Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead... But Gutsy Girls Do (8 page)

The other piece of bad news was the results of a questionnaire I crashed into the issue that was closing when I arrived. I'd asked readers to rate each article in the issue. All of these articles had been assigned before I got there, with the exception of a little sidebar I added to a piece on birth order called “How to Make Each Child Feel Special.”

Well, unfortunately, many of the more highbrow pieces didn't score very well. The highest-rated piece in the entire issue was actually the little box on making each child feel special. But what that revealed was actually pretty fascinating. Obviously having enough money to own a center-hall Colonial home and a BMW didn't mean you felt you knew how to be a perfect parent. Even upper-middle-class parents got called poo-poohead from time to time.

Based on these two pieces of information, I decided to change the positioning of the magazine. Instead of gearing it to
elite
parents, I would try to grab the bigger audience of fairly affluent yuppies, women like Hope Steadman from
thirtysomething.
And from now on we'd address more basic concerns parents had about their child's health and behavior—though in a more sophisticated way, befitting a more educated reader. (One of my favorite articles was “Babysitters from Hell: How to Spot One.”)

NOW FIND THE PULSE

An analysis of data is essential, but that's not all you must do to create your vision. You must also listen to your instincts to see if the vision
feels
right. Does it excite you, make you want to sing on your drive to work each morning? I always know I'm on the right track when I like my vision so much I feel as if I want to date it.

At
Child,
the data I got about what readers liked and didn't like made perfect sense to me on a visceral level. I was an educated, fairly sophisticated person, and yet I craved the most rudimentary parenting advice. You see, despite how competent and in control I was at the office, as a parent I was completely inexperienced and inept, feeling at times as if someone had handed me a newborn puma and told me to raise it until adulthood. I made a mess of the simplest of things. Once I forgot to wash my son's brand-new baby clothes before he wore them and when I took them off he had a little sticker on his bottom that said
INSPECTED BY NO
. 2. It seemed a glaring symbol of my lack of skill as a parent. A newly positioned
Child
magazine, filled with solid advice, was exactly what I wanted to read.

WRITE IT DOWN, EVEN IF IT MAKES YOU FEEL STUPID

Once you've worked out your vision, don't keep it in your head. Put it on paper, ideally in one succinct sentence. Though this seems like a third-grade exercise, writing it down will help you to crystallize it further and you'll have it there to refer back to constantly. It's easy to drift from your goal as you attempt to navigate the white waters of your workplace.

A SPECIAL WARNING FOR GOOD GIRLS

When you're creating your vision, beware of the good-girl tendency toward earnestness. Good girls hope for a better world and, yes, that's admirable, but when you're involved with a product or service, you can't get weighed down with what
ought
to be. When I arrived at
McCall's,
it was suffering from a noble vision that wasn't in line with what everyday women wanted. After years of being a how-to magazine for mainstream women, it had been transformed into a repository for pieces like “Who Will be the First Woman President?” by William Safire and “Americans Need to Work Smarter, Not Harder” by Lester Thurow. Now, maybe in a perfect world everybody would stay abreast of Lester Thurow's thinking, but the
McCall's
subscribers wanted pieces like “Double Your Energy without Sleeping More,” “Stay-Slim Ways to Eat Chocolate,” and “Oprah's Secret Dream.”

Don't let your vision be at the mercy of the Pollyanna factor. It should be based on what
can
be rather than what
should
be.

WHY YOU NEED THE SLIM-FAST PLAN

Once you've got your vision, you need to figure out the key moves you must make to execute it—and that probably means putting it on a diet. As a good girl, your drive will be to do
everything,
but you must plan on a limited set of actions that you can actually pull off. Nancy Brinker, founding chairman of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, the country's largest private funder of research dedicated solely to breast cancer and named in honor of Brinker's sister who died of the disease, follows what she calls “the three or four” rule. In building the Komen Foundation, she learned that you shouldn't try to concentrate on more than three or four major steps that relate to your overall plan. If you take on too many projects, you'll be unable to devote enough attention to any of them, and you'll end up looking like Janet Reno did that first year—playing endless hopscotch.

