Similarly, many companies think they are saying something good and decent and noble when they tout employees as "our most important asset." As every youngster in the United States learns in school, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment were supposed to put an end to thinking of people as capital. Then take another small step to "indentured servitude" and-well, you can see where I am going with this. Substitute the word "chattel" for the word "capital" and you begin to see it. But something repugnant, thoroughly repugnant, happens when we juxtapose the words "human" and "capital." I understand the different kinds of capital: economic, physical, intellectual, social. For that matter, a Saturday night jazz quartet is more like a business than a Saturday morning foursome is.Īnother bad metaphor is "human capital." Companies commonly refer to the people who work for them as human capital. Conducting an orchestra comes closer to running a business than golf ever can. It does not require collaboration or innovation or engagement or teamwork or agility or communication of any sort-all of which are essential components of business success.
It isn't noisy or messy, and it certainly isn't fast. It requires intense concentration, hushed silence, and perfect form, and it is so very leisurely. All good.īut the sport of golf is a solitary enterprise. Moreover, many parents (including my own) have taken delight in teaching their children to golf, and it becomes a wonderful family activity. They may think of it as a social sport because they golf in twosomes and foursomes, and afterward they enjoy lunch or drinks and dinner. I do realize that millions of people enjoy golf, and that is certainly their privilege. Looking for parallels between business and golf is like looking for similarities between mollusks and molecules. What matters in business has nothing to do with what matters in golf. It is awful because there are no real parallels between performance in business and performance in golf. Golf, however, is a perfectly awful metaphor in business.
These metaphors lack something in freshness and creativity, but they make up for it in clarity and color. Tip of the iceberg conjures up a superficial observation. A well-oiled machine suggests an operation running smoothly. Low-hanging fruit refers to easy, early solutions. Some common metaphors in business work well. Executives who use golf as a metaphor for business success are trying to be creative, and that is fine. A well-chosen metaphor can be terrific for a speech or presentation. A metaphor (and its like-as cousin, the simile) is a comparison for the sake of shedding light on something. In contrast, metaphors can be good or bad. There are hundreds of them, Lord help us all.
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Business is full of clichés, too: walking the talk, win-win solution, thinking outside the box, synergy, paradigm shift, pushing the envelope, today's highly competitive marketplace, proactive, a perfect storm, leverage-and we're just getting started. A cliché is just an overused and typically tin-sounding word or phrase that has lost whatever zest it once had. That's what we mean by using golf as a metaphor for business.īy metaphor we are not referring to clichés, which are another problem altogether. Maybe the speaker will even step away from the lectern and pretend to size up that 20-foot putt for a birdie on the 18th hole, and then go on to expound on the parallels between golf and business. Sooner or later almost every manager will find himself in a town-hall meeting or a skip-level luncheon or an after-dinner speech when a senior executive-his own boss, perhaps-begins to wax eloquent on golf as the perfect comparison for business.
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They give license to so many executives to use this wonderful game as a metaphor, absurd though it is, for business performance. There's just one problem with major golf tournaments and with golf in general.
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You need not be a golfer-I myself haven't swung a driver in 23 years-indeed, you need not even enjoy sports to find special beauty in the magnolias, dogwoods, and azaleas of the Augusta National Golf Course and in the glorious traditions of The Masters. This week the best golfers in the world converge on Augusta, Georgia, to compete in The Masters. Regular readers with a good memory have requested that we rerun this essay on The Masters, golf, and other bad metaphors for business.
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