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Instead of focusing on all the good writers who had turned us down and wondering whether there would have been any way to convince them, I started thinking about the few big names who had said yes. Was there a common denominator? In most cases the reason they'd consented was that they liked the idea of mass exposure—we had 28 million readers—during a time they were promoting a book they'd written. What, I wondered, if instead of going after big-name writers randomly, we went after only the ones who had books out, or better yet, books just coming out? And instead of approaching them directly, we'd go through the publishing-house publicity departments, which would be our ally in making the appeal. Over the next year or two I landed James Michener, Gail Sheehy, Betty Friedan, Alvin Toffler, Margaret Truman, and Robert Jastrow, among others, to write cover stories, all to coincide with the publication of their new books.

6. Steal a Great Idea from Someone Else

I don't mean to just out-and-out steal it, but rather figure out if there's some derivation that can work for you. Too often when we see a fabulous idea we get so busy kicking ourselves for not being the one to think of it that we neglect to consider how we can apply the principles to our own projects. One of my most successful column ideas was an indirect steal from someone else.

When I was at Working Woman I was always trying to find ways to include more real working women in the magazine, but profiles of them never rated very well. Readers were most interested in profiles of the glamour pusses of industries or in straightforward management and career-strategy pieces. One day I was at a magazine awards ceremony and one of the columns that was being honored was “All I Know” from Golf magazine, a feature in which a famous golf pro talked about how he had mastered a particular golf dilemma, like sand traps. Walking out of the luncheon, I came up with a column called “How I Did It.” Each month a different working woman would talk about a specific accomplishment: selling an idea to top management or adding new life to a tired product. It was an instant hit in the ratings. Though straight profiles of ordinary women weren't appealing, readers were obviously interested in the strategies they had used to get results.

One of my favorite steal stories comes from Wendy Kopp, president and founder of Teach for America. I met her after we had selected her for a special feature in McCall's, and she's by far one of the most dynamic young women I've ever met.

While Kopp was at Princeton in the late eighties, she worked on several extracurricular projects that made her aware of the problems many public schools across the country had attracting high-caliber teachers. She eventually decided to develop a teacher corps, composed of recent college graduates, that would go into poor areas to work. But how could she possibly recruit graduates for such an unglamorous post? This, after all, was the eighties. All around her at Princeton, Kopp watched as her classmates were being lured by investment banking firms: These firms offered prestige and security, they recruited aggressively, and they paid major bucks.

What Kopp finally decided to do was steal their techniques. She couldn't deliver money, but she could offer the other three benefits. “To guarantee prestige, we only accept the top candidates,” says Kopp. “The program is a two-year one so there's a sense of security, of being rooted for a while. And we recruit really aggressively on campuses.”

HOW TO BREAK THE RULES AND NOT GET BURNED

But if you start playing loose with the rules, isn't there a chance you'll get into trouble? Nancy Austin, the dynamic management consultant and author whom I hired as a columnist for Working Woman, told me recently that whenever she holds seminars with people about work, Anita Roddick's name frequently comes up. People are dazzled by her, the quintessential rule breaker who created the environmentally correct and very successful cosmetics company The Body Shop, and they talk about how much they'd