Stanford Business

FEBRUARY 2007


Dean's Column

In Golf or Business, ‘Women Don’t Give Putts’


Photo by Robert Holmgren

Besides providing added talent, women also increased the professionalism of our management.

This month’s cover story addresses women and work, and I’d like to add a few words. Diversity is important to innovation and high-performance teams. It means not only demographic elements like gender, race, and nationality, but also the differing experiences and insights people bring with them. It is important for our students to know that diverse teams are essential to good management.

Women, who are among those who add diversity, are important to organizations for a couple of reasons. First, without them, management is limited to 50 percent of the talent pool. I saw that firsthand at Wells Fargo, where I spent 22 years. When I started, less than 3 percent of branch managers were women. Most managers were credit specialists making loans. They were less effective in sales and customer service because they were crunching numbers in their offices. As computers and scoring algorithms became increasingly key to small loan decision making, Wells Fargo redefined the role of the branch manager. Women, who previously had not been in the credit track, immediately moved into management. Customer service improved and new accounts grew. By automating credit and tapping women’s years of front-line experience, we revitalized our branch system and customer outreach. By the time I left Wells in 1992, about 65 percent of branch managers were women.

When I joined Westpac, a large Australian bank, as CEO in 1993, women in management were nearly nonexistent in Australian banking. I knew we could promote and hire more women because I had seen it work at Wells. This time, it happened faster. Just six years later, the number of women branch managers soared from 6 percent to 60 percent. Their leadership and performance were part of the financial turnaround at the bank.

Besides providing added talent, women also increased the professionalism of our management. One of our most senior and wise executives observed to me, “It’s great having more women on our teams; you know, women don’t give putts.” Never having golfed with women, I didn’t quite get his point. But after playing a round with my sister-in-law one day, it hit me. I was used to playing only with men, and men usually give you the short putts—you don’t have to make them. But she wouldn’t go for that. “Jack Nicklaus has to make them, doesn’t he?” she asked.

Of course, she was right (and of course, you don’t always make them). Similarly, I found that women entering senior management asked questions like “Aren’t we supposed to have clear objectives for all our people and do performance reviews regularly?” Just as in golf, the prevailing, largely male environment had often produced informal shortcuts that really undercut the professional standards and competitive excellence we needed in the organization. By “not giving putts”—and not continuing some of the sloppy practices that had crept in—the inclusion of women and their diverse outlook raised our game.

For me, this experience with the advancement of women in banking on two continents was a powerful example of the value of diversity in organizations. Like minorities and others entering corporate life from nontraditional backgrounds, women brought fresh perspectives and important questions to our deliberations.

I often found the worst-performing departments were those that lacked diversity. When everyone has very similar outlooks, people tend to take shortcuts. They avoid confronting reality and making tough choices. Sometimes shortcuts can be harmless, but they also can undermine the managerial underpinnings that make organizations innovative and keep complacency at bay.

I confess that I give putts on the green (even to women if they’ll reciprocate) because my golf game isn’t that important or competitive; but in today’s organizations—where performance really matters—shortcuts don’t work.

Finally, a note on my November column: Two readers challenged my characterization of Stanford as a “trade school” in the late 1950s. My apologies for those poorly chosen words. While critics levied such criticisms at business schools broadly during a review of business education at the time, it did not apply to our school, already one of the finest. Indeed, the foundation built by Dean Hugh Jackson enabled the GSB’s transition to a world-class teaching and research institution in the decades that followed.

Read more about Dean Jackson.

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