Zhang Xin: Building Beijing – CNN.com.Zhang Xin is a billionaire property magnate, has been named one of the world’s most powerful women and has played a large role in transforming Beijing’s architectural landscape.

At 45, Zhang has made a name for herself bringing hip, urban architecture to Beijing’s previously gray and drab skyline, and making a lot of money while at it.

She co-founded her property development company Soho China — which stands for Small Office, Home Office — with her husband Pan Shiyi in 1995. When it went public in 2007, it had raised $1.9 billion.

Wealthy, stylish and dynamic, Zhang and Pan are the embodiment of middle-class Chinese aspirations of wealth and success.

However Zhang’s own path to success includes an itinerant childhood and working in a Hong Kong sweatshop when she was only 14 years old.

Zhang’s parents came from a long line of Chinese immigrants who lived in Burma but moved back to Beijing, taking jobs in the Bureau of Foreign Languages. They later separated when Zhang was only 5 years old. Zhang and her mother relocated regularly until they finally settled in Hong Kong. Zhang, then aged 14, worked in a garment factory, while learning English at a secretarial college.

She managed to get a scholarship to study economics at the University of Sussex in England and went on to gain a masters degree from Cambridge. Head-hunters from an investment bank offered her a job on Wall Street where Zhang worked until 1994, when the lure of being part of China’s rapid transformation and economic boom became too great.

She returned to Beijing where she met Pan and joined Vanatone in 1995, the property company he co-founded. The pair set up their own company that became Soho China and have since embarked on a number of projects — One of their first was a boutique hotel by the Great Wall of China.

Since then, Zhang has fostered her passion for architecture and design and invited a number of internationally renowned architects and artists to work with them, including Riken Yamamoto, Patrick Schumacher and Ai Weiwei.

Soho China’s Jianwai project in Beijing’s Chaoyang district is set to be completed in 2011, but already the mix of business and residential towers has transformed a previously run-down and depressed area in the east of the city into one of its most appealing areas for young aspiring professionals.

Last year, Forbes listed Zhang as #19 on their list of the 400 richest Chinese, with a net worth of $1.21 billion. Even in the current tough economic climate, Zhang and Soho China have a bright outlook for 2009 and beyond.

In February, Soho China made a statement saying that more projects would be completed in 2009 than in 2008 and that profits would quadruple to 2.3 billion Yuan.

E

Of course, all of us dream of finding our passion and somehow shaping a career out of it. As Wax points out: “The problem is, a lot of passions don’t seem to offer any reasonable ability to make a living. That’s where Career Renegade comes in – in a nutshell, the book advises you to stop looking for the reasonable opportunities and start making unreasonable ones.

Getting from Here to There

Fields breaks the opportunities for career renegades into 7 categories:

1. Redeploying your passion in a hungrier market. That’s what Liv did. (A classically trained artist, she discovered ) there are already plenty of markets for the arts, and they’re hard to break into. Liv turned her passion loose in a market that hadn’t previously had much use for artists, the baking world.
2. Refocus and mine the most lucrative micro-markets. Produce a product aimed towards a small but wealthy audience, who will pay a premium for the distinction. Think Apple.
3. Exploit an information gap. Find out what people need to know about some activity and provide that information. That’s basically what Jonathan Fields did in writing Career Renegade; people want more meaningful careers but don’t know how to create them, so Jonathan shows how.
4. Exploit gaps in education. The world doesn’t just need information, it needs skilled teachers to convey that information effectively. If you can teach something there’s a demand for, you’ve got a great opportunity.
5. Exploit gaps in gear or merchandise. Invent or bring to market a product that doesn’t exist but will make a big difference to people pursuing some activity. Jonathan discusses a woman who invented a non-slip yoga mat for high-intensity styles of yoga (where people sweat a lot). Or think of the after-market in iPod products – a market that was invented out of thin air when the iPod became popular.
6. Exploit gaps in community. People are social animals in a society that more and more works against social behavior. Provide community and people will love you. Liz Strauss, for example, has built an incredibly popular forum for people to just talk at Successful (and Outstanding) Blog – which has grown into a very successful conference (SOBCon) and speaking engagements.
7. Exploit gaps in the way a service or product is provided. Make it easier or more compelling for people to use your products, by delivering them where everyone else ain’t. Think on-site car washes, online education, aerobics videotapes way back when, and so on.

Regegade careers aren’t only about having ideas, though – they’re about implementing them, and to that end Career Renegade is packed with information about researching, launching, marketing, and running your own business. It also deals with getting support and mentors to help you on your path.”

If you want to read the whole post go to Build Your Renegade Career! A Review of “Career Renegade” by Jonathan Fields i

If you want to download the first chapter, go here.

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What Is Your Greatest Weakness? Find A Career -  AdvancingWomen.com

The fastest way to make a good interview go bad is to avoid questions posed by the hiring manager. The one question candidates love to avoid is, “What is your greatest weakness?” Most candidates are quick to respond with superficial answers such as “I’m a workaholic” or “I’m a perfectionist.” Not only are those responses boring, but they are also predictable answers interviewers are used to hearing. So much so that an interviewer’s comeback line often is, “That doesn’t sound like a weakness. Now why don’t you tell me about a real weakness?”

Ouch. What an uncomfortable position to be in-when a decision maker challenges you during an interview. Just like you, the interviewer wants the process to go as seamlessly as possible, and they quickly become resentful when they are placed in a confrontational position.

When answering questions surrounding your greatest weakness, my advice is to tell the truth-to a point. Though I don’t advocate providing a play-by-play of every area that may need improvement, it isn’t a good idea not to cop to a weakness either. A happy medium does exist, and it lies in focusing your response on an area that doesn’t have a major impact on your ability to do the job. This should be an area that you are on your way to improving. Note, not an area you’ve already improved, but one that is well on its way.

