BUSINESS LIFE:WHEN SHE was alive, Helen Gurley Brown struck me as a bit of a joke. The veteran Cosmo girl was still getting boob jobs in her 70s and still insisting that the two best things for a girl, even a very aged one, were having a great deal of sex and earning a great deal of money.
Although both are fine in their slightly limited ways, they are surely incompatible. If you work the whole time, you don’t meet anyone to have sex with; and even if you do, when your mind is filled with interest-rate swaps, great sex surely proves hard to achieve.
But now that Gurley Brown is dead, I have taken her on as a role model. Almost everything I’ve read about her in the past week has made me want to emulate her – apart perhaps from the frequency of her visits to the plastic surgeon and the way she made her husband a cooked breakfast every morning.
What she did and what no one else seems to do any more was to say exceedingly sensible, realistic things about work.
“What you have to do is work with the raw material you have, namely you, and never let up,” she once said. There is no soft tosh about everyone being talented; instead, she was quick to point out how ropey her own raw material was – she had bad acne and sticky-out teeth.
Still, never mind: a lot could be done. Keenness was a good start.
“The faster you get back to people, the less brilliant you have to be,” she said in another shockingly sensible moment.
The week before this leopardskin-clad genius died, I received an email about a book to be published next month by Kate White, the current occupant of the US Cosmopolitan throne.
Alas, judging from the press release for I Shouldn’t be Telling You This, there has been a sorry falling-off in advice for working women in the 50 years since Gurley Brown wrote Sex and the Single Girl.
Ms White’s first tip – land a job you’re truly passionate about – is not only a complete yawn, it’s a bum steer.
With youth unemployment so high, she should not be telling anyone anything other than to grab the least worst job going.
Compare this to advice from the real deal. I’ve been sifting through five decades’ worth of Gurley Brown sayings and concluded that her true legacy has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with work.
Indeed, among the quotes, I’ve found, are the five wisest and most cheering tips I think I’ve ever seen, not just for working girls but for working boys too.
The first bit of advice is to shut up. But she put it better: “Never fail to know that if you are doing all the talking, you are boring somebody.”
I need to learn this and so, I’m guessing, do you.
The second is, at first sight, a strange choice for a career tip.
“While putting on her make-up, a girl should tell herself: ‘Tonight, baby, I’m going to get laid.’”
But, if you think of it metaphorically, this is just the sort of psyching that we all need to do every day – not so much to get laid as to get paid.
The third is a great comfort to me: “Feeling insecure is good for you. It forces you to do something better, drives you to use all your talents.”
I have long suspected that being neurotic is useful – even if tiresome for everyone else. The best way to be good is to fear that you are useless.
The next tip makes me even happier. “I would rather have a wisdom tooth pulled than go to a reception,” she said. If HGB felt this way, it lets the rest of us off the hook. Networking is for wimps.
Hallelujah.
But the final tip is the most valuable of all. Gurley Brown has discovered the answer to the problem so many of us suffer from: we can’t for the life of us remember people’s names, even when we’ve worked with them for ages.
For her, the answer was simple: she called everyone Pussycat.
What makes this so inspired was that far from making people feel insignificant, it made them feel she loved them, and so they loved her back.
There is only one trouble with my adopting this scheme.
If I started calling people at work “Pussycat” – let alone Pushycat, which was how she pronounced it – they might think it a bit strange.
So I’m working on an alternative that might be more fitting for an uptight Brit.
I’ve thought of “Love” and “Ducks”, but I don’t think either is quite right and have come up with something that might do.
From now on, and in memory of the greatest management guru that ever lived, I’m going to start calling everyone Dear. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2012
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