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OWL BOOK REVIEW
AVIARY
Tom Hirschfeld, Business Dad: How Good Businessmen
Can Make Great Fathers
Little, Brown, ,1999.
ISBN: 031621 9509
Most books of this type are focused on how lessons from
Attila the Hun, Jesus Christ, or samurai can teach people how to be more
successful business people. Hirschfeld's book goes in the opposite direction.
He says that the lessons one learns in business can help fathers to be
better parents.
Hirschfeld says that once he realized that he used the
same negotiating principles to get his small son to bed, he realized that
many of the same techniques that make one successful in business are transferable
to parenting small children.
Here are some of the transferrable skills:
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Listening
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Negotiating
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Crisis Management
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Empathy
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Learning about foreign cultures.
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Negotiating hostile takeovers (when teenagers are taken
over by their hormones).
If these skills are transferable, then why aren't
more businessmen better fathers? Hirschfeld says in part it's because you
can't fire your kids. Another, and perhaps more obvious reason, is that
businessmen generally don't devote enough time to their families. Techniques
in business only work because they are used, and if they aren't used in
families, they aren't doing much good there. Hirschfeld cites a study printed
in Harvard Business Review saying that fathers who are more involved with
their families tend to be more successful at work.
Some readers of this book might balk at some of Hirschfeld's
analogies, but one could also argue that the analogy is the point of the
entire book. He describes a marriage, for example, as a joint venture where
the husband and wife need to work out their "turf." One person doesn't
own the household, for example. It's an interesting twist on an age-old
problem.
His key points are that you don't have to be one person
at work and then a different kind of father at home. That's a hopeful and
useful message. Second, he doesn't believe that to be successful at home
you have to sacrifice your career, or vice versa. Just hearing that message
will be helpful to many busy businessmen fathers.
Janelle Barlow, Ph.D.
President, TMI USA
 Previous
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