Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead_. But Gutsy Girls Do - Kate White [29]
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: NOT 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