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By Root 714 0

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.

5. Look at a Problem While Standing on Your Head

One of the rule-breaking strategies I use most frequently is to look at a situation from a different vantage point than the one that I or everybody else has been using. This works especially well with nagging problems, those that have been dogging your department forever but no one ever gets around to solving. (Hint: The nice thing about solving a nagging problem is that it seems less renegade to nervous superiors than other forms of rule breaking.)

When I joined Family Weekly as articles editor, the nagging problem was that we could only pay $500 tops for an article. At the time most magazines paid up to several thousand dollars for a piece, so we were forced to use young, inexperienced hack writers. This didn't stop the editor-in-chief from trying. He was a terrific journalist who was constantly making statements like, “Let's see if Nora Ephron will write it,” and you'd walk out of his office muttering, “Yeah, fat chance. She gets five hundred dollars to cover her lunch expenses on an assignment.” I once did call Nora Ephron about doing a piece for us and she said no with the same disdain she would have used if I'd asked her if she'd be interested in buying a device to remove toe beards. Despite the abuse we took from these hot writers, we continued to call them because we wanted to add class to the magazine.

The obvious solution was to pay more, but the company had no intention of coughing up the money. One day I started looking at the problem from a different direction.