BEING GREAT at a terrific job is sexy. You are far more intriguing than a drone or a slug. Men don’t like drones or slugs in offices any more than they like having them around the house. By being a deliciously successful career girl you can collect fabulous men as lovers and friends. A pal high up in the television business says, “I’m constantly impressed with the durability of business-rooted friendships with men. I’m still dating, writing to or chatting on the telephone with a couple of dozen such men. I recently wrote a chap I hadn’t seen for seventeen years that I was coming to Miami on business. He got me a single reservation at his beach club, set up interviews for me, sent his car to drive me around. Do you think for a moment he’d have put out the red carpet if I’d been retired to suburbia these seventeen years?”
Another tycooness, now married, says, “I’ve found nothing to compare in duration and fervor with the friendships you make with men in business. You have to be a full-scale embezzler or get into a fist fight with the guy’s wife before he drops you, and even then it’s with tears in his eyes.”
You do want wonderful male friends, don’t you ... to date or marry or whatever you have in mind? Then let’s talk about things to do to be a sexy whiz in a job somewhat above the secretarial level.
Once you’re in scoring position with this great job, it’s no time to guard your precious weekends from vandals. Give them gladly. Take work home. There is no exception to this rule. A few years from now you may want to summer in Rio. Make up your mind this year to put the company hopelessly in your debt.
To accomplish this you must do what is due each day that day and a few things that aren’t. Of course every girl has moments when she wants only to lie close to the eaves and breathe just enough to keep alive. I don’t think it pays to go against natural rhythms but if you lie bat-like in a torpor for twenty-four hours, you must work on the double to make up!
Doing “what isn’t due” may be as simple a thing as submitting unasked-for ideas. One beaver who is moving up in retailing says, “Every sixty days without fail I head up a sheet of paper, ‘Why Don’t We?’ Then I give it to my boss. The company hasn’t used any of my ideas yet, but I know they sometimes get passed onward and upward. The important thing is this: they know I’m out here.”
Bone up and soak up! Study whatever business your company is in. Read all the trade journals, the Wall Street Journal, letters to the salesmen, the stockholders’ report. Take people to lunch who know more than you do and pump them. A girl I know at the Yale Lock Company has learned how to pick a lock. Said she figured it would come in handy whether she succeeded or failed in the job.
It’s okay to butter up anybody . . . boss, client, visitors, brass, workers, even people who are a little creepy.
I can see your mouth corners turning down . . . being nice to people you hate is phony. AH right, Miss Pure Motives, have it your way—but in my opinion, a business office is not the place to discriminate between the worthy and unworthy recipients of charm. You can draw the line in your personal life if you wish, although I never do. (I positively slather over the milkman to get certified raw skim milk delivered to my door, and he looks more like a tugboat than a dreamboat.)
Send the congratulatory wire. Take the vice-president’s wife to tea. Carry on over a new crew-cut. Carry on and carry on. No matter what your motives are, you’ll make people feel nice and that’s always good.
Listening, babying, flirting (except when it would embarrass the object of your attention) are all things you should do with impunity .. . and a little style. And there just may be room at the top for you to cheer a Chairman.
You have to make up your own mind about sleeping with people to get ahead, but there’s nothing wrong with talking to a man. Long, probing, business-friendship talks are delicious, whether they improve your perch or not.
I could name ten corporation executives whose real business confidante is a woman—not a secretary, in these cases, but some girl who has a terrific grasp of executive problems.
The smart tycooness entertains, even if it’s just a twice-a-year cocktail bash. Dinner party, brunch, bridge and “stop by for a drink” are all perfect little affairs to show you off. (We’ll get to the other affairs later.)
One of the most successful ad girls I know (a late rival) was so maniacal a hostess you had to start booking people in January if you wanted them for a treasure hunt May Day. Anybody who waited until only a reasonable time in advance to ask them found that Perle Mesta had everybody important at the office tied up for all the prime time.
It’s definitely smart to show how well you cook, what a pretty apartment you live in and how feminine you are at home (as well as being brilliant at work). You’re the new girl success who bears no resemblance whatever to that tweedy, walrus-shaped thing of the past.
