Two Women, Three Men on a Raft
Two Women, Three Men on a Raft - HBR.org
pagina 1 van 7
Two Women, Three Men on a Raft by Robert Schrank
What really happened to Raft No. 4 on an Outward Bound trip down the Rogue River?
This article was originally published in May–June 1977. Harvard Business School Press has just published it as part anthology of
HBR articles on women and work, entitled Reach for the Top: Women the Changing Facts of Work life, edited by Nancy A. Nichols.
For its republication as an HBR Classic, Robert Schrank and three professional women have written retrospective commentaries.
One of the commentators accompanied Schrank on the original raft trip.
One afternoon in June, I left cloistered halls of the Ford Foundation and within 36 hours found myself standing on the banks of the
Rogue River in Oregon with three other uncertain souls who had embarked on a week of “survival training” sponsored by Outward
Bound. It was a cloudy, cold day, and as we pumped up our rubber raft and contemplated the Rogue, we also wondered about one another. Before embarking on a Greyhound for the raft launching site, we had gathered the night before at the Medford Holiday Inn.
That night, the Outward Bound staff had distributed individual camping gear and waterproof sleeping/storage bags to the 20 of us, almost all novices, and had given us a short briefing on the perils of going down the Rogue River on a raft.
As they explained the nature of the trip, the Outward Bound staffers reminded me of seasoned military men or safari leaders about to take a group of know-nothings into a world of lurking danger. Their talk was a kind of machismo jargon about swells, rattlers, safety lines, portages, and pitons. Because they had known and conquered the dangers, it seemed they could talk of such things with assurance. This kind of “man talk” called to a primitive ear in us novices, and we began to perceive the grave dangers out there as evils to be overcome. In our minds, we were planning to
pagina 1 van 7
Two Women, Three Men on a Raft by Robert Schrank
What really happened to Raft No. 4 on an Outward Bound trip down the Rogue River?
This article was originally published in May–June 1977. Harvard Business School Press has just published it as part anthology of
HBR articles on women and work, entitled Reach for the Top: Women the Changing Facts of Work life, edited by Nancy A. Nichols.
For its republication as an HBR Classic, Robert Schrank and three professional women have written retrospective commentaries.
One of the commentators accompanied Schrank on the original raft trip.
One afternoon in June, I left cloistered halls of the Ford Foundation and within 36 hours found myself standing on the banks of the
Rogue River in Oregon with three other uncertain souls who had embarked on a week of “survival training” sponsored by Outward
Bound. It was a cloudy, cold day, and as we pumped up our rubber raft and contemplated the Rogue, we also wondered about one another. Before embarking on a Greyhound for the raft launching site, we had gathered the night before at the Medford Holiday Inn.
That night, the Outward Bound staff had distributed individual camping gear and waterproof sleeping/storage bags to the 20 of us, almost all novices, and had given us a short briefing on the perils of going down the Rogue River on a raft.
As they explained the nature of the trip, the Outward Bound staffers reminded me of seasoned military men or safari leaders about to take a group of know-nothings into a world of lurking danger. Their talk was a kind of machismo jargon about swells, rattlers, safety lines, portages, and pitons. Because they had known and conquered the dangers, it seemed they could talk of such things with assurance. This kind of “man talk” called to a primitive ear in us novices, and we began to perceive the grave dangers out there as evils to be overcome. In our minds, we were planning to