And, hey, don't bug that daughter of yours to take up golfing. She needs to find her "thing."
Oh, please explain this to me....It'll also help in business later on. I would've gone farther and might not have been laid off in 2001 had I been a regular on the golf course.
Oh, she's found her "thing". It has something to do with the mall and my empty wallet...
whoops. missed that the first time. Okay, story time boys and girls.
I used to work for one of the Big Five accounting firms back when they were still the Big Eight accounting firms (there have been mergers since then).
Cutting to the chase: there were two places were "networking" was taking place -- the golf course and the smoking areas outside the building. I wasn't going to take up smoking. Anyway, there isn't a better way to get to know the project leaders and project managers and the up-and-coming wunderkinds than spending a couple of hours with them on the links. (Unless, of course, you stink at it and you hold everyone up.) Golf, unfortunately, was a big part of corporate life, which I used to joke about.
Sometime back around 1994, there was a moment that I knew would came back to haunt me. A guy that worked in tech support came over to fix or upgrade my PC and while doing it, he noticed the deck of Magic cards on my desk. He asked if I'd teach him how to play, and we were going to go to lunch. He came back about 20 minutes later and said, "Dude, I totally forgot that I promised to go to the driving range with Pardo. Can we do it another time? You're welcome to come with us if you want."
Well, I made my usual joke about not being able to get past the windmill and declined. And I immediately realized that that had been a mistake. I wasn't really going anywhere in my department and Pardo was on his way up and I should have been expanding my connections.
Flashforward to 2001: I had been floundering around for a bit after Y2K had ended and they weren't sure what to do with me. I finally wound up in a group where I could get things done working for a partner I liked. And then the partner was bought out in a cost-cutting move. After everyone was through shifting around, I found myself working for Pardo, who while he knew who I was, he really didn't know me. When the axe finally fell and 400+ people were laid off, Pardo tried to save as many of "his people" as he could, but I really wasn't one of his people, and I'd been with him for the shortest amount of time, so I'd done the least amount of work for him.
Now, had I been networking, I might've been in a better position with him or someone else sooner. For that matter, I might not have actually been in that department which was a major mess after a string of mergers, acquisitions and spinoffs. It was like something from a soap opera or Dilbert.
Anyway, maybe playing golf wouldn't have helped, but it definitely couldn't have hurt.