According to her associates, an ex-Broadway chorine has orbited in public relations in two short years by putting everything in writing. “Janice never goes out for a hamburger without getting an idea while sopping on the mustard,” says a friend. “Then she comes back and sends it to someone. A full-blown lunch date gives her enough material for twenty memos.”
You know how seeing a story in print makes it seem “official.” There is also something impressive about neatly typed ideas, reminders and requests for information. Keep them short.
Your office may look like headquarters for the scrap drive, but saving things is another trick I have seen parlayed into shimmering success.
One of the girls I worked with on the Max Factor account brought along every cosmetic idea she’d ever thought up at other agencies . . . lipstick that tasted like strawberries, a ballpoint pen that wrote perfume to make letters smell good, shampoo in champagne bottles, cologne that was half gin to attract alcoholics. Each new creative director (and we had nine) would be introduced to Marjorie’s brain children as though they were brand new babies, not teen-agers. I used to go nearly mad knowing she was in there bowling over still another creative director.
Whether anybody does anything about your ideas doesn’t matter. As I suggested earlier, showing them and your thinking off is sufficient.
You should have a long list of people who can be useful to you. And you should be on a few long lists yourself. (Being useful is different from being used. It’s quite moral.)
I could always get heaps of information for a project from the librarian in the history and geography department of the Los Angeles Public Library. Ditto an adorable chap at the Los Angeles Times who would read old news stories to me over the phone and even spell the names. I also had a panel of wife-and-mother girl friends who would tell me how mothers felt about aspirin, oranges, adultery or anything I needed to know.
Your secretarial background should come in handy here. You’re used to coming up with what people need, but now the requests may be tougher.
Every girl has just so many things going for her . . . good cheekbones, sense of humor, terrific backhand, etc. Yes, they all fit into business. If by some incredible stroke of luck you’re loaded (diamonds, money, tax-exempt bonds), there’s no reason not to let it show in a nice way.
By all means have lunch with your father, the oil tycoon, and tour him through the office. Wear your Traina-Norells to work. Have your own Piper Cub. Only use of your talent will eventually provide you any real fun on the job, but for some weird reason certain people in charge are impressed by who and what belongs to you and may give you more of a break if you’re well-possessed.
In your new spot you can play it two ways: You can be a crispy, crunchy, starchy, bristly, high-heeled clickety-clacking girl wow, slaving the livelong day to turn your molehill into a mountain (then running around and showing it to everybody); or you can relax (to the naked eye).
I think stirring up a big fat hurricane around yourself was probably necessary for a business woman in 1923. If you didn’t, men looked right through you like glass. I think hurricaning now is only practiced by the phonies and people who are not very sure of themselves.
Let me give you an example. Last spring I was on a panel television show at a Midwestern university. The kids had their own studio and transmitter and telecast shows into town. I never saw so much going on, fervor-wise. The producer was producing, the coordinator was coordinating, the cameraman was rolling around getting angles. It was like a submarine after a hit.
How was the show? We were all so over-rehearsed that everybody’s lines came out like grey flannel.
By contrast, over at NBC they get the “Tonight” show on five nights a week without any fuss. It seems to be the most casual, informal, easy-going little jewel of a show you’ve ever seen with everybody’s lines sounding like silver bells. It only takes fifty pros working quiedy and without showing off to make it look and sound that way.
No, of course you aren’t really casual about your work, but it’s probably better to start sooner rather than later being a pro. The best of them—Frank Sinatra, Margot Fonteyn, Lyndon Johnson, Bob Hope—make it look easy, don’t they? You should too. Incidentally, men hate loud-mouth, show-off dames. Those are the ones they’re really prejudiced against in business.
A lot of women in business have images. A girl who later started a magazine and became a hostess to royalty used to trail mink on the floor behind her when she was a mere slip of a secretary. She also used to move her two good Louis XV chairs down to the office to impress a lunch date, then have them hauled right back home to wow the cocktail trade. Her image was Opulence. (Don’t ask me how she did it on her salary! I’ve heard some conjecture, of course.)
Another powerhouse I know can’t be got to without a visa and a letter from three congressmen . . . the Exclusive Type. Another one wears only leopard everything from the skin out... Jungle Goddess. A fourth eats just a few grapes and a gram or two of crystallized ginger for lunch. Fragile, About-to-Float-Away image.
