Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead_. But Gutsy Girls Do - Kate White [91]
There's another kind of loosening-up good girls need to do in order to be more creative, and that's daring to think about the situation in a different way or from a totally different angle. In Chapter 3, I talked about how a gutsy girl makes her mark by breaking the rules, by taking a step that's outside the parameters of her job or the outlines she's been given for a specific project. You also have to break the rules in the way you think. Roger von Oech, who is president of Creative Think, a California-based consulting firm, and the author of A Whack on the Side of the Head, says that creative thinking requires an attitude that allows you to manipulate your knowledge and experience. Sometimes, he told me, it helps to “use crazy, foolish and impractical ideas as stepping-stones to practical new ideas.”
Be playful, silly, outrageous. At Working Woman, we once interviewed a team of people who had created a successful new shampoo by asking themselves, If we were a hair shaft, what would we want? Jonas Salk is said to have used a similar approach when he was frustrated in his quest for a polio vaccine. He asked himself, If I were an immune system, what would I do to fight a virus or cancer cell?
Over time, I've come to see that some of my best ideas are generated when I do what I call “reading upside down.” By that I mean that I look at a piece of information from a different angle or focus on a teeny-weeny aspect of it. For instance, when I was at Working Woman, editors were always suggesting that we do cover stories on Christie Hefner, president of Playboy. She was young, beautiful, and was one of the most powerful businesswomen in the country. I felt, however, that there'd been an overabundance of coverage on her. One day an editor made another stab at it, sending me a proposal for a profile, with a few clips attached. As I took a cursory glance at the clips, my eye fell on this little nugget buried in the middle of the story: 47 percent of the people in management at Playboy at that time were women. How could they feel comfortable there? I wondered. And that was the birth of one of my favorite articles, “Why Would a Smart Woman Work at Playboy?” It was a provocative piece that looked at how women rationalized working for a magazine that ran nude pictorials of their “sisters” with titles like “Animal Attraction” and “Leggy, Bosomy and Hot Blooded: The Birds of Great Britain.” We even ran the story on a centerfold in the magazine.
FIVE WAYS TO KNOW WHAT PEOPLE WISH YOU DIDN'T
Working in a creative field, it's probably been easier for me to learn to trust my gut with ideas than if I'd worked in, lets say, the insurance industry. In the magazine industry, you're constantly encouraged to go with your instincts, and anyone with a golden gut is revered. I've had a much harder time trusting my gut with people.
For years my good-girl tendency was to believe that there was basically something good about everyone. When a coworker pulled a stunt that seemed mean, malicious, or underhanded, my initial instinct was to give that person the benefit of the doubt. I'd think, She's just preoccupied, or, He's having I bad day. There were sparks that turned into brush fires because I didn't acknowledge to myself that the situation was combustible.
I once look over a job in which one of my new subordinates began giving me a hard time almost from the start. I told myself she was just getting used to the change. Plus she had had bronchitis for several weeks after I started and I figured that she fell out of the loop.