Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead... But Gutsy Girls Do (5 page)

When Claire Brinker was working as the ad director for Red Cross Shoes, a division of U.S. Shoe, her job responsibilities were to create ads and sales promotion events for Red Cross Shoes and two other subsidiaries. Unfortunately, Red Cross was a declining business, due in pan to the association people had with the name. Brinker fell it was essential that the company find ways to grow the business, which had a target audience of women age thirty-five and above.

One of the observations she'd made was that women everywhere seemed to be walking. She could also see that women who walked faced a paucity of shoes to choose from, “If they went into an athletic footwear store.” says Brinker, “they'd end up with some teenager asking, ‘How fast do you run?’ The more I read about the popularity of walking, the more I realized that our company should develop a walking shoe. And we should sell it not in athletic footwear stores but in department stores, where women over thirty-five were more comfortable shopping.”

So Brinker went to management and pitched the idea, even though that wasn't one of the things she was “supposed” to do under her job description. It look lots of effort (“My persistence could have been compared to Chinese water torture”), but she eventually sold them on the idea—and the result was the Easy Spirit Walking Shoe, the third-ranked brand of walking shoes in the country.

Today Brinker is director of corporate marketing at U.S. Shoe. She also played a major role in the success of the Easy Spirit dress pump—which was marketed brilliantly by showing women wearing the pump as they played a fast game of basketball.

I know that even as I champion the benefits of breaking the rules, you probably still consider it a scary proposition. But here's what I've learned. The first time you break the rules, it's not nearly as frightening as you think it will be; in fact, it can be downright exhilarating. It has always reminded me of the thrill I felt the first time my mother let me strip to my underpants and run through the sprinkler in our backyard.

WARNING: DO NOT CONFUSE GUSTO WITH GUTSINESS

If you're smart and a hard worker, someone whom other people think of as a go-getter, you may be telling yourself right now that you are already a rule breaker. But go-getting is not the same as rule breaking. I've seen good girls on my staff congratulate themselves for being whirlwinds around the office, but when the dust has settled, all they've done is follow orders and take care of the basics.

TEST YOUR RECORD

To find out how much of a rule breaker you are, ask yourself these questions:

In the past month have you

•  done something in your job that's never been tried before?

•  used a fresh new approach to get a task or project accomplished?

•  solved a nagging problem that no one has ever bothered to tackle?

•  taken on a major responsibility that wasn't in your job description?

•  presented an idea to your boss that made her say. “Wow”?

•  done something that made half your peers green with envy?

If you answered NO to most of these questions (or “No, but…”), it's time to strip down to your metaphoric underpants and jump through the water.

DO NOT PROCEED UNTIL YOU CONSIDER THESE TWO POINTS

Okay, before you do start jumping in, it's important to realize that only a certain kind of rule breaking will pay off for you. It must directly or indirectly

1. make money for your company, OR

2. save money for your company.

Now, that seems pretty obvious, but good girls have a tendency to gravitate toward earnest projects that sound noble on paper and involve lots of scurrying around, but ultimately don't help the bottom line.

At one of the fashion magazines I worked at, an editor on my level in another department told me one day in a self-congratulatory tone that she had just gotten permission from the editor-in-chief to develop a stringer system for the magazine. Young women from around the country would be paid a small retainer to keep the magazine posted on trends and stories in their area. There would be stringers in Minneapolis and Miami, Tucson and L.A. Here a stringer, there a stringer, everywhere a stringer stringer. The editor said this had never been done at the magazine before and she was thrilled to have gotten it off the ground. As I offered her a strained, “That's great,” all I could wonder was whether I should have thought of the idea myself.

But you know what? Readers of the magazine wanted to know what the hottest styles were and the tell-tale signs of guys who would never commit, not what people were doing in Des Moines. The stringer system might have charted new territory but it did nothing for the business. It fizzled just a short time later.

SIX EASY WAYS TO COME UP WITH A WOW IDEA

Okay, you're ready and eager to make a gutsy move, to break, bend, or extend the rules. But where do you begin? How do you find the ingredients for your own upside-down sundae?

One of the points that struck me as I pored through management books in my job as editor-in-chief of
Working Woman
was how little information exists on how actually to generate a bold, creative idea or strategy. These books are filled with information on how to do the maintenance part of your job effectively: supervising people, handling your boss, managing your time, but little on going beyond the basics. You're not likely to find a chapter called “How to Knock Their Socks Off.”

In part that's because we assume you can't teach people how to conceive bold, gutsy ideas—they're supposedly second nature to certain individuals. But I think there are several strategies that you can train yourself to use effectively.

I. Fantasize About What Turns You On

Some of the gutsiest moves involve paying attention to your
own
needs as a human being, as a consumer, even if it means ignoring the common wisdom in your company about what people want. You know what you like, what you buy, what you rely on, what you really get the hots for. That's incredibly valuable information. My assistant, Amy, once told me that her favorite magazine covers were those that looked so delicious that she felt a strange urge to lick them. I realized that that was one of the best guidelines I'd ever heard, far better than any I'd gotten analyzing lots of numbers.

Unfortunately we tend to leave our secret or crazy yearnings behind when we walk into our jobs. We're encouraged to focus on lots of numbers and adhere to principles developed by people who haven't been away from their desks in decades. If you pay attention to what gets your juices flowing, you are likely to hit on an approach that may seem renegade, but in the long run it could turn everything around for you.

This is how I got one of my biggest career breaks in my twenties.

At the time I was a junior writer at
Glamour,
in charge of turning out short little pieces for a section called “The How to Do Anything Better Guide.” It was a good starter job in the articles department, but I knew there was no way I could stand out if I was forever relegated to subjects like “How to Make a Bathing Suit from Two Bandanna Scarves.” I would have to write a major feature in order to establish myself as an important player.

