It is July. You have much to learn. The Travelers PGA golf extravaganza was a wild success. That should be your clue.
You must play golf. Your snobby MBA, your quick mind, your gray suit and blue shirt and red tie – they all mean nothing. You must play golf. The employee files in the Human Resources Department are not filed in alphabetical order; they are filed according to golf handicap. If you can’t play bogey golf, kiss that vice presidency goodbye.
The accounting department can explain to you the principles of GAAP – “Golf Assisted Appreciation Performance,” a complex formula that determines how much of your compensation is tied to your golf score.
Especially when you are playing a round of golf alone, or with friends not associated with your corporation, you should make use of “pro forma” golf scoring, which allows you to omit from your score certain misses, flubs, bad luck and putts that rim the hole – thus preserving important bragging rights, come Monday morning.
The first time that you break 80, some insolent file clerk or assistant vice president may question the accuracy of your scoring. The correct response: you “neither admit nor deny” the accuracy of your score, except to say that to the best of your memory, that is what you shot.
Think ahead. If you know that you are going to be invited to play in a charity tournament, and that your handicap will be included in determining the winners, you want your “earnings” so-to-speak to be understated. Apply a little last-in, first-out logic. Play a few really lousy rounds in the weeks preceding the big tournament, to get your handicap up so high that you’ll look good come tournament time.
You should also be aware of “net actuarial gains,” which allow you to pretend that you are very old and should play from the “senior” tees, even as you score the hole as if you played from the regular men’s tees.
If you are a man. If you are a woman, you, of course, must still play golf. And smoke cigars. And smile demurely and laugh that special little laugh as you walk up to the women’s tees, which give you a 150-yard advantage over the male creatures who may well determine your future.
If you are a woman who works for a piggish company that tends to exclude women from golf outings, you can still enhance your career by offering to write up the golf tournament story for the company newsletter. Explain that you will use pro-forma reporting to write the story, which is to say that you will (wink, wink) remove nonrecurring triple-bogey distortions in order to reveal the true underlying performance of the golfer. Changing a 95 into an 80 will do wonders for your job evaluation.
As a famous financial analyst once put it, golf scores are derivative representations of reality, not reality itself. If a bee lands on your nose just as you’re completing your back swing, you have every justification to use sophisticated, discounted cash flow analysis to make appropriate assumptions about a future swing – thus eliminating the bee-induced flub and improving your score.
It also is perfectly acceptable in golf circles to make use of accrual accounting, which is to say, if your have a really hot front nine, book the benefit early, multiply by two to determine your18-hole score, and forget about the cost to future earnings if the second nine aren’t really all that great.
If possible, try to play golf with a scorecard that provides plenty of room for footnotes. For instance, during a recent round in Florida, I footnoted a special termination benefit that allowed me to record a par for a 35-foot putt that I never really holed, because there was an alligator nearby.
Be sensitive to the fact that golf is best played first thing in the morning. If, in fact, you are playing after lunch, which included a few pops of alcohol, you are a depreciated asset and are therefore allowed to reduce your price/earnings ratio at least three strokes a round.
Golf is the lifeblood of corporate America. You can’t place a high enough value on the internally generated intangibles that come from playing a good round with the big boys.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