If you feel an image cropping out, probably there is no reason to run for the fungicide. Images, however, don’t do much for you unless they are solidly backed by talent and hard work. I think it’s better to have the talent and hard work come first. Then let an image gradually emerge out of your natural idiosyncrasies.
I’d be burying my head in the ostrich to pretend there weren’t highly successful bitches in business—but, oh, how everybody detests them. It isn’t at all necessary to be one to make good. Really it isn’t.
On a fashion magazine a new young editor is as pretty as carnations and wildly ambitious. Nobody can beat her in to work in the morning and nobody can outlast her in the evening. She’s informed in depth. So far so good. The other day an older editor was showing some new merchandise to an important department store executive. “And this is the sportive cocktail suit,” she was saying. “And the boots....”
Enter the carnation girl who tucked in her tummy, underslung her fanny and went to work. “Oh, isn’t that a heavenly suit, Mr. Mudd? We just love it at Dazzle, but has Miss Finch shown you . . .” and she pulled out a tweed evening coat which happened to be the next item on Miss Finch’s list. “Isn’t it divine?” she burbled. “The minute I saw it I said that’s for Mr. Mudd.”
Miss Carnation kept right on slithering, darting around, being a bitch and, let’s face it . . . charming . . . while the older editor watched in fascinated horror. The buyer was bamboozled all right—men can’t always tell who is being bitchy if they are the recipient of a lethal dose of charm. One of these days, however, Miss Carnation will find a hatchet in her neck.
Another young lady I know who is exactly the same age as the carnation girl works for a book publishing company selling subsidiary rights to magazines, paperback companies, book clubs, foreign publishers. It’s a responsible job. She has two girls working for her. I have never been in her office when I haven’t heard, “Carol, you can handle this. Take him to lunch if you like.” Or, “Elizabeth, you know the Post people. Will you see what you can do about this?” She doesn’t have to grab authority. She gives it.
The carnation girl rarely dates . . . afraid the night lights might wilt her for work. (She probably also dislikes or is afraid of men anywhere but in business.) The pubhshing girl has a heavy date schedule and two of the men she dates want to marry her.
A project is giving you trouble. The deadline is nigh. Very well, you must borrow some ideas!
A young copywriter friend in California telephoned me in Neve York recently, and said, “Help! IVe got to think of twenty ways to increase the sale of avocados, and IVe got to think of them in twenty minutes.”
I came up with six, including a contest to describe the taste of an avocado. (I planned to enter “An avocado tastes like cashew-flavored green cold cream” myself.) David, my husband, thought of several more ideas. My friend reported that all but two of our schemes were voted by the group to be totally impractical, but at least she didn’t go to the meeting empty-minded.
Another copywriter I know was given the assignment of developing a singing commercial about margarine. He couldn’t carry a tune, much less rhyme anything. His forte was straightforward prose about batteries and generators. He called home, and his thirteen-year-old daughter bailed him out.
Naturally if you had to borrow all your ideas you’d be in the wrong job. Your company would soon know and so would you. But in emergencies and when you’re learning, it’s okay.
Suppose a brilliant idea comes to you smack, first thing in the meeting. Do you spring it?
Not necessarily! It may well be your casually tossed-in thought is The Answer, but nobody will recognize it because it came on such little cat feet. If there’s to be a second meeting, you might do well to retain your jewel and return with it mounted in a more Tiffany setting.
I believe a company soon learns whom it can count on for the good stuff, regardless of whether you present it with showmanship. Nevertheless, if you make enough of a federal case out of your plans, it’s at least harder for three other people to say it was their idea.
Men sometimes claim women are too emotional. (They love it when you get all soggy and dramatic about them, but not when you get that way about an idea.) Girls aren’t any more emotional than men, really, but accompanying your idea with some unemotional charts, graphs and figures is wise. Statistics are marvelous for backing up your visceral convictions. One girl I know makes her convictions match the statistics. If she comes across some hair-raising figures on the population boom or insecticide poisoning, she’ll manage to get around to those subjects and sound as smart as Kip-linger. Other people make up their statistics as the need arises, which may be the soundest plan of all!
