It's the corporate events where an elite former rugby player gives the keynote speech, because of course everyone knows the lessons of sport translate to business. It's the same sportsmen – usually men – who pop up on boards or in the executive ranks after they retire from the game, without any prior business experience. We need to knock it off. It's bad for diversity and bad for business. It's entirely probable that Australian workplaces are full of people feigning an interest in sport to get along and get ahead. A common interest in sport can be a bridge across a cultural divide – cricket is something many Australians share with Indians, for example. But just as often it's something that divides us. I know many people – particularly other women, but plenty of men as well – who honestly couldn't care less about any kind of sport. Or they follow one sport but not others. Tamerlaine Beasley, managing director of Intercultural, which consults on diversity issues for business, says people in the dominant culture often assume their interests are universal.

"The small chat at the start of the meeting is actually really important," Beasley says. "If you come in and all the small chat is about the football on the weekend and you can't take part, then you miss out on rapport building and you're perceived as being there for the transactional part, but not being one of the mates. So conversations about sport can exclude people – you might be better off asking what people got up to on the weekend rather than whether they saw the game." Beasley says she does urge immigrants to nurture an interest in sport to fit in – particularly for newcomers to Victoria to convert to the "state religion" of AFL – but it's also incumbent on the rest of us to be inclusive. Beasley says sporting metaphors are also problematic for managing a diverse workforce. "It's 'can you give me a ballpark figure?'; 'go into bat for'; 'be on the ball'; "it's a line call'; 'we need to be kicking goals'; 'it's a game of two halves'; she says. "If you have someone in your team who has English as a second language, they may be fluent in English but they have to also be fluent in sport. People from more hierarchical cultures may not admit to not understanding and just smile and nod, and if people don't understand what you're talking about, it's going to reduce performance." Even if they do understand you, competitive sport is actually a really bad metaphor for the workplace. Modern business is less about beating the competitor and more about collaboration and building community.

Freek Vermeulen, an associate professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at London Business School, published an article in Harvard Business Review earlier this year titled "Stop comparing management to sports". "Good management is not like a competitive sport," he wrote. "And managing your company as if it is can lead your business astray – or at least create a mighty corporate mess." The reason is that if you focus too much on beating the competition and grow too fast, you will actually hurt your chances of succeeding. "Firms that approached their growth as a race to be won, by expanding faster and further than others, eventually led themselves into dire straits," he says. Vermeulen's analysis fits with my experience. I once knew a sales guy who had a former career as an Olympic athlete – from what I could observe, the fact he'd been banned from sporting competition for drug offences didn't seem to do him any harm in the corporate world.