One way to stay focused is to pick several key words that sum up your goal. As Andrea Robinson began to revitalize Ultima II, she decided that their products would be “smart, fun, and sexy.” It not only made it easy to assess ideas, but it also helped better define each product. When Ultima II developed a twelve-hour lipstick it became Lipsexxy. When they produced a fabulous mascara that plumped up lashes, it became, what else, but Falsies Mascara, with the slogan on the counter card: N
OT SINCE THE PUSH-UP BRA HAS SOMETHING DONE SO MUCH FOR SO LITTLE
.

HOW TO GET A GUTSY PLAN OFF ITS DUFF

Now that you have your plan, you must turn it into a reality. Too many great missions get sucked into the quagmire of review and cogitation.

Quick, Do Something

Management consultant Nancy Austin taught me that one trap many managers and executives fall into at this point is to assume that their first step should be big and bold—and that only slows down their pace. (I'm convinced good girls use this as an excuse for stalling.) Austin's philosophy is that you should get off the ground with a small but convincing success. In other words, think big but start small.

Now Play It to the Max

You can get off the ground with a small step, but once you're rolling, you need to go for maximum impact. As you look at the three or four major goals that you've set as part of your vision, you have to think of how you can accomplish each in the boldest, gutsiest way possible. This is where you do the rule breaking, rule bending, and rule expanding I talked about in Chapter 3.

A few years ago, I worked with a terrific marketing consultant named Toni Maloney, president of the Maloney Group. What she taught me was that you take every idea and ask yourself how far you can run with it and how do you give it the “legs” to get there. For instance, part of the mission I made for
McCall's
was to publish articles that would fully inform women about topics that had direct impact on their lives—like “The Politics of Breast Cancer” or “Why Working Mothers Are Losing Custody.” Her advice: If you've got a great story in
McCall's,
don't just publish it. Find the senator who's in love with that particular issue and get him/her to give a press conference on it standing in a supermarket. Try to get the article entered in the
Congressional Record.

One of Dr. Clyda Rent's plans for Mississippi University for Women was to promote the fabulous alumnae, such as Eudora Welty and O. Henry Prize founder Dr. Blanche Colton Williams, and other writers and literary types. Rent didn't settle for showcasing these women in a few brochures. She started the annual Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium as part of the Gala Fall Weekend. There's a Book and Author Dinner, at which the school hosts such nationally known writers as William Styron and John Grisham. She also named a building after Eudora Welty. Now that's playing it to the max.

Be Gutsy Enough to Sacrifice

When you've made a list of the steps you must take to get to your destination, you're likely to discover that some of the projects your department has been diligently working on don't “fit” nicely with those steps. There is only one thing to do: kill them off. This isn't so hard with tasks that clearly aren't working, but it's far more difficult to take the ax to those that provide some short-term gain—like extra revenue or cachet or attention—even though they don't put you on a direct course to your goal. But you can't allow yourself to be seduced. Abandon anything that's superfluous.

After I'd gotten an understanding of the
McCall's
reader, it was clear that the kind of information she wanted most in the magazine were strategies for making smart choices about the areas of utmost concern in her life: her health, husband, kids, friends, clothes, money, etc. Ninety percent of the articles I commissioned fell into that category. But with the other ten percent I cheated a little. I felt we should also be doing some provocative pieces that would generate lots of publicity, even if they didn't generate much reader interest. One of the first of these kinds of features was a lingerie shoot with Marla Maples, who had recently split with boyfriend Donald Trump. The shoot was fabulous. Marla looked luscious in the clothes (though we had to stuff her bra with toilet paper), and much to our surprise, The Donald showed up, acting penitent. The icing on the cake was the fact that an “extra” photo of Trump feeding Marla grapes on the set was picked up by the Associated Press and it appeared in seventy national newspapers. What more could I hope for?

