"Who in their right mind would invest $50,000 in an organization that changes its CEO every year?"

No one every accused me of timeliness, but I finally got around to my October Golf Digest and their special money section. Each story had excellent points and you can access all of them here if you are behind on your reading like me. But considering yesterday's news from Winged Foot and the interesting state of club life in America in light of the financial crisis, each story has relevance, none moreso than this excerpt from Chris Millard's story was most entertaining, particularly this anecdote.

Fred Laughlin, who has long consulted with nonprofit groups on management issues, has recently begun working with the Club Managers Association of America on governance modeling for private clubs. His initial impressions of American private-club management and governance were not good. "Just awful," he says. "Mired barely in the 20th century." (See accompanying story by Davis Sezna.) How did we get here? Many of these clubs started because founders wanted to get together with friends. After a while the founders turned over management to boards, which in turn appointed presidents, who eventually hired GMs. "This happened over decades," says Laughlin. "Now we've got to a point where people are asking, 'Who's in charge?' "

It doesn't take a CFO to realize that there's something unsustainable about a 90,000-square-foot clubhouse in an age of dwindling enrollments. "A club needs to be run like a business," says Laughlin, adding that the top private clubs would rank among the top-10 percent of all businesses in the United States. Business-like thinking should extend, he says, to governance. "Who in their right mind would invest $50,000 in an organization that changes its CEO every year? Yet that's exactly what these members are doing and what these clubs are asking them to do."