Most of the articles in
Glamour
at the time were reporting pieces, like “Dating and Mating: How Much Have the Rules Changed?” But I just couldn't get interested in doing a piece that focused on trends or provided lots of helpful tips. What really fascinated me most were some of the issues I was facing in my own life as a single woman living in a shabby apartment building in New York City, and I wanted to write a sad and funny first-person article about my experiences. The magazine rarely ran essays, but I felt that if my heart was aching as a single girl, so were others’. Over the next two months I wrote a story about being single, about being terrified of living alone, about having a lackluster social life and a telephone that rang so infrequently that it seemed as vestigial as my appendix.

The moment after I put it on the editor-in-chief's desk, I began to panic. They never did pieces like the one I'd just handed in and I worried that she'd see me as a real kook. (I imagined her calling Personnel and saying, “Help, there's a girl on my staff who thinks there are giant seed pods under her bed.”) But as it turned out she loved the article and crashed it into the next issue. I got dozens of letters from readers who said things like, “How did you know how I feel? I could have written those words myself.” And I was asked by the managing editor to begin churning out essays on any subject that I felt passionate about.

Looking at her own needs was exactly what Andrea Robinson did. Despite the preponderance of colors at makeup counters everywhere, she herself wanted makeup that would enhance her appearance without making her look like she was wearing much. “I couldn't find the kind of makeup
I
wanted,” she says. “I wanted to look like I was wearing
something,
but I didn't want to seem painted with a lot of blue, pink, or red.”

2. Ask Yourself, “What Are They Really Looking For?”

I've been talking about how you need to step outside the boundaries you've been given, but how do you do that without going in the wrong direction and getting lost—or arrested for trespassing? One trick is to consider the ultimate goal of the project you're working on, regardless of whatever guidelines or instructions you've been given.

Recently I talked to this charming, high-powered young woman, Amanda Schatz, associate manager of 3 Arts Entertainment, who had worked in an entry-level position at the LA.-based Creative Artists Agency. One day her boss and she were discussing how the agency might become more of a force m the New York market, and he suggested she make a list of people they could develop as contacts. As she thought about the assignment later, she decided to do something far more expansive. He had given her a “starter project,” but the ultimate goal, she knew, was to establish a plan for New York. She wrote a four-page memo on how to get into the New York market and her boss was so blown away, he sent it around the company. A few days later, Mike Ovitz, the president and one of the most powerful people in Hollywood, called to tell her how impressed he was.

3. Live By the Phrase, “What More Could I Do?”

No matter what description you've been given for either an assignment or your overall job, you have to always be wondering how to make it broader, bolder, more exciting.

The woman who has taught me the most about ignoring the parameters—or to use the vogue expression of the day, “pushing the envelope”—is Andrea Kaplan, the vice president in charge of corporate communications for Gruner & Jahr. You give her parameters and she starts toying with them, like a cat with yarn, and it's such a kick to watch. She got her start in public relations working for a small, prestigious firm that represented a variety of clients. She'd only been working there for a few months when she began to go outside the lines and expand the responsibilities she'd been given.

The client she'd been assigned to was a fashion magazine, and she'd been told by her boss to write four or five press releases each month, based on material from each issue, and pitch them to the Associated Press and other wire services. The hope was to get at least one story on the wires for every issue. Each month the drill was pretty much the same—her boss never suggested she waver from the basic plan.

In March, as Oscar night approached, Kaplan suddenly saw an opportunity to do something special. The magazine had an entertainment editor who was charismatic and photogenic, and Kaplan thought it would be great fun to turn her into a commentator on Oscar night fashions—Who was wearing the most outrageous outfit? Who was in the most danger of falling out of her dress?—for one of the New York stations. At first people on the magazine reacted by saying, “But there's nothing in the magazine about Oscar dressing.” Kaplan's response: “So what? The TV stations don't care.” One station eagerly jumped at the opportunity, the entertainment editor was a smash, and the magazine was delighted. From then on, press releases became just a part of what Kaplan did each month.

If I were to call up Kaplan and say, “I just sold a book on how women can learn to take a gutsier approach to their jobs.” she'd say. “Fabulous! Why don't you do one of those day-at-a-glance calendars with a gutsy goal on every page? And why don't you sell the rights to the movies? It can be the sequel to
Working Girl
.”

4. Imagine the Wackiest Solution Possible

Sometimes you need to step outside the lines, and sometimes you need to go even further, to contemplate something outrageous, perhaps even downright naughty. At
McCall's
I got to know and learn from one of the columnists, Alexandra Stoddard, the renowned decorator and author Stoddard is very sophisticated looking but she's got an adventurous, irreverent side as well. She told me once that when she was first working as a decorator, she landed two young, blue-blooded clients who had inherited a spectacular home. They wanted her to make it beautiful, but there was a very big hitch: they hadn't inherited any
cash.
Stoddard would have to operate on an itsy-bitsy budget. That, however, didn't mean she could zip over to Scars. This was a couple who loved elegance and wouldn't be satisfied with anything “cheap.”

After several days of cogitating, Stoddard came up with a plan that would solve her problem. It was daring, even sort of zany, but she thought the couple would go for it. She went to Knoll Associates and bought woven-leather porch furniture for their living room. Though it was top of the line for a porch, it was far less expensive than living room stuff. It was also chic and beautiful and sensuous, and their friends would think they were marvelously avant-garde using it in their living room. An extra dividend: They could move it to their porch once they could afford real living room furniture.