THE NEW RULES

Like everything else, business — and I'm using that term in the widest sense — has rules. To succeed, you've got to follow those rules, and that's true whether you're the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or a part-time instructor in a yoga studio. The confusing part is that, within my lifetime, the rules have changed.

THE OLD RULES

When I started out in the 1960s and 1970s, society was in flux but business was definitely not. It was an old boys' club with a rigid hierarchy. I can remember flying on a corporate jet from Ohio to New York when one of the fellows on the plane opened up the bar and started offering everyone drinks. The CEO, who owned the plane, didn't hesitate to put him in his place. Don't you realize, he said, that I'm the one who opens the bar? The guy promptly sat back down.

In those days, business operated under a strict set of rules and assumptions. The fact that most of them were unwritten only made them more powerful.

A POLICY OF EXCLUSION

In many ways, the business world that I found as a young man was like a country club — the kind that a lot of people can't get into. There was an unspoken rule that blacks don't apply. There was a rule that Jews don't get into commercial banks. There was a rule that women were secretaries — or they were home, where they supposedly belonged. Asians were strictly curiosities. As for Puerto Ricans, they were fictional characters out of West Side Story; in the real world of business, they didn't exist.

In short, the WASP — White Anglo-Saxon Protestant — ruled. And not just any WASP, either. You had to be male. You had to be middle class or better. And you had to attend the right schools. I know. You might not think that someone like me — a white male from a middle class background — could feel the sting of discrimination. But I remember one time in the 1960s when I attended a meeting at a Midwestern bank. At lunch, someone suggested that we go around the table and tell everyone where we had gone to school. One banker said he was from Princeton, another said Harvard, and a third had a degree from Yale. Then it was my turn. I proudly announced that I had gone to Notre Dame. I might as well have said that I graduated from Sing Sing. Instead of nodding and smiling, as they had for the other universities, the bankers in that oak-paneled dining room cleared their throats and politely looked away. Notre Dame was a respectable enough school if you were a football player — or a Catholic. Otherwise, it wasn't on the map.

Today, being a WASP is not as important as it used to be, and neither is attending an Ivy League school. True, a lot of people still believe deep in their hearts that graduates of private schools are somehow better people. But thanks to business leaders like Steve Jobs (a Reed College d