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

way kids were disciplined in school. “Instead of punishing kids in the punitive, pruned-up mouth way that schools are known for, we began helping a child model appropriate behavior.”
    Today, test scores have improved dramatically and the school has won major awards, including the $750,000 Next Century Schools Award. Deaton is now chief officer for Educational Improvement for Montgomery Public Schools.
    #3: DO SOMETHING THAT DOESN'T APPEAR ANYWHERE IN YOUR JOB DESCRIPTION
    And sometimes rule breaking is a matter of rule extending or expanding, going outside the parameters of your job description to make the kind of impact you can't make within those parameters.
    Now, your first reaction might be. “Hey, I don't want to overstep my bounds.” But today that's become a necessity. There was a time when getting promoted was a result of doing a fabulous job within the framework you'd been given. But those were in fatter years. Now, you must do that just to keep your job. To move up, you have to lake on some of your boss's responsibilities or contribute something of value that may not have been requested of you but is nonetheless viewed as beneficial to the company.
    When Claire Brinker was working as the ad director for Red Cross Shoes, a division of U.S. Shoe, her job responsibilities were to create ads and sales promotion events for Red Cross Shoes and two other subsidiaries. Unfortunately, Red Cross was a declining business, due in pan to the association people had with the name. Brinker fell it was essential that the company find ways to grow the business, which had a target audience of women age thirty-five and above.
    One of the observations she'd made was that women everywhere seemed to be walking. She could also see that women who walked faced a paucity of shoes to choose from, “If they went into an athletic footwear store.” says Brinker, “they'd end up with some teenager asking, ‘How fast do you run?’ The more I read about the popularity of walking, the more I realized that our company should develop a walking shoe. And we should sell it not in athletic footwear stores but in department stores, where women over thirty-five were more comfortable shopping.”
    So Brinker went to management and pitched the idea, even though that wasn't one of the things she was “supposed” to do under her job description. It look lots of effort (“My persistence could have been compared to Chinese water torture”), but she eventually sold them on the idea—and the result was the Easy Spirit Walking Shoe, the third-ranked brand of walking shoes in the country.
    Today Brinker is director of corporate marketing at U.S. Shoe. She also played a major role in the success of the Easy Spirit dress pump—which was marketed brilliantly by showing women wearing the pump as they played a fast game of basketball.
    I know that even as I champion the benefits of breaking the rules, you probably still consider it a scary proposition. But here's what I've learned. The first time you break the rules, it's not nearly as frightening as you think it will be; in fact, it can be downright exhilarating. It has always reminded me of the thrill I felt the first time my mother let me strip to my underpants and run through the sprinkler in our backyard.
    WARNING: DO NOT CONFUSE GUSTO WITH GUTSINESS
    If you're smart and a hard worker, someone whom other people think of as a go-getter, you may be telling yourself right now that you are already a rule breaker. But go-getting is not the same as rule breaking. I've seen good girls on my staff congratulate themselves for being whirlwinds around the office, but when the dust has settled, all they've done is follow orders and take care of the basics.
    TEST YOUR RECORD
    To find out how much of a rule breaker you are, ask yourself these questions:
    In the past month have you
•  done something in your job that's never been tried before?
•  used a fresh new approach to get a task or project