The Opportunity

Excerpted from
Business Dad : How Good Businessmen Can Make Great Fathers (and Vice Versa)
By Tom Hirschfeld, Julie Hirschfeld, Ph.D.

Name any weekday afternoon since your college graduation. Where were you? Probably in the office, or out in meetings, but in any case, working. And that would be true not only of almost any weekday afternoon, but also of mornings, evenings, and even (sad to say) numerous nights and weekends. Since our early twenties, in fact, most of us have spent over half our waking hours either working or training to work. In 1995, Fortune surveyed more than two thousand of its readers and found that the average time spent working and commuting was about fifty-seven hours a week. And those were the readers who had time to answer a survey!

The point: work is by far our most formative adult experience. Most of us have already accumulated far more hours at the office, or in the office-oriented culture of B-school, than we ever spent awake in college or high school, for example. (When I say "office" in this book, I mean workplaces in general. It could be a farm, a store, or a factory floor without altering the central truths.) That tally doesn't even include the monstrous swaths of time we've spent away from work but reading about it, either in office papers or E-mail or trade magazines, or of course the Wall Street Journal or Fortune or Forbes or Business Week. Except for time spent with our own parents, work has been the major influence on our world view and way of functioning. We are, like it or not, creatures of the work environment. As Bruce F., CEO of a fast-growing Virginia training company, told me, "When I get home from the office, I've been using my business skills all day, managing different kinds of people. It's all I have to fall back on. It's who I am."

Can these skills really help us as dads? After all, one of the obstacles I mentioned earlier was that home and office are diametrically opposite in some ways, and that transferring behavior blindly from one to the other is a recipe for disaster. In other, more fundamental ways, however, the two are getting more similar every day. On the home front, things are getting a little more regimented, a little more complicated, as kids' activities multiply and as many of their moms work hours rivaling Dad's. (Last definition: when I say "work," it's just shorthand for paid work. A major reason for this book is that parenting entails work at least as hard as you'll find in any office. Ask any stay-at-home mom why she decided not to "work," and you'll be lucky not to get socked.)

Meanwhile, those working moms are bringing their influence into the office. As anyone outside of academia knows, women are different from men. Many have brought with them to the corporate world a more collaborative, less hierarchical, more psychologically astute way of interacting. Not that women crave power and success any less than we do, mind you. They just define those goals a little differently and have different methods of reaching them. Some try to act just like men in the workplace, but most have blazed their own trails, causing management mavens like Tom Peters to postulate that women are actually better businesspeople. The business magazines have been chronicling the results for decades: as women have risen and proliferated throughout our companies, they have brought with them a sweeping cultural change, one that makes the workplace a little more like, well, like family.

At the same time, the nature of work itself has changed. Communications technology has helped to flatten organizational structures. Thanks to reengineering, business processes have become more integrated and less departmentalized, so teams requiring elaborate minicultures, workflow diagrams, and "groupware" have become the basic fabric of many organizations. Most companies are evolving into "adhocracies," in which the needs of the moment determine who works with whom. Shortages of skilled workers, along with the rising cost of replacing and training workers in a knowledge-intensive environment, are making it ever more important to keep people happy and motivated. The changes go beyond any one corporation: companies and even industries have grown more interdependent, giving rise to webs of strategic partnerships, consulting disciplines like "bionomics," and new models for business relationships such as "co-opetition" and outsourcing.

John Doerr is arguably the leading venture capitalist of the 1990s. He has aided and abetted the early successes of Sun Microsystems, Intuit, Netscape, and ©Home-and those are just some of the big ones. When this pleasant, unassuming agent of change talks, smart people really listen, more than they ever did in those old E. F. Hutton commercials.

As the headhunters keep telling us, the skills that took execs to the top thirty years ago are only a small part of the portfolio we now need, and people skills and information management are playing ever-growing roles. One result is that skills that help people function in families now help them in the office as well.

How often have you read interviews with successful women executives, women practically fawned over by the business press, who attribute their meteoric rises to skills first learned at home? It's always the same story. "Once you've survived a birthday party full of four-year-olds," they say, "handling the board of directors doesn't pose much of a challenge." Or, "Once you've persuaded your twins to clean their room, you've got what it takes to reorganize a department." And you know what? They're right.

Pat Fili, president of the ABC television network, provided a recent example in a November 1998 Forbes interview. "Does being a mom make me a better manager? Oh, yes. It's perfected my negotiating skills." Sally Helgesen, in her book The Female Advantage: Women's Ways of Leadership, takes note of how parenthood has helped women executives.