The problem: Our readers
didn't like
Marla Maples, and wrote in telling us to keep that good-for-nothin’ husband stealer out of the magazine. I soon came to realize that even though these kinds of pieces took up a very small percentage of the magazine, they detracted from the mission of creating a magazine about the issues most dear to women. I'd told myself originally that readers could just skip over these pieces, but I realized they were probably dragging the whole product down, confusing readers about who we were.

Dr. Rent said that when she created her mission to be an inexpensive undergraduate school, she knew she was going to have to sacrifice trying to be competitive on a doctoral level. “These days you can't be all things to all people,” she says. “You have to be a bistro rather than a cafeteria.”

Be prepared for the fact that in the short term, sacrificing may cost you money. Laurie Ward says that she gets requests all the time to have her or one of her decorators do a traditional decorating job on a home or apartment. That entails having the decorator do all the shopping and oversee the workpeople, rather than simply providing a “plan” for the clients to execute themselves. “But we turn those jobs down,” says Ward. “If we got into them, they'd divert us from our specialty.”

Hold Absolutely Everything up to Your Mission Statement

When you develop a new vision, it's likely that some of the habitual ways you do business in your department or your area won't facilitate that vision. And yet it may be difficult to notice it because they're so ingrained. It's essential to look at
all
your systems and evaluate whether any may be causing roadblocks for you.

When I went to
Working Woman,
I thought it looked as if it were trapped in the late seventies or early eighties, like a woman wearing a navy, man-tailored suit and sensible shoes. I wanted to make the magazine seem relevant for women's lives in the nineties. I was also concerned about advertisers’ perception of the magazine. Many advertisers were under the assumption that
Working Woman
was a women's service magazine similar to
Self
and
New Woman,
rather than a publication filled primarily with career and management strategies.

I started making the graphics much livelier and the articles breezier. Then I set out to liven up the covers. For years the magazine had used models in business suits on the covers, twenty-three-year-old girls just out of Iowa, who knew so little about business that they probably thought that downsizing was something you had to do before a bathing suit photo shoot. The results seemed phony to me. I told the art director to find older, more experienced-looking models.

About five or six months into the job, I suddenly realized that I had accepted the model cover concept automatically—because that was how it had
always been done.
Yet using models only reinforced the idea that
Working Woman
wasn't really a business magazine. Could you imagine
Fortune
or
Forbes
hiring guys from the J. Crew catalog to pose in suits for their covers? From that point on I decided to use only successful, powerful women on the cover. I knew that “real people” wouldn't sell as well initially, but the magazine was primarily subscription driven. The new covers not only made the magazine seem much more energetic, but they suddenly fit with the mission.

Remind Yourself of Your Vision Frequently

Take it out of your folder and reread it. It should be your reference point, a litmus test that you constantly hold ideas against. When
McCall's
won the Komen Foundation award for media coverage of breast cancer, I had the chance to go to Dallas for the presentation and meet Dr. Mary-Claire King, professor of epidemiology and genetics at the University of California at Berkeley, who is trying to find the gene for hereditary breast cancer. She told me that as she does her research she often asks herself. What is the reason I am asking this question? so that she never drifts from her mission.

GETTING YOUR TROOPS ON BOARD

No matter how good your mission, no matter how sure you are of it, no matter how passionate you feel about it, you will never make it happen unless others become invested in it and are motivated to take the necessary steps.

The first thing you must do in order to galvanize them is to tell them what your vision is. It's amazing how often people keep those who work for them in the dark about both the destination and the clear directions for getting there. That doesn't mean you have to pass out copies of what you've written down, though that isn't such a terrible idea. In fact, that's exactly what Shirley DeLibero, executive director of New Jersey Transit, basically did. DeLibero runs one of the best transit systems in the country (the people in my office who commute from New Jersey love her). Her mission is printed on the back of every business card: