Golf — Transcript
[00:00:00.01] Jim: I lost my notes, hang on a second.
[00:00:09.67] Ken: Okay, I can cut this, I can cut this part out, cut this beginning out.
[00:00:22.50] Jim: on top and now it’s gone and here we go oh okay so uh we’re going to discuss why we didn’t golf because neither Ken nor I recall uh participating in one of the great uh pastimes of consultants which is to either golf with uh their colleagues or golf with even better golfing with their clients, and I felt like I needed to introduce this properly by first pointing out, and I’ll turn it over to Ken after this, but first I need to point out that going through high school athletics, at virtually every sport. I can’t remember a sport that I wasn’t cut from. So when we discuss why we didn’t golf, keep in mind that my ability to golf was probably severely curtailed anyways, and I’ll let Ken tell the story, but his experience with high school sports and later college were completely different from mine and so that may lead to different reasons for him not golfing. Do you want
[00:01:40.74] Ken: to explain Ken? Well yeah I was always relatively athletic there that wasn’t the issue with me. was I grew up in a golfing family and I’m talking a serious golfing family. I understand golf. They tried to get me to golf. I have a, a, um, my dad had like a two or three handicap. Maybe he went to a four, you know, at 65 years old. Um, my mom was a. or eight handicap golfer, which is, these are very good golfers, for those of you that don’t follow golf. My son is a scratch golfer, which means he can’t have a handicap ‘cause he’s so good. I have a nephew with the same thing. So we all grew up golfing. My rebellion in life, every kid has a rebellion. Mine wasn’t taking drugs or… getting arrested or anything like that. Mine was not golfing, and it was a conscious decision because everybody wanted me to golf left-handed, and apparently that can be a benefit to golfers, but I just absolutely refused to golf. So subsequently, I never got very good at it. I have played. few times since I became an adult, and I was never very good at it, but I also don’t have the mindset for it. It’s gotta, you gotta be very patient with every stroke, and for me, I just don’t have that kind of patience. I can’t, my parents had every golf book on the planet, I’ll never forget is, you know, “A Good Walk Spoiled,” I think was the title of the book, and that describes how I think about golf. So that’s kind of my golf background story. I’ve got more to go into about it, but I’ll let you take over for just a minute, Jim.
[00:03:39.69] Jim: Okay, well, it’s not that I didn’t try to golf when I was… 17 and 18, I spent a lot of time at the local, it was called Sierre Golf Course, and it was one of those shortened courses, nine holes, you know, three par, and it was fun, and then I tried to go to a regular golf course, I was probably 18 at this point, and I had a very bad, particularly bad tee shot. I still to this day don’t know how I sent a golf ball basically on a line drive. I mean, I know your background is baseball and if this ball took off like a line drive and, there was an elderly guy on a course that should have never been in danger and Or on a hole that should have never been in danger for me And I remember that line drive golf ball going between his head and his knee because he was bent over picking up a ball off the course and I Don’t believe he ever knew how close he came to getting whacked on the head with that ball and that that was
[00:04:59.07] Ken: The last time I golfed Ken. I made up my mind after that. You’re too dangerous to public health.
[00:05:06.00] Jim: One thing to be bad, it’s another thing to be endangering people that are on you know he was if anything he was Not straight in front of me. He was like 90 degrees from me, you know Problem That’s when I stopped and I and I really my second I have a second, uh issue and I was never really able to string together, uh, Four hours to spend
[00:05:38.38] Ken: Away from my family. I had young kids and it just wasn’t gonna happen. I’ll come back to that in a minute. I have a similar story. The last time I remember playing golf, and it wasn’t, you know, probably 20 years ago, we’d belong to a club primarily because we got a discount because my son was a golfer. the high school, on the high school golf team, and my wife and I went out and decided to play around, and my son, and we’re, you know, teeing off, I think, the 11th hole, or the 10th, it would have been the 10th hole, and my wife, you know, my son’s coaching my wife, saying, “Keep your head down.” Watch the ball watch you hit it and stuff and sure enough. She goes back swings turns her head and you know, and and the ball hooks way off and Right flies right out into the middle of a big street that lined the the hole bounces once and goes right into the headlight of a car and and, you know, just bashed it. Guy pulled over, you know, we went over. Guy gets out of the car, he’s probably 6’6”, covered in tats, big muscle guy, you know, nose rings, earrings, all that stuff. It turned out he was the nicest guy, but I ended up having to replace a headlight. My wife always says, “Yeah, I never got a hole in one. I got a headlight in one.” which is kind of true. So that was the end of her golf, and when she wasn’t golfing, I wasn’t going to do it. But for me, when you talked about golf, the thing that came up was, this is often a team building exercise, particularly in big firms, you know, where you go out Sundays and golf, and as you said, one of the reasons. I didn’t like a big firm was, you know, I spent whatever, 60 hours a week