Tag Archives: golf

July 5, 2012 · 9:31 am

How To Make Better Decisions

I played in the annual July 4 scramble golf tournament yesterday.

A golf ball directly before the hole

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For you non-golfers out there, this is a team competition in which each member of the team hits a shot, the team selects the best one, and everyone then hits the next shot from that position. Once on the green, hopefully with more than one ball, the team chooses from which ball position to putt and everyone gives it a go from there. If the team is playing pretty well, there are often a few decisions to make. Do we forsake some distance for a better lie? Do we putt the shorter putt or the straighter one? Do we chip a ball that’s off the green but close to the hole or putt a ball that’s way on the other side of the green?
Your thinking is influenced by your particular abilities. I’d always rather putt than chip, and while distance isn’t usually a problem for me, it might be for the other members of the team who’d rather hit out of the rough if they can be 25 yards closer to the green.  And of course, this raises a business point too.

There’s a good piece today in Lifehacker about how as part of beating back confirmation bias (the tendency to listen only to the data or opinions that confirm our own) we need to take the other person’s perspective – walk a mile in their shoes – as we consider their opinions.  It works for research too – who funded it, what might the researcher’s biases be, etc.  Most importantly, when we’re asking for advice, taking the person’s perspective along with the advice helps overcome the blindness confirmation bias can instill.  This is a good article on that phenomenon.

The ability to get past your own beliefs in considering outside information is a key to being successful.  It goes with the ability the synthesize and communicate your thinking effectively.  We won the tournament yesterday so I’m very happy with how we communicated and thought as a group, even when my opinion was overruled.  Even when our shots weren’t perfect, our thinking was awfully good.  How’s yours?

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June 8, 2012 · 8:43 am

Free Lunch

I was going to write our Foodie Friday Fun piece about Jacques Pepin and his insistence in cracking eggs on a flat surface until I realized that I had written it already almost three years ago.  I guess that sort of proves his point – small details are what makes good cooking.  It makes good businesspeople and managers too.  Apparently, it makes for less redundant blogs as well.

Lunch

Lunch (Photo credit: munir)

Instead, let’s write about free lunches.  We’ve all heard about them and that it’s supposedly impossible to get something for nothing.  It comes from the old tradition of bars serving free food if you bought drinks.  I was reminded of this as I experienced yet another “freemium” model.  The problem is that many companies have turned freemium into bait and switch.  They’ve also made the free product pretty useless without the premium purchase.  There’s a really nice piece on three gaming companies and how they approached this balance on The Mary Sue (hat tip to my girl geek youngest daughter for pointing it out!).

In my case, I used an online golf trip service.  It’s a great idea – in fact, it was a concept my buddies and I had talked about doing ourselves to help other groups plan golf trips and score golf tournaments.  The problem is this:  the basics – organizing emails, setting up housing, and communicating with the group are free.  Another free element is setting up scorecards.  Once you actually have scores, you can input them but tournament results are part of the paid system.  So is the trip accounting.  Now if you’ve ever traveled with other folks you know that keeping track of the money and dividing it all out is a big pain.  So is scoring a golf tournament when handicaps, match play, and other side bets factor in.  The price to upgrade is per player, per round, so as the trip gets bigger or longer, the cost goes up until, as in our case, it became prohibitively expensive.  In other words, I scored the tournament manually, the accountant is figuring out the bills manually, and we won’t be back to the service since it offers us nothing we really need.

I’ve had the freemium business model discussion with many clients over the last few years.  I think it’s a good idea but I also think it the free part needs to be valuable on its own and the paid part needs to be an add-on, not an integral part of why folks would use the product in the first place.  As always, the focus needs to be on the customer and providing value, not on luring them in with a semi-broken product that only a payment fixes.  Look at Pandora or Skype – great freemium businesses. So is Valve, the game company.

There may not be any free lunch but we certainly can provide some great free snacks that whet folk’s appetites without making them angry.  You with me?

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May 14, 2012 · 10:13 am

Na Na Na Na

We do food on Friday here on the screed and I’m starting to think we ought to do golf on Mondays since now that it’s golf season I seem to find golf themes to start the week. I’m not sure if any of you watched The Players over the weekend but it contained a fascinating study in psychology. We talk a lot in golf about it being a mental game. Bob Jones, a golfing icon, summed it up perfectly:

MARANA, AZ - FEBRUARY 22: Kevin Na watches pl...

(Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch course…the space between your ears.

There was no better example of this than Kevin Na during The Players.  It’s a great business lesson too.  For the uninitiated, The Players is often referred to as the fifth major.  Whether it is or not, it’s a big deal in the golf world and it draws a top field.  Kevin Na is a young (28) golfer who turned pro out of high school and won for the first time not long ago.  He was probably best known for carding a 16 on a hole last year (which he did with great grace and a smile, by the way).  What is unusual about him is that he struggles to start his golf swing.  There’s no way to describe it so I’ll show you:

It’s painful, and what’s even weirder is that once he did manage to swing he was playing well enough to be leading the tournament into the final round.  It’s a great example of how often our worst enemies lie within us, both on the golf course and in the office.  How many of us spend time negotiating against ourselves rather than the other party in a deal and deliver worse deal terms than we might otherwise have got?  How many of us operate without a plan or without regard to data that might prove useful?  How many of us let our fears of failure undermine our abilities to function, despite the fact that there is plenty of evidence (like Na’s scorecard) that says we’re doing well?

Part of our ability as businesspeople is our mental capacity, which includes the ability to shut off our brains when we need to and just let our other skills take over.  To a certain extent, we need to get outside of our heads in order to let our brains function.  I’ve had the experience of feeling as if I’m watching myself give a presentation to a few hundred people, one for which I’ve prepared diligently.  My head got out of my brain’s way.  Hopefully Na, who seems like a good guy, can use this experience to do the same.  How about you?

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