Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead_. But Gutsy Girls Do - Kate White [28]
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