What We're Up Against

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

(Page 3 of 3)

• No training. Dozens of schools offer M.B.A.'s, but there's no Master of Fatherly Administration. The fact is, we can't prepare for having kids the way many of us prepared for our professional careers. And make no mistake: fathering is tricky work, hellaciously hard sometimes, with more pitfalls and traps than an Indiana Jones flick. We can get training to engineer a merger, turn around a factory, or launch a new brand, but fathering makes all those feats look like cakewalks.

• No role models. Bookstore business sections bulge with billionaires - tomes by or about idols like Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Michael Eisner, Sam Walton, and Warren Buffett. But where are the heroes of fathering, the shining examples for us to emulate and measure ourselves against?

Mentors make a major difference, as the phenomenon of Silicon Valley shows. Did that awesome agglomeration of capital and brains happen overnight? Of course not. Companies such as Hewlett-Packard, which was founded more than sixty years ago, and Fairchild Semiconductor served as mentors and “fathers” to a whole industry. Where can dads get that kind of guidance today?

Our wives typically grew up being groomed for the role of mother, and their first female role models were their own mothers, who by and large did a pretty good job. Most of us, on the other hand, had dads of the old school (if we were lucky enough to have fathers living with us at all). Some of those dads may have performed fantastically under the old rules - lower expectations, shorter work hours, and wives who stayed home. But times have changed, and some of our fathers' lessons no longer apply.

• No expert status. Moms begin with all kinds of cultural preparation for being sensitive, nurturing, competent parents. What really makes them experts, though, is spending so much time with the kids, beginning with pregnancy. Sooner or later, the children become their turf. Once that happens, anyone who ventures onto that turf risks correction, reprimand, or worse.

The husbands of expert moms may get caught in a catch-22. The best way to learn is by doing, but the more the knowledge gap widens, the more painful it can be for us to try doing anything. At the very least, we're bound to be relatively inefficient. Also, some moms act so possessive about their kids that it can be tough for lessinvolved dads to get closer. Worst of all, some dads find it unpleasant to do anything they're not instantly good at - meaning they never learn.

• No books. Have you been to your neighborhood bookstore lately? Almost all the books on child raising are for moms - or parents, which in most cases amounts to a code word for moms. There's little that focuses on the contributions that only fathers can make, or on the issues they have to deal with. Most books with “father” in the title target subgroups like single dads, gay dads, or middle-aged dads, as if they're the only ones who need or want advice. Of the few general books for fathers, one of today's bestsellers dates from the Nixon presidency! Even the more recent books were written by psychologists, writers, professors, or fathering activists - not a businessman among them. As a result, the authors tend to gloss over issues that business dads face, and they totally ignore the amazing resources that our hard-won business skills give us. Instead, they write long, long chapters dwelling on things that social scientists care about. Parts can be useful, but the authors seem too seldom to have dads like you and me in mind.

• No magazines. Try finding anything about fathering in the men's health or men's life mags. Women are bombarded with parenting articles in the “women's service” magazines, and of course they have their pick of general (that is, woman-targeted) parenting magazines, but there's virtually nothing out there just for fathers, let alone for business dads like us. On the Web, you'll find huge volumes of information for parents, but again written mostly with mothers in mind.

• No time. For combatants in today's economy, time is the scarcest commodity. Most of our dads had more time to fulfill their (relatively limited) fathering expectations, because they worked maybe fifty hours tops. The rest of the time, they basically stayed around the house, and we got to see them reading, fixing things, and chatting with the neighbors - letting us observe who they were and how they acted. Today, by contrast, our “day jobs” could go on all day, every day, if we let them. Like our dads, we still need adult time with the women we married, and maybe a couple of hours by ourselves to recharge our batteries. With all those competing priorities, who has time to be a father, let alone a good one?

• No professionalism. It's an understatement to say that corporate and kid environments are not the same. At work we give a few terse orders, and behold, they get carried out; at home we try the same, and get a tantrum or an adolescent snit for our pains. At work we're told problems so we can solve them; at home we're told problems no one can solve. At work we aspire to order and clarity; at home chaos is rarely far away. At work we're rewarded for focus, intensity, and singleness of purpose; if we try applying those characteristics the same way at home, the only reward we get is rapid burnout. Any business dad can testify, in summary, that reflexively slipping into office behavior with our kids is risky business. The problem is, they just don't act like professionals.

• No evaluations. At work and home alike, it's tough to rise above the day-to-day tumult - to get a good overview of how we're really performing. Good employers provide some kind of formal assessment every three, six, or twelve months to make sure that we stay on the right track and that we know which skills need more work. Our kids can't give us any explicit feedback till they talk, and formal evaluations are never very likely. All we can do is watch how they're doing, and guess how we might help them do better.

• No pay. Annual assessments are all very well, but in the corporate world nothing talks quite like cash on the barrelhead. Our salaries and bonuses constitute our rewards for a job well done, and in good years they can make all our hard work seem worthwhile. As fathers, by contrast, we tend to see cash streaming out in the opposite direction. Then there's the “soft” compensation at work, like Outstanding Salesman recognition ceremonies and praise from the boss, or the little courtesies and ego boosts we get from our colleagues in the course of everyday interaction. These niceties have not, I'm afraid, made it into the repertoire of most two-year-olds. There are many other compensations to fatherhood, but they're not always obvious.

• No competition. Face it: one of the forces that drives us at work is the primeval urge to outperform our colleagues, or our college roommates, or our neighbors. The raise and the bonus are not simply feedback mechanisms, but also ways of keeping score. Since boyhood, and probably since the cavemen, we've instinctively asked who's biggest, who's smartest, who's fastest, who can throw the farthest, kiss the prettiest, and possess the most. But in our households, we're it. There are no other dads to compete against. Where there is no competition, can there be motivation? Can there be meaning?

* * *

With hurdles like those to overcome, you'd think business dads would try to even the odds with as much information as possible. In business, after all, we flock to new bestsellers every month, with such titles as Crossing the Chasm or The Learning Organization. And yet you may have noticed that most businessmen (yes, it's true) read fewer books on parenting than they do on business.

Why might this be? Is it that books about fathering don't have business dads in mind? That successful businessmen see books on fathering as self-improvement, a genre they haven't much time for? That businessmen absolutely must read what their competitors are reading? Or that, confronted by so many obstacles, some business dads just give up and follow Mom's instructions? I suspect that each of these explanations contains some truth.

This book sets out with the modest goal of helping to change all that. For starters, I mean this to be a book that business dads will actually read. It's a simple idea, yes, but one whose time has come: a book by a business dad for business dads.

What makes this book different? It directly addresses the What We're Up Against obstacles listed above. It uses terms naturally familiar to businessmen, with real-life examples from both the corporate and the child-raising worlds. It explores in detail the particular work-family struggles business dads face, from deadline juggling to paternity leave.

Most important, this book recognizes that we businessmen have a secret weapon to help us in the struggle to be decent dads. It shows that our business experience itself, of all things, has graced us with huge reservoirs of untapped fathering skills; that successful businessmen, by definition, have the makings of truly exceptional fathers; and that there exist commonsense, logical methods of unlocking that incredible potential.

© 1999 by Tom Hirschfeld with Julie Hirschfeld, Ph.D

About the Author

Tom Hirschfeld is a venture capitalist at Patricof & Co., where he invests in technology and communications companies. He serves on the boards of six corporations and one nonprofit institution. He was previously assistant to the mayor of New York City, vice president in corporate finance at Salomon Brothers, and author of two books about video games.

Julie Hirschfeld holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and specializes in marital and family therapy. The Hirschfelds live in New York City with their two children.