They’ve been talking about the double framostan with the transitional support for about twenty minutes, and you don’t whether the discussion is about bridges, girdles or elevated shoes. When you’re an old pro, you can come right out and ask, “What are you talking about?” As a wobbly amateur, you have to tread on dainty little feet. Listen raptly and if it “feels” kind of like something you ought to know, play it owly. (They don’t talk much.) If other people are asking questions, ask one or two yourself—but not too many. Little girls with too many big questions are usually just showing off their ignorance. They want to be “on” in the meeting but have nothing to get on with.
If you honestly believe everybody in the room is wrong about something except you—and it’s possible they are—then sweetly,, firmly say so, but don’t get mad.
If you’ve had trouble getting the floor, it’s tempting to be vehement, inflamed and hysterical when you get it (especially if you’re arguing with men who tend to think women in business are vehement, inflamed and hysterical). Quiet does it. You know how the least emotionally-involved arguers at dinner parties win everybody over and the impassioned ones lie there bleeding and ignored. The more you keep the edge out of your voice and the petulance out of your mood, the better your chances to change minds.
How long do you fight for your cause? Only so long. You may not really change your mind, but the time comes when you stop saying, “I’d rather die first.” It’s only a business decision at stake, not your virtue.
What about tears to help convince people?
Tears are very impressive, but then so is a derailed Pullman with cut-off arms and legs sticking out of the windows. Some people just aren’t too keen about getting impressed that way. Besides, it’s very hard to turn tears on and off at random. I know. They usually well up when you have the least use for them. As an old cryer from way back, I’d recommend that when you feel the little devils forming ranks, you hide out and stay hidden until they disperse.
You must compliment other people’s ideas when they’re good no matter what the agony. “That is a fantastic idea, Eloise. It’s just sensational,” will get you credit for being a perceptive and a warm, wonderful human being. Hah! Clamming up and staring at your pencil will get you credit for being the jealous piker you are.
Suppose they’re now giving the hoof, the ears and the tail to somebody for an idea you thought of yourself last week but it was so miserable you threw it out. If you mention you thought of it first, nobody will believe you. Do not hari-kiri. Know that your fertile brain will come up with other ideas, and next time they’ll be riding you around on their shoulders.
One girl executive tells me she never totes anything to a meeting except a little red alligator notebook in which she writes smashing little red alligator notes in red alligator ink . . . only if what’s being .said is important.
How chic! I used to need a wheelbarrow to haul my paraphernalia in.
It’s my opinion that auxiliary material can be very helpful to your cause because it relieves a meeting’s boredom. Anything people can pass around, sniff, touch, fondle, shred or stroke is great. If they can eat it, that’s the greatest.
My finest prop of all time was my mermaid picture. I tore it out of a back issue of the Saturday Evening Post, took it to a meeting and suggested Max Factor might feature eyes that summer wearing the Mermaid Look. The idea was so well-received that in three days five people had forgotten whose mermaid idea it was and were under the impression it was theirs. Poor darlings. They didn’t have the one, the original mermaid picture to keep flashing in the meeting, and so they couldn’t make the theft stick.
Once an idea of yours goes into the works, it will nearly always be tampered with and made worse by a boss, a group, a committee, a rival. This group grabbiness just can’t be helped. Though one person’s anything creative is usually better than a group effort, management—which doesn’t always understand creativity—is nervous if it doesn’t throw in a bunch of experts (often including management’s wife, girl friend, golf buddies and haberdasher). Someday you’ll be important enough to demand that everyone keep his CL.F.’s and F.H.H.’s off your work.
It’s a wonderful thing to be able to move with your ideas (i.e., they have to follow your plan and nobody can interfere). Any time you see a resounding success in business it’s usually because one gifted person has got hold of the full responsibility for the store, the airline, the magazine, the ad campaign; and his concept is carried straight through to completion. (He has plenty of helpers but no other quarterback.) This kind of spot takes some working up to and little bit of luck. More than one tycooness says, “I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.” I never had the thrill of having unlimited responsibility in business myself, but I had the thrill of the results when I wrote a book. I was the only quarterback.