working in the office. I didn’t want to spend another four or five hours away from my kids on a Sunday afternoon or Sunday morning golfing with the same people I worked with all week. or some people golf is a team-building exercise, and we did a number of them that I remember. We went paintballing. They took us to classical music concerts, even things as goofy as trust falls and all those things, and I think that if I have a point in what, we’re we’re kind of talking about. I found those things a little dehumanizing in some ways. I had fun doing things like paintball and stuff like that but it was also seemed kind of artificial particularly when you get to the point of having a trust fall or some consultant come in and say hey we’re going to build you know teams and I don’t think that really works. It just seems like a bit of, I guess maybe because I don’t love golf, that’s kind of was my impression. I guess if I did love golf or if we went out and maybe if we swung at baseballs or something or went to a batting cage, I’d have been happier about it. But that’s what this topic brought to mind exercises and playing golf as a consultant or a business guy and I don’t think it ever hurt us because our clients weren’t golfers particularly in the area that we served which was generally the public sector it’s not like we were you know serving I don’t know who who golfs but you know big industry or something like that. But anyway, that’s what came to mind when you brought up this conversation, not just that I was a bad golfer, but that I have a negative connotation for it ‘cause it’s used to kind of artificially build teams in the organizations I’ve been in.
[00:09:40.56] Jim: - Yeah, no, I think a couple of. points that you made. Our clients were in state government and you always think of what the headline’s going to read before you act. A consultant hired by state takes them golfing every week. It’s not the headline you want to see. Whereas if we were retail consultants or hospitality industry consultants, that’s basically expected part of the job, right?
[00:10:21.70] Ken: Yeah. Although I do find it funny, I know some of the team building exercises our clients went to, and we’ve mentioned this before, one of them involved… our our staff going to a shooting range with the client and learning how to shoot. I don’t know whether pistols or rifles or what they shot but it was it
[00:10:40.67] Jim: Just it’s funny the things people do for team-building efforts. In that state the headline consultant goes to the shooting range with a state official would have gotten us more work.
[00:10:59.51] Ken: (laughing) - Yeah, probably, probably. Anyway, I mean, it just, we always struggled with these team building exercises, and I think we came to the conclusion that, you know, Things will happen naturally, whether it’s, I remember things that worked for us, it seemed like the things that we planned, so the, “Hey, let’s all go paintballing and we’ll all arrange this,” were fine, but they were very artificial, like golf, and the things that happened spontaneously in here, I’m sort of thinking of things like staff going, you know, just saying, “Hey, let’s go dancing tonight.” And like half the staff went out to a bunch of bars dancing, or I always joke about, you know, walking the streets of Chicago, which was both a scary experience, but kind of a bonding experience. I think half a dozen of us went out to a bar and, of us went out to a bar and walking back we realized we were sort of in bad neighborhoods as the rats ran by and things like that. So those are the real kind of team-building things and golf always struck me as just a little bit artificial in that regard. I don’t have a love of the game, so I’m sure there are people that might listen that are turned off by the fact that I don’t think golf is a good way to bond or a good thing to do, it’s to spend four hours on, but I’m sure they would think things I do are a waste of time, too.
[00:12:36.52] Jim: Yeah, yeah, and if we have any non-golfers listening to this that are wondering, you mentioned some alternatives. But what I what I found was just a simple, I’ve always enjoyed walking, especially in new areas because I see things I wouldn’t see otherwise, but my first consulting job was for a very big firm in downtown Seattle and a group of us. You know, after I was there for about a year, a group of. us, you know, I think two, three, four people, five at the most, would go out walking in the afternoon in downtown Seattle, maybe 30 to 45 minutes, which was really frowned on by the partners, but we did it anyways. walking and talking and getting to know each other and. you know, discussing sort of the lighter moments of work life. I just found that super helpful. It was a really good, both bonding and it helped us work through things.
[00:13:42.20] Ken: Interesting, interesting thought. It’s probably more helpful because the partners or your bosses disapproved of it. You know, it was kind of a bit of a rebellion. to get out there, but it was a bonding experience. So, you know, just kind of summarizing this whole conversation, I have not liked golf since I was a kid, probably for more psychological reasons than physical reasons, and I don’t have the patience, but also as a bonding exercise, I just don’t find it very helpful. those kind of spontaneous things, like you’re walking through the, you know, getting a bunch of people together and walking was a much, much, much better idea than any planned activities.
[00:14:26.23] Jim: Yeah, yeah. Good point, because it would just come together, which always feels good.
[00:14:32.57] Ken: Yeah.