Fly-fishing your way to business success

The trout season is underway on British rivers, and fly-fishers are exhuming the kind of clothing you normally see on scarecrows, shaking the bottle-tops out of their fishing bags, filling their hip flasks, reviewing their tackle and buying bizarre hats.

Those with jobs know the close relationship between work and play – and not only because one pays for the other.

For example, PR people have put fly-fishing on their “active” corporate hospitality menu to spice up the constant barrage of golf, clay pigeon shooting and lunch. A summer’s day spent stalking trout on a chalkstream half a mile from your guest is not perfect for deal-making, but it’s obviously better than being roped together in a blizzard on the north face of the Matterhorn.

But fly-fishers also believe they learn business lessons without actually having to go to the office. And even if they are wrong, at the very worst they are by now millions of trout ahead. Here’s an initial selection of such wisdom.

Getting into rivers is easier than getting out. If you've waded downstream in a powerful river, the chances are that you won’t be able to wade back up – and in several of the rivers I’ve fallen into you'll also by now be wobbling on the brink of an invisible slippery ledge, with a sheer drop on three sides. Lesson: always have an exit strategy – a fall-back position could involve drowning.

Why have one fishing rod when 40 or 50 would do just as well? Fly-fishers maintain that you need them in different lengths, actions and materials – and buy more rods than they ever use. In business one obvious parallel is financial reporting, where the x-dimensional views of every last penny can obscure the fact that you’re going bust.

Ugly flies can catch beautiful fish. Successful fly-fishers know that the flies they tie are designed to catch fish, not win prizes. In businesses like advertising and PR there’s a temptation to see analogies with the trophy cabinets of football clubs. But in sport, the trophies are the objective. In business we should look at the client’s ROI as well as our own.

Hell and high water are all in a day’s fishing. Although you returned from the river drenched, broke and knackered, you’re going to do it again tomorrow because you love it. Back in the office, if you’re not having fun you’re doing something wrong.

David Shenk, in his perceptive book Data Smog, says: one of the most vivid consequences of the information glut is a culture awash in histrionics.

PR people are not wholly to blame for this but they’re among the prime suspects. Nearly 400 years ago, legendary English angler Izaak Walton said: Study to be quiet.

These four words are worth a business book to themselves but, taking his advice, I’ll shut up now.