What if you don’t want full responsibility but you can clearly see that somebody up there is wrecking the company. You’d at least like a hearing to tell them how to straighten things out.
It’s quite true that a fresh junior executivess can sometimes see straight through the morass and muck things are in and know in her bones what ought to be done. She may see clearer in her neophyte hours than she ever will again. Right or wrong, however, you can’t often get people to listen seriously to your plans to revamp the company unless you’re on the management team. (There must be Joan of Arc cases where a slip of a girl led the company out of bankruptcy, but I never heard of one.) Do your own job fiendishly well, keep looking for the Main Chance—mainer than the one you already have—and two years and several dead bodies later when they get around to doing what you knew ought to be done in the first place, you can crow (to yourself). This doesn’t mean you can’t always try in your ladylike way to interest people who are in power in your schemes. You may also get a crack at some of these men unofficially through dates, affairs, friendships. Smart girls sometimes get to be confidantes of important men. No reason not to talk about business when you’re on his yacht.
If, unlike the girl who “hears voices,” you’re inclined to think something is so just because somebody in power says it is, it aint necessarily! Don’t be too impressed. You have a brain. Listen to it and do what it tells you as often as you possibly can.
Some girls think it’s unfeminine to show any enthusiasm shaking hands, and so they have developed the wet-hot-dog-bun hand clasp. It’s a chiller. Some very formal Europeans often have a miserable handshake too. They only go as far as the knuckles and do a quick one-two as though they were shaking down a thermometer. Do grasp hands warmly, firmly, all the way in. I don’t think there’s anybody not to shake hands with at first meeting, including women. If you like to touch and pat people as I do, this is a way of getting at them legitimately.
If terms of endearment are natural to you, they’re in so far as I’m concerned. Your fond salutes should be changed from month to month, however.
I have gone through lambchop, dreamboat, mushroom, cutiepie (a real low!) and Lady Catherine, Lady Jane, Lady Margaret or whatever the girl’s name is this year. I could use a new supply. A very popular chap I know has a name for each girl—Bearcat, Crank-case, Flapjack and Birdbrain (said lovingly), but probably no girl should get quite that cutiepie with her co-workers.
Now that you have a fancier job, how much menial stuff should you continue to do?
If you’ve ever been a secretary, the temptation is strong to do it yourself. You figure every girl you give your typing to is thinking, “Who does Miss Uppity think she is? We knew her when.”
It’s not that you’re too good to do your own typing, but if you type, valuable time and energy go down the drain that should be going into your new work. Chloroform your guilt feelings and turn the stuff over to the typist.
Don’t let them stick you with taking notes in meetings either. Ask them to call in a secretary. Otherwise you’ll be transcribing notes far into the afternoon while the other people are getting on with what the meeting was called about.
How do you get co-workers to do what you want when they don’t have to? Or even when they do?
Everybody doesn’t subscribe to this “exaggerate the obstacles” method of getting work done for them, but it works for me. When you want something impossible, you make it sound worse than it is! “Johnny, this is a ghastly request. (Look as though you were about to faint with the hideousness of it all.) I don’t know whether you’ll be able to do it, but I’m hoping.” Or, “What a miserable time to be bringing you this, Marguerite. I know how swamped you are.” (You are almost putty-colored with compassion.)
As long as they know you know how ridiculous you’re being, I think people often try harder for you.
Sometimes charm won’t work, of course. Other employees sometimes push a new young tycooness around out of simple jealousy or resentment that you’ve “made it.” You are smart, of course. Occasionally they do the work their way instead of how it’s got to be done. This was certainly true for me as a young advertising copywriter. I would ask an art director for a layout showing plump doves circling around the classic head of a dreamy-looking creature en negligee. What I would get was a burlesque queen in a bikini surrounded by American flags.
“What happened?” I would wail.
“Your idea won’t work,” he would say.
The hell it wouldn’t!
I gradually learned that what separates the girl successes from the marshmallows is the guts to fight for what you have to have. Letting a dissenter off the hook so he’ll think you’re a nice person doesn’t make him think you’re a nice person. He thinks you’re a worm! Letting nut-skull helpers off the hook will certainly never get you the pay and the post that let you swish around sexily among the men.
