Paper 07: The Hogan Principle – Why Club Direction Must Be Shaped, Not Straight
“Any time you hit a straight shot, it’s a fluke. You've got to either draw or fade the ball. Don’t ever try to hit it straight. You can stand on the practice tee and hit 30 balls. If you hit 10 straight, you’re doing pretty well. But if you follow your swing, you can draw or fade all 30.”
— Ben Hogan
Golfers eventually learn that a perfectly straight shot is not necessarily the sign of complete control it appears to be. Good players usually know which way the ball is supposed to move. They may prefer a draw or a fade, but the important part is not the direction itself. It is that the shape is intentional. Their setup, alignment, swing, and target all work together around a shot they have already decided to hit.
Hogan understood that trying to eliminate every curve from the golf ball could introduce uncertainty rather than remove it. A player who knows the ball will move one direction can plan for that movement and build the shot around it. A player trying to hit the ball perfectly straight leaves room for the miss to appear on either side.
There is an institutional lesson in that.
Private clubs often approach modernization as though the safest path is the straight shot. A board does not want to move too far toward tradition or too aggressively toward change, so it looks for a balanced middle. The website is refreshed without changing much else. Communications are updated. A few amenities are reconsidered. Technology is introduced carefully enough that no constituency feels particularly threatened. None of those decisions is necessarily wrong, and moderation is often sensible inside a member-owned institution. The problem comes when balance becomes a substitute for direction.
A club can spend years making reasonable individual decisions without ever establishing what those decisions are collectively trying to accomplish. One board emphasizes heritage. Another becomes concerned about attracting younger members. A new committee wants stronger digital communication. Management identifies operational improvements. Each initiative may make sense on its own, but the institution gradually begins moving according to the accumulated decisions of the moment rather than a deliberate long-term direction. That is the governance equivalent of standing on the tee and hoping the ball goes straight: the club may remain somewhere near the fairway for quite a while, but it becomes difficult to know which miss is coming.
Choosing a Shape
The lesson from Hogan is not that one direction is inherently better than another. Some clubs should lean more deliberately into tradition because their history, architecture, golf culture, membership expectations, or place in the community are central to what makes them distinctive. Modernization in those clubs should strengthen that identity rather than dilute it. Other clubs may need to move more decisively toward adaptation because their membership is changing, their market is becoming more competitive, or their digital and operational systems no longer reflect the quality of the club itself. Preserving the institution may, in those cases, require meaningful change.
Most clubs will contain some of both. The important question is whether those choices belong to a larger institutional direction. A club that understands what it is trying to preserve can modernize aggressively in areas that do not threaten that identity. It may replace technology, redesign communications, rethink dining, improve member systems, or change the way prospective members encounter the club while remaining unmistakably itself. Another club may decide that parts of its culture have become too rigid and intentionally broaden the experience it offers. That does not require abandoning tradition. It requires deciding which traditions are essential and which were simply inherited habits.
Once the club understands what it is trying to become, or perhaps more importantly what it is trying to remain, individual decisions become easier to evaluate. A new website is no longer judged simply by whether it looks better; the more useful question is whether it expresses the institution accurately. A technology investment is not worthwhile merely because it is modern; it should support the experience the club intends to provide. Membership initiatives can be considered in terms of the community the club hopes to sustain rather than simply the number of prospects they might produce. Direction gives those decisions a common reference point, allowing the tools to follow the institution rather than quietly determine it.
Where Neutrality Becomes Drift
There is understandable caution inside private clubs about setting direction too firmly. Boards are temporary, members have different interests, and nobody wants a three-year leadership term to impose a new identity on an institution that may be a century old. That restraint is healthy, but institutional direction is not the same thing as a board imposing its preferences.
Ideally, direction comes from a much deeper understanding of the club itself: its history, culture, membership, golf course, geography, traditions, competitive environment, and the experience members actually value. Governance then becomes an act of stewardship rather than reinvention. The goal is not for each board to decide what the club should be, but to understand well enough what it already is that change can be evaluated with some continuity.
Without that deeper understanding, neutrality can slowly become drift. Small decisions accumulate. Communications change tone. A new website presents the club a little differently. Amenities receive greater emphasis. Traditions that once carried meaning gradually become ceremonial. New technology alters how members interact with the institution. None of these moments feels large enough to represent a change in direction, yet years later the club may discover that it has changed considerably without ever consciously deciding to do so.
That is what makes institutional drift difficult to recognize. It rarely arrives as one dramatic decision. More often, it is the cumulative result of many reasonable decisions that were never connected to a larger sense of direction. The problem is not that the club evolved, because healthy institutions always do. The problem is that nobody shaped the evolution.
Institutional Control
Private club governance will never offer the control of a golf swing. Boards rotate. Members disagree. Markets change. Economic conditions intervene. Technology evolves, and even the best institutional planning has to leave room for circumstances nobody can anticipate. That uncertainty does not make direction less important; it makes direction more useful.
A golfer cannot control the wind, the lie, or every movement of the swing, but the player can still decide what shot to attempt. A club can do something similar. It can establish what makes the institution distinctive, what should survive leadership transitions, what kinds of change support its character, and where modernization is genuinely necessary. From there, governance, communication, technology, capital planning, and member experience can begin working in roughly the same direction.
That alignment is where institutional architecture becomes valuable. It does not eliminate change or protect a club from every mistake. Instead, it gives change a shape. Technology and artificial intelligence will continue to provide new tools. Marketing will continue to evolve. Member expectations will change, and future boards will bring different ideas and priorities. None of those things has to determine the direction of the institution unless the club allows them to.
Hogan’s point on the practice tee was not that the ball should never move. It was that a player who understands the intended shape has a better chance of controlling where the shot finishes.
Private clubs face a similar choice. Evolution is inevitable. The more important question is whether that evolution will be shaped deliberately, with an understanding of what the institution is trying to preserve and where it intends to go, or whether its eventual direction will simply reflect the accumulation of decisions made along the way.
The ball is going to move.
The club should know which way it intends to shape it.
Markus Van Meter is a Brand Architect for private golf clubs, specializing in governance alignment, institutional identity, and long-term institutional architecture.