I asked my friend Ted. He, too, denied ever taking reading material along for a bio-break. "But," I probed, "aren't there newspapers on the floor already that you can read if you want to?"

"Well, yes, there are," he admitted, and then added thoughtfully, "but I don't think it's so much about reading as it is about having time alone."

"Time alone?" I asked; the concept is rather alien to many women.

"You know, the bathroom is one place where you know no one is going to bother you. No one is going to ask a question, pressure you, remind you that you have a deadline or that the budget is due."

The more guys I talked to, the more concurred with Ted.

That's when I realized that I may have judged men unjustly. What I thought I was observing might not be what I was observing at all. Carrying a newspaper down the hall may not be an act of male bravado. Instead, it could actually be an act of male vulnerability. I never imagined it was a guy's way of letting the rest of us know that he needed to spend some time in his safe place.

Image Credit: Flickr member Strph  Image added August 2007.

Note: The names have been changed to protect the privacy of our bio-breakers.

Have a story?  I want to hear it! The success of this blog depends on people sharing their stories-- so whether its a boss, co-worker, corporate policy or just general corporate nonsense, let me hear from you --your identity and the identity of your place of employment will be protected.  The goal is to tell the story, not get anyone fired.