You have to trust people who know what they’re doing to do it, of course, without staying on their heels. I believe the biggest washout of a boss I ever had was one of the nine creative directors who couldn’t, as they say, delegate authority. In his case, he couldn’t let copywriters write copy. I’d go into his office with a television story board I’d struggled with nine days. He would lay it down on his desk and say, “Thanks, that’s swell. Hey, what do you think about the idea of a guy getting out of a seaplane with a four-day growth of beard. His wife meets him, they kiss. She gets pretty badly scratched. She pulls out a razor. . . “
What I thought was what I could do with a razor, but what I said was, “That’s marvelous!”
Sometimes the underling’s idea is just as good as your own but different—not the way you’d do it. That doesn’t make it wrong. Let the people who were hired to do the work do their work, and you do yours.
At a ladies’ luncheon I attended at Temple Israel—second biggest temple in the second biggest U.S. city—the chairman of the day introduced ten committee women who talked at the mike half a minute each. Then she introduced twenty other women who had done something which entitled them to be stood up and clapped at. Then she read off twenty other women’s names. Whoever was left must have been a real shirker! Actually the introductions only took a few minutes, and the chairman had managed to leave a lovely glow around the room.
If you’re in a position to thank out loud, make it a long list, and I mean down to complimenting whoever got the conference room ashtrays emptied so snappily. Maybe you think it’s going overboard to acknowledge so many. I say you can’t go overboard mentioning names.
It came as an enormous shock to me when the girl who had been my assistant while I worked as executive secretary to Mr. Belding (the ad agency boss) was instantly made his secretary when I moved on to write copy. Little Charlotte . . . dear little Charlotte .. . who had run errands for me on her lunch hours and even sewed up sagging hems for me while I hid in the closet.
What a fathead I was . . . assuming someone as smart as this girl would just go on and on delightedly doing these chores for some other executive secretary to the end of her days.
I think it is a good rule to remember that most people who serve you like sheep dogs don’t do it because you’re so glorious and they’re so impressed with you. It’s their job and they do a good job of it. You might just as well give them credit and see about advancing them, because if you don’t, somebody else will and maybe over your still-warm body!
Who wants to play dominoes at their silly “for men only” luncheons anyway ... or choke to death in their smoke-filled, segregated dining room? It’s quite a new thing for men and women to be companions anyhow. For centuries they just piled into bed together but had few discussions. A little more time is needed to integrate completely (and naturally there will always be some things men and women won’t do together, and women wouldn’t want them to). Meantime, I’m sure you have a million projects for your lunch hours, the most important of which might be to grab a nap against a very big evening or big meeting.
Is your ego so shaky that when somebody says a co-worker did a sensational job you can feel the spikes being driven into your ribs? Do you feel other people’s hate, jealousy, tenderness toward another in the room before “the other” feels it himself?
“Overly sensitive” people do succeed in business. (How many executives do you know who are on the couch?)
You can “feel too much” and still be a fabulous executive secretary because you sense exacdy what a boss needs before he needs it. (This also makes you a great lover but, as I said, we have to wait a bit for that discussion.) Coupled with other skills, the sensitive person can go just about as high as she wishes. She knows what other people need to hear and receive—including the public who buys the stuff—and she gives it to them.
Nevertheless, if you’re frequently inclined to feel out of the group, the party, the meeting (or even if you’re in but somebody else is more in), my advice is to try psychiatry, but also to show a few personal guts while you’re suffering. Instead of withdrawing into a bruised little ball, make yourself get back in the group, the party, the meeting. Yes, you have to be a little phony—pretend to be animated when you’re actually not enjoying yourself too much. I’m convinced that’s what “normal” people do. They get bored almost speechless too (which is what you are when you feel “out of it”), but they keep the smile on, the valves open. They stay in there plugging instead of granting themselves the luxury of cold, miserable withdrawal! You can force yourself to do the same!
There certainly are a load of them around. One of my nine creative-director bosses at the ad agency used to get absolutely hivey if anybody stayed at the office after he headed for the car pool at five-fifteen. It was a reflection on him to have anyone working when he wasn’t. Some of us workers should probably have offered to go get in the car pool for him.
