Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead... But Gutsy Girls Do by Kate White Read Free Book Online

their candidate and I wanted more than anything to win—partly because the prize was a ten-day trip to Great Britain, but also because I saw it as a way to break into the magazine business. The application called for a photo, a description of your campus activities and awards, and an essay on the goals you had for the future. I spent two days trying to figure out what kind of essay would help me stand out from the pack of wildly popular, rich, and beautiful girls from colleges like Wellesley and Smith. Finally I decided that I would break the rules of the contest and write an essay on why, at twenty-two, I had no goals. I stated that in the chaotic seventies it seemed inappropriate to have some definitive road map for the future. Six months later I was having tea and scones at the Churchill Hotel in London.
    Unfortunately, like many good girls, instead of recognizing how much the rule breaking had paid off for me, I assumed that I'd managed to get away with something. It took many years for me to see that all my big successes had resulted from not doing what I was told.
    There are several variations on rule breaking and at a given time one will work better for you than another.
    #1: DO SOMETHING THAT NO ONE HAS THOUGHT OF OR DARED TO DO BEFORE
    Perhaps the gutsiest form of rule breaking is to go out there and do something that's never been done before, even something that's considered taboo for your field. That's what Andrea Robinson, president of department-store marketing at Revlon, did when she took over Ultima II several years ago and launched a makeup line called “The Nakeds.” It was makeup that had only a hint of color and made you look like you weren't actually wearing any. Robinson was one of the first women we profiled after I took over Working Woman and I've always admired the sheer, so to speak, gutsiness of what she did. Until then makeup had always been about color, of course, and more than a few people told her that The Nakeds were bound to fail.
    But Robinson felt women were ready for something quite new. “I saw a different attitude taking hold in the nineties,” she recalls. “We had just come out of a decade where everyone was very coiffed and manicured and luxuried to death. I thought women didn't want to look like they spent all that time on themselves anymore. The philosophy behind The Nakeds was, Look like yourself, only better. ”
    The Nakeds was a major hit. The company even had to run ads apologizing to customers for not being able to get the product to them as fast as they wanted it.
    #2: DO WHAT YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO DO—BUT IN A TOTALLY DIFFERENT WAY
    In certain situations what's called for isn't something spanking new, but rather a bold variation on what you've been doing all along.
    After Cheryl Deaton became principal of West Forest Elementary school in Opelika, Alabama, a school at which the majority of students were poor, she soon came to realize that the standard approach to running a school and helping kids learn just wasn't working there. Test scores were the lowest in the district and many students eventually dropped out of school. Gradually, Deaton and the team of people she worked with began altering the way they imparted knowledge and managed students.
    “We got rid of textbooks in certain classes, like English, and replaced them with contemporary books that we knew kids would be attracted to.” says Deaton. “Textbooks have a canned representation of things. In libraries kids don't take out books that are old. They read what's attractive and fun and has a nice from cover. In the age of Nintendo, kids want things with sex appeal, for lack of a better word.”
    Though Deaton's step of “throwing out the books” generated lots of press, her innovative strategies went far beyond that. The curriculum was changed to offer more music and art classes than schools traditionally offer, in order to have an “easy way for kids to communicate and be successful.” She even changed the