Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead_. But Gutsy Girls Do - Kate White [31]
Remind Yourself of Your Vision Frequently
Take it out of your folder and reread it. It should be your reference point, a litmus test that you constantly hold ideas against. When McCall's won the Komen Foundation award for media coverage of breast cancer, I had the chance to go to Dallas for the presentation and meet Dr. Mary-Claire King, professor of epidemiology and genetics at the University of California at Berkeley, who is trying to find the gene for hereditary breast cancer. She told me that as she does her research she often asks herself. What is the reason I am asking this question? so that she never drifts from her mission.
GETTING YOUR TROOPS ON BOARD
No matter how good your mission, no matter how sure you are of it, no matter how passionate you feel about it, you will never make it happen unless others become invested in it and are motivated to take the necessary steps.
The first thing you must do in order to galvanize them is to tell them what your vision is. It's amazing how often people keep those who work for them in the dark about both the destination and the clear directions for getting there. That doesn't mean you have to pass out copies of what you've written down, though that isn't such a terrible idea. In fact, that's exactly what Shirley DeLibero, executive director of New Jersey Transit, basically did. DeLibero runs one of the best transit systems in the country (the people in my office who commute from New Jersey love her). Her mission is printed on the back of every business card:
To provide safe, reliable, convenient and cost-effective transit services with a skilled team of employees dedicated to our customer's needs and committed to excellence.
That's a fabulous idea to get everyone noticing, but in the age of information overload, sometimes a better way to do it is to …
… SAY IT IN A SOUND BITE
As I read profile after profile of very successful women while I was editing Working Woman, I saw that one of the gutsy moves many of them made was to sum up their vision in a sound bite, much the way politicians and generals have been doing for centuries. Their goal becomes crystallized into one powerful line that is easy to grasp and remember.
How do you do that if you haven't been trained as an advertising copywriter?
Well, don't worry about it being cute and clever. In fact, it's far better to have people get what you mean instantly rather than have to spend time thinking about it. When Laurie Ward started her business, she ran the name Use-What-You-Have Interior Design by a number of friends, most of whom told her it was too wordy. And yet she felt that because her business was unique, it would be tremendously beneficial if people knew the moment they heard the name what it was all about. She went with it and feels that the name has played a powerful role in her success.
Jay Conger says that you shouldn't be afraid to be emotional with your vision statements. Touch people's need to belong, to feel like winners, to make a difference. Also, an unusual grammatical construction can stick in people's minds (“Ask not what your country …”). And it really helps if you can give them something to visualize.
When Nancy Brinker founded the Komen Foundation in 1982, it was around the time when the Vietnam War Memorial was being erected in Washington. Brinker discovered that a powerful sound bite and motivator was to tell people, “In a 10 year period, 58,000 lives were lost in Vietnam. In the same 10 year period, 330,000 women died of breast cancer. But there is no wall dedicated to them.”
One of my favorite sound bite creators is Tina Brown, editor-in-chief of the New Yorker and formerly editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. When she took over Vanity Fair, she said she wanted to go after “the disparate themes and elements that bind together a best-selling book—love, money, sex, dreams, death.” That's not only visual, it's about as juicy as you can get. Who wouldn't want to execute a vision like that? When she went on to the New Yorker, she said she was creating a magazine for people who would