Another creative director used to come out from the East Coast to Los Angeles (where I spent most of my office years) to mold us Western clay into copywriters. He adored company, so we all had to be molded in a body. And you’ve heard of night people? This cat didn’t get his eyes really propped open until four in the afternoon. By dinnertime he was getting livelier, and around midnight he did his very best molding. I can remember us morning people trying to get our clay to cooperate at two in the morning, but I know mine was clammy and unshapable.
Neurotic bosses and co-workers are SL lot of bother, but I’ve found they usually do themselves in before they do you in.
Isn’t that lovely that you weave rugs out of old nylon stockings . . . and how nice you can out-field every teen-age outfielder in your block? To each his own. It’s my opinion, however, that people who live for the weekend and the hobby must be fairly miserable in their jobs and should see about a new one. In your early years of making good I think your work is the hobby.
Titles are very nice things, although they are frequently as phony as plastic pearls. I heard one the other day—Creative Projectionist. Now what on earth do you suppose a creative projectionist does to be creative unless maybe run the film backwards? Nevertheless, I can’t sniff at anybody’s title. Get one if you can. They look very nice on printed business cards.
Speaking of business cards, have those too. Badger the company to print some for you even if you have no title and have to pay for them yourself. Just use your name, the company’s name, address and phone number. These come in very handy at cocktail parties.
If you ever have to make a speech, first write the speech out completely. It doesn’t have to be very fancily said, but write it all down. Then transfer the main points paragraph by paragraph to 3 x 5 cards. These are what you will actually use when you give the speech. Practice and practice your “extemporaneous” address until you can practically give it without the cards. It will come out a little differently each time. That’s what makes it sparkly.
When you start having a rather terrific success in your job, it’s like little firecrackers going off inside you . . . pop, pop, pop. Sometimes it’s a few days between pops, but the sensation is a bit like the sweet, glow-y feeling at the beginning of a love affair. The difference is this: the best part of the love affair may be the sweet, falling-in-love period after which things inevitably go downhill joy-wise. The sweet-success feeling of work usually comes at the end of a hard pull and keeps building.
Miss Geraldine Stutz, president of Henri Bendel and one of the most breathtaking girl-successes of our time (she really is successful) says: “It’s like having good legs. It’s that extra lovely something in your life. It’s the joy of having every bit of you used.”
Miss Kay Daly, vice-president of Revlon and mother of the famous “I Dreamed I Went Walking in My Maidenform Bra” campaign says: “If there’s anything more fun than just being a girl, I’d say it’s being a successiul-m-business girl. That way, you can have your cake and eat it, too—and the frosting is on the top. There the money is nicer and the men you meet are more fun to know, because they are usually many-faceted in personality and interests (and a little more neurotic than, say, the milkman—which makes them more interesting, naturally!). Even though a girl has to work a lot harder at the top, the grind is not so grim if she can afford to show up in a Chanel suit for those early-Monday-morning meetings . . . or tuck her hair into a divine Dache hat if she hasn’t time to get to the hairdresser. If you’re a girl who prefers the cake (plus the frosting) to the crumbs, and you’re not afflicted with acrophobia (the higher you go, the fewer friendly hands will be reaching down to help you!), the top-of-the-ladder is far and away the pleasantest place you can perch.”
One lovely thing about having a success is that you lose your jealousy, and perhaps for the first time in your life you can truly rejoice in a friend’s—any friend’s—good fortune.
Everyone will take credit for you, of course. As Mussolini said, “Success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan.” You can afford to let all the benefactors and factresses claim you. The incredible thing is that they will not have discovered a genius or somebody who is that much smarter or prettier or crazier-gifted than anybody else. They will simply have “benefacted” a very hard worker.
Herbert Mayes, president of the McCall Corporation, says, “Nothing recedes like success!”
We don’t want that happening to you, and it shouldn’t happen if you stay cat-vigilant and keep doing all the things that made you successful—plus some new ones. There is one blight, however, that can run through an office like carbolic acid . . . temporarily. Let’s discuss this affliction and how to fight it before traveling on to raises, firings, expense accounts and finally fun and sexy games in the office.