If you’re getting tired of the golf puns still being generated as a result of the Tiger Woods story — e.g., “Tiger had me in the rough” (News of the World), “Wife needs to putt Tiger in his place” (Daily Mirror), “Teed-off cops to probe Tiger’s injuries” (The Sun) — just thank your lucky stars you don’t work in business. Because golf analogies are, if you forgive yet another pun, par for the course in corporate life.
Indeed, of all the parallels commonly drawn in the corporate world — business as warfare, as Shakespeare, as gardening, as hostage negotiation, as motorised toilet-bowl racing — golf is by far the most common. Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, once used golf to make a point about the inability of central banks to control currency rates for long (“A golf pro may be able to straighten out my swing, but he will never get me to be able to hit the ball 300 yards down the middle of the fairway”).
Professors Gerard Seijts and Gary Latham have used a golf analogy to explain why it is counterproductive to set performance goals without also promoting “learning goals” (“In short, the novice golfer must learn how to play the game before becoming concerned with attaining a challenging performance outcome, e.g., a score of 95”).
Accenture, the consultancy firm, has, of course, been using Tiger Woods in its advertising for years (“We know what it takes to be a Tiger”).
An internet search reveals golf being used by others to explain everything from the importance of hiring PR professionals (“You turn to a consultancy like you would turn to a golf pro — it may be expensive, but you learn faster and better in the end”), to the importance of preparation (“Practise a lot, work to improve your game one stroke at a time, and before you know it, you just may find yourself playing in the ‘US Open’ of your industry”) and the manufacturing accuracy needed to make microchips (“The equivalent of hitting a hole in one 100 per cent of the time from 18 miles away”).
The popularity of the references probably comes down to the fact that golf is more than just a game to many managers. It’s a way of networking. It’s a way of not going home. It’s a way of reinforcing the old boy network. Which is part of the reason I’ve always hated smug corporate references to it. But I’ve found my position softening towards it in the light of the recent Tiger Woods coverage and other dark revelations about the sport. I now think there may be something to the comparison, beyond the fact that most offices, like golf clubs, do not permit the wearing of jeans, camouflage trousers or shell suits. For example:
In fact, while British golf clubs can no longer legally ban women members from their bars or discriminate in any other way on gender grounds, until just two years ago, there were still golf clubs that gave female members limited access to club facilities or barred them from the running of the club.
