Shoot from the hip!

Saturday nights during the football season are often full of battles in our house. While my husband and son want to watch the football highlights, my daughter and I can’t see the point, even though we like football.

We stayed up for this year’s Champions League Final, where Man U beat Chelsea in a nail-biting penalty shoot-out (Chelsea captain Terry broke down in tears after missing the penalty that would have won the game – yes, Terry is English). And we’ll be watching as many matches as we can during the Euro 2008 (we were supporting Greece — not just because they're the reigning champions, but for family reasons — and we're still keeping our fingers crossed for Germany, as England are strangely and incomprehensibly absent). If we’re going to watch football, we want to see the whole thing, not just the bits and pieces.

So why do men (boys) love watching the highlights? Christopher Flett gives an excellent explanation for this in his new book of advice for career women, What Men Don’t Tell Women About Business. Men watch sport so they can see “every goal, touchdown (he was talking about American football), body check, and highlight”; they’re not interested in how people pass or move to get to there, they just want the goals.

The same can be said of the alpha male attitude to business, Flett argues. While men focus on goals, women work on the details and on the process to get to those goals. Flett uses colourful language to describe how men focus on goals. He writes that “men jump into the fire and shoot from the hip”. (I can just imagine my boss doing that!) His book is fun to read because of the way he uses the language. In our exercise, we focus on some of the expressions from his book. We hope you enjoy learning them!

Deborah Capras