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category. But with the other ten percent I cheated a little. I felt we should also be doing some provocative pieces that would generate lots of publicity, even if they didn't generate much reader interest. One of the first of these kinds of features was a lingerie shoot with Marla Maples, who had recently split with boyfriend Donald Trump. The shoot was fabulous. Marla looked luscious in the clothes (though we had to stuff her bra with toilet paper), and much to our surprise, The Donald showed up, acting penitent. The icing on the cake was the fact that an “extra” photo of Trump feeding Marla grapes on the set was picked up by the Associated Press and it appeared in seventy national newspapers. What more could I hope for?

The problem: Our readers didn't like Marla Maples, and wrote in telling us to keep that good-for-nothin’ husband stealer out of the magazine. I soon came to realize that even though these kinds of pieces took up a very small percentage of the magazine, they detracted from the mission of creating a magazine about the issues most dear to women. I'd told myself originally that readers could just skip over these pieces, but I realized they were probably dragging the whole product down, confusing readers about who we were.

Dr. Rent said that when she created her mission to be an inexpensive undergraduate school, she knew she was going to have to sacrifice trying to be competitive on a doctoral level. “These days you can't be all things to all people,” she says. “You have to be a bistro rather than a cafeteria.”

Be prepared for the fact that in the short term, sacrificing may cost you money. Laurie Ward says that she gets requests all the time to have her or one of her decorators do a traditional decorating job on a home or apartment. That entails having the decorator do all the shopping and oversee the workpeople, rather than simply providing a “plan” for the clients to execute themselves. “But we turn those jobs down,” says Ward. “If we got into them, they'd divert us from our specialty.”

Hold Absolutely Everything up to Your Mission Statement

When you develop a new vision, it's likely that some of the habitual ways you do business in your department or your area won't facilitate that vision. And yet it may be difficult to notice it because they're so ingrained. It's essential to look at all your systems and evaluate whether any may be causing roadblocks for you.

When I went to Working Woman, I thought it looked as if it were trapped in the late seventies or early eighties, like a woman wearing a navy, man-tailored suit and sensible shoes. I wanted to make the magazine seem relevant for women's lives in the nineties. I was also concerned about advertisers’ perception of the magazine. Many advertisers were under the assumption that Working Woman was a women's service magazine similar to Self and New Woman, rather than a publication filled primarily with career and management strategies.

I started making the graphics much livelier and the articles breezier. Then I set out to liven up the covers. For years the magazine had used models in business suits on the covers, twenty-three-year-old girls just out of Iowa, who knew so little about business that they probably thought that downsizing was something you had to do before a bathing suit photo shoot. The results seemed phony to me. I told the art director to find older, more experienced-looking models.

About five or six months into the job, I suddenly realized that I had accepted the model cover concept automatically—because that was how it had always been done. Yet using models only reinforced the idea that Working Woman wasn't really a business magazine. Could you imagine Fortune or Forbes hiring guys from the J. Crew catalog to pose in suits for their covers? From that point on I decided to use only successful, powerful women on the cover. I knew that “real people” wouldn't sell as well initially, but the magazine was primarily subscription driven. The new covers not only made the magazine seem much more energetic, but they suddenly fit with the mission.