Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead_. But Gutsy Girls Do - Kate White [27]
And that's because hiding in the midst of bad news are often the seeds for a brilliant plan. The Kanungo and Conger study found that charismatic executives, unlike noncharismatic ones, “recognize deficiencies in the present system, actively searching out existing or potential shortcomings in the status quo.” From there they determine how weaknesses can be transformed into opportunities.
When Laurie Ward, president of the interior design company Use-What-You-Have Interiors, started her very successful business, it was based completely on what she saw as the weaknesses in her old business.
She'd been a classic interior designer who went into people's homes and did a total overhaul. But there were several aspects of the job that began to bother her. “As a traditional decorator, you make your money on a percentage of everything the clients buy,” says Ward. “It's in your interest, therefore, to get them to purchase as much as possible. But I didn't like telling a client to start over when they had a really good foundation. I'd often realize that a certain piece of furniture that didn't seem to work in one room would actually look terrific in another, and I'd almost have to tie my hands together not to move it.”
So Ward chucked the old way of doing things and started a business that calls for clients to pay her a flat fee for an overall consultation about their home. She makes suggestions about what, purchases they might make but also encourages people to keep any furniture and accessories that actually work.
In my early weeks at Child magazine, when I was trying to develop my goals for the magazine, I got handed two pieces of really bad news that made me feel like sitting at my desk with my head in my hands, muttering “oy vey” for an hour or two. But both of these killer facts ended up helping me find my way.
Up until my arrival, the one-year-old Child had been positioned as a parenting magazine for very, very upscale mothers and fathers, featuring articles on how to find a camp with a good reputation, plan a perfect birthday party, teach “good table manners,” and enable your child to achieve his career goals. There was nothing on the down-and-dirty basics of parenting, like what to do when your kid screams that you're a poo-poohead in front of a restaurant full of people or insists you lie on the floor outside his door until he falls asleep at night. That type of advice was usually left to Parents magazine, a publication geared more for middle-class mothers, to dispense.
Was this a good vision for Child? It was almost impossible to tell. The magazine certainly looked beautiful and vibrant, but there was no data yet available on readers or how they responded to the magazine.
The first piece of bad news I got was a demographic study on parents that had been initiated before I arrived. According to the study, if you counted up the number of parents who made over $75,000 a year and had kids under five, parents for whom Child was marketed, the total was about 126 in the entire United States. Great, I thought, no audience. The study also showed, however, that once you looked at families with income around $50,000, suddenly the audience got much bigger.
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.