People golf. [photo/standardmedia.co.ke]
The most successful professional golfer, Tiger Woods once said: “I get to play golf for a living. What more can you ask for, getting paid for doing what you love.”
Indeed, golf is no longer a leisure game but rather a social re-engineering exercise where career businessmen and professionals from different career shades meet to make friends, network; have business contacts and deals done in the quiet lush green golf course.
In the words of advocate Stephen Gikera who recently organized a golf tournament dubbed ‘When Golf meets the Bar; that is a Perfect Practice’, the sport offers an informal and serene environment for players to create and maintain those invaluable relationships that one can depend on for career growth and livelihood.
Sparing time to play golf with current and future business contacts afford you an opportunity to show them what kind of a person you are, create lasting interpersonal relationships and, of course, create a relaxed, low-stress environment where you can propose and discuss new ideas for mutual benefit.
This appears to conform to a study appearing in the Economist titled “How Golfers get Ahead”, which apart from opening that a good golfer makes a good businessman or woman, it also comes up with interesting statistics about golf. For instance, an estimated 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEO’s play golf!
Even more interesting is the fact that executives who play golf bring home 17 percent more on average than those who don’t! Further, 54 percent of business professionals agree that golf is the ultimate networking sport against only eight percent who pitched for football. Last, but not least, most golfers agree that “the way a person plays golf is similar to the way they conduct business affairs.