Interviewers recognize that jobseekers aren’t forthcoming when answering the “greatest weakness” question. As a result, there is a new trend in hiring circles of interviewers cleverly disguising the question and using a variation of the theme. In doing so, interviewers are successfully stumping candidates, and are receiving responses that uncover the not-so-pleasant side of candidates.

Cleverly Designed “Greatest Weakness” Questions

* We all have aspects of our job we prefer not to do. What aspect of your day-to-day responsibilities do you dislike?

In hopes of making you feel comfortable, interviewers may ask questions that start with “we.” The psychology behind this is to make you feel as though you are with a friend, which can cause you to let your guard down.

* Think back to your last review. What suggestions did your supervisor have for improvement?

The chances are extremely high that your supervisor offered suggestions for improvement. Interviewers are aware of this and anticipate that you will disclose the details of your most recent evaluation.

* Describe a project you worked on that didn’t turn out as well as you expected.

Interviewers find that job seekers reveal more when they are asked to tell a story. The assumption is made that the more you talk, the more likely you’ll disclose your weaknesses.

* In what area of your work do you think you can be more effective?

This question is very similar to “greatest weakness” question. However, interviewers believe the way the question is phrased will make you feel less threatened, and therefore more likely to answer freely.

Bottom line: whether or not you want to divulge sensitive information during an interview, an interviewer is going to try his or her darnedest to dig for skeletons in your closet. Interviewers want to uncover any reasons why they shouldn’t hire you, and they hope those reasons will come straight from you. So be prepared.

About The Author: career expert, Linda Matias is President of CareerStrides and the National Resume Writers’ Association. Visit her website at http://www.careerstrides.com or email her at linda@careerstrides.com.

Image via CrunchBase

Your goal is to stand out and get noticed. The minute you join  Join LinkedIn , you have a better chance of standing out, as you will be in a smaller category, one step down the funnel.

Once in LinkedIn, instead of being a passive member, you should be proactive and use all LinkedIn‘s many capabilities to search out contacts and opportunities and put your skills on display. Whether or not you yet have the stature to be out there raising your profile by speaking to groups on industry trends, there are no barriers to responding to LinkedIn Answers questions posed for your industry. Your public profile allows you to display answers you’ve provided which broadcasts your expertise, and that’s your goal. That will make you stand out from the crowd. And there are literally dozens of ways to make Linkedin work for you.

JobMob at Gigantic Tips Guide for Finding Jobs With LinkedIn has some advice on this subject:

Make the right choices first

• Join LinkedIn. 17 million and counting, there’s still room for more.
• Only join LinkedIn once. Having multiple accounts will only dilute the usefulness of each individual profile, and LinkedIn Customer Support cannot merge accounts for you.
• Update your account with all your email addresses that people might use for LinkedIn invitations. This will help you avoid creating multiple accounts by accident.
• Consider upgrading to a premium account with features such as enhanced search results containing relevant LinkedIn users that aren’t yet connections of yours. You can then contact them with InMails which have a much higher rate of being opened that regular email.
• Subscribe to the LinkedIn blog to find out about new features.
• Cancel your account if you decide to stop using LinkedIn by emailing Customer Service. Don’t leave expired information to be found by people researching you.

Develop a LinkedIn strategy

You need to cover 3 fundamentals:

1. Make your profile the best sales document for you so that you can…
2. Get a maximum number of recommendations to build your stature, which will help…
3. Grow your LinkedIn network to increase the chance that your profile will be seen by the right person to hire you.

Supercharge your LinkedIn profile

• The LinkedIn Profile is your online resume or CV. Apply great resume tips, avoid any typical or unusual resume mistakes.
• LinkedIn gives you a lot of control over what appears in your profile and your public profile. The public profile should only display positive elements that are pertinent to your current work search.
• Attract hiring managers or clients via your public profile by only including hard-hitting information such as stellar recommendations from past hiring managers or clients.
• All texts should be well-written, but by YOU, written in your voice.
• Write memorable Summary text, it’s your LinkedIn elevator pitch.
• Although your profile is promoting you, avoid using annoying sales text (”Act now!”) that you wouldn’t have on your resume.
• Display an effective photo on your profile that best conveys the impression you want to leave with the viewer. People remember faces.
• Hide irrelevant connections from your public profile. Typically this means non-work-related friends and family.
• Create a LinkedIn “vanity url” using a format that’s easy to guess and remember: http://www.linkedin.com/in/firstnamelastname
• Publicize your LinkedIn vanity url in your email signature, on business cards and wherever it may be seen by someone who would want your resume.
• Use a LinkedIn-generated email signature to promote your public profile. It will also help grow your network of connections from your email recipients.
• Promote your profile on your blog, other websites and forum signatures with official LinkedIn buttons.
• Update your profile regularly. The easiest way to do this is by constantly adding connections. Every change highlights your profile on connections’ Network Updates pages, giving you more exposure.

Multiply recommendations, yours and theirs

• Write as many recommendations as you can about people in your network, which should help you to…
• Get as many recommendations as you can from people in your network. LinkedIn advises asking for recommendations from “former managers, colleagues and co-workers, customers and clients, business partners.” Start with people you know who have large networks of their own, and use the message to also tell them what kind of work you’re looking for.
• Write great recommendations that will make recipients want to display them on their public profile, giving you additional exposure.
• Never hesitate to ask connections to improve their recommendations to meet the standards of your public profile in promoting you towards your next job. People like to help.
• Be truthful with your recommendations. This is your credibility we’re talking about.
• Hide bad recommendations that are exaggerated or just plain false.