Whats your Golf Quotient?

You might want to push this upwards if its like mine - zero.

India's Premier Business School IIM Ahmedabad has introduced a course on golf - which includes practice sessions as well as theory classes, which will educate students on the link between golf, corporate leadership, business negotiation and networking.

Why? Because many crucial deals are struck on the golf course.

This brings me to the much abused word in corporates today "networking". Be it in campuses for getting jobs or in corporates for getting clients, networking is here to stay.

I recently attended a training program where we were given what the facilitator called a "Networking Stack". Very simply put, we were given 10 questions creatively woven into a story, which we could use every time we met a stranger in a social gathering. Basically, it was a memory aid, which each question serving as the trigger for the next question that you would ask the stranger.

Now this is where I think we get it wrong. Networking, at the end of the day is about having a genuine conversation, a dialogue, and too many times we get caught with "what next".

While organizations focus on provide tools for networking - (like golf, for example) - conversational & listening skills are what will help you actually connect, and that cannot be ignored.