Basic Black: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life) - Softcover

Black, Cathie

 
9780307351135: Basic Black: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307351130 ISBN 13: 9780307351135
Verlag: Crown, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

New York Times Bestseller ... #1 BusinessWeek Bestseller ... Wall Street Journal Bestseller
• Pursue Your Passions
• Take Risks That Are Calculated, Not Crazy
• Achieve “The 360° Life”
• Make Your Life a Grudge-Free Zone
• Orchestrate Your Own Success

The bestselling guide to seizing opportunity in the workplace, from the woman at the pinnacle of the Hearst magazine empire

Every woman dreams of having a wise, funny mentor who understands the challenges she faces. Now, Cathie Black—one of Forbes’s “100 Most Powerful Women” and Fortune’s “50 Most Powerful Women in Business”—offers invaluable lessons that will help you land the job, promotion, or project you’re vying for. You’ll find out how to handle interviews, which rules to break, and why you should make your life a grudge-free zone. Filled with surprisingly candid, personal stories and advice, this is the only career guide you’ll ever need.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CATHIE BLACK heads Hearst Magazines, a division of Hearst Corporation. She manages the financial performance and development of some of the industry’s best-known magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Harper’s Bazaar, and O, the Oprah Magazine. Black made publishing history in 1979 as the first woman publisher of a weekly consumer magazine, New York, and she is widely credited for the success of USA Today, where for eight years, starting in 1983, she was first president, then publisher. Before joining Hearst, she also served five years as president and CEO of the Newspaper Association of America. She lives in New York with her husband, son, and daughter.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1
Drive


One bright December morning, a young woman with a wild mane of black hair, tight jeans, four-inch stilettos, and feather earrings walked into my office at Hearst. Six feet tall, with a bombshell figure and striking dark eyes, she could have strutted right in like an Amazon. Yet I could see she was nervous—and why wouldn’t she be? At age twenty-six, Atoosa Rubenstein, a fashion editor at Cosmopolitan, had come to pitch me on her idea for a new magazine.

It’s pretty much unheard of in this business to give a twentysomething editor the chance to pitch a major new magazine directly to the president. But I’d heard about Atoosa’s idea for launching a publication for teenage girls under the Cosmopolitan brand—she wanted to name it CosmoGirl—and I was intrigued. Born in Iran, raised in a conservative family, Atoosa sat in my office and talked with real passion about the pressures teenage girls face, the kind of advice and comfort they seek, and her vision for how to provide that in a monthly magazine.
I liked what I was hearing, and told her so.

“Well,” she responded, “what would be the next step?”

“You should put together a prototype, or ‘dummy,’” I said. “Go to the newsstand, buy a bunch of magazines, and cut and paste them together into the kind of magazine you envision. Don’t go hire an art director on the side—this should be your vision and passion. Bring it to me when it’s ready.”

Atoosa didn’t hesitate. “When would you like to see it?”

“Sooner’s always better than later,” I told her. And with that, our meeting ended. Like a gangly teenager, Atoosa bounded out of my office with a good-bye wave, excited to get started.

Now, to be honest, Atoosa wasn’t exactly breaking the mold by pitching a magazine aimed at teenage girls—any glance at a grocery store magazine rack will show you that. In fact, we’d been discussing the possibility of starting a teen magazine at Hearst well before Atoosa made her pitch. But there were other things that set Atoosa, and her presentation, apart. For one thing, it was clear right away that she had a real emotional connection to teenage girls—she knew and remembered well their angst, insecurities, and hopes. But, more important, she had demonstrated the single most important element she’d need to succeed in her quest: drive.
Atoosa had demonstrated this in three ways:

•  She planted the seed for getting a meeting with me by telling her boss, Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Kate White, about her magazine idea.
•  Once in the meeting, not only did she communicate real passion for her subject, but she took it a step further by asking me what her next move should be.
•  She asked for a specific deadline, so she could get me her prototype when I wanted it.

All this was good, and I took notice. But then Atoosa took it to an even higher level.

After our meeting, she went straight to a newsstand and bought dozens of magazines, took them home, and started cutting them up like crazy. She planted herself in her bedroom, surrounded by hundreds of clippings covering the bed, floor, and tables, and began gluing pages together left and right. She wrote the name “CosmoGirl” over and over in twenty-seven different shades of lipstick, trying to capture just the right youthful image, until she fell asleep exhausted, the lipsticks permanently staining her new white bedspread (to the chagrin of her new husband).

Over the course of forty-eight hours, Atoosa hardly slept at all, determined as she was to get her dummy finished by the close of business on Friday afternoon. She’d found out from my assistant that I was scheduled to leave the office at five-thirty, and she was anxious for me to have it for the weekend. Then, just as she was ready to print out the final pages, the inevitable glitch happened—the printer in her office went down. She watched in dismay as the clock ticked past her self-imposed deadline.

When the machine was back up and running, she printed out the final version. Disappointed at missing her chance to get it to me for the weekend, she asked her assistant to call my office. By then she figured she’d just send it over via interoffice mail, and I’d get it on Monday. But, to her surprise, I hadn’t left yet. “Why don’t you come over now,” I told her, “and show me what you’ve got.”

Though the Cosmopolitan offices were a five-minute walk away, Atoosa arrived breathless about two and a half minutes after she hung up the phone. She walked in, handed me the dummy, and began excitedly telling me about what she’d done.

“Slow down,” I told her. “I’m not going anywhere.” And indeed I wasn’t. I was too busy flipping through the prototype of what I already knew would be Hearst’s next new magazine.

It was fantastic—so full of energy and feeling, and different from other teen magazines in that it had Atoosa’s personal, more emotional touch. She had, in her own words, been the classic “ugly duckling” growing up, a gawky, uncertain girl with constellations of pimples and a lingering sense of being the geek. The magazine she envisioned was what she had craved herself as a teenager. For her, CosmoGIRL! would be more than a magazine—it would be a mission. She would be the “big sister.”

I put the dummy up on a display shelf in my office, along with the latest issues of all of Hearst’s magazines, from Cosmopolitan to Harper’s Bazaar to Marie Claire to Esquire and Popular Mechanics. “Atoosa,” I said, “it looks like we might have ourselves a magazine.” Later she’d tell me she didn’t know for sure what that meant—was she to be the editor? Or would Hearst take her creative idea and pick someone more experienced? That would have been crushing, but at least she knew that whatever the case, her magazine would become a reality. And she was so excited that when she reached to shake my hand, she grabbed my wrist instead, eagerly pumping it up and down.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines drive in two ways:
• a strong, organized effort to accomplish a purpose
• energy, push, or aggressiveness

Here’s how I define it: doing whatever it takes to propel yourself to the next level, whether it’s aiming for a big promotion, looking for a new job, accepting a transfer, starting a whole new career, or just figuring out the next step in a project. Drive is the act of moving forward on your own initiative, and it’s one of the most important traits to have if you want to succeed in your work and in life.

Yet you don’t have to pitch a whole new business idea, magazine, or TV show like Atoosa did to prove you’ve got drive. At its most basic level, drive involves being motivated enough to track down information you need for tasks ahead, so you don’t make obvious mistakes. It’s as simple as this:

If you’re well prepared for meetings, presentations, or just everyday work tasks, you’re far more likely to advance in your job. If you aren’t, not only will you thwart your own progress, but you’ll almost certainly end up making embarrassing mistakes.

Here’s a perfect example: When I was just out of college, working at Holiday magazine, I had a roommate who worked as the assistant to the cartoon editor at another magazine. She’d been there about a week, and one evening when she came back to our apartment, we got to talking about our days,...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307351130
ISBN 13 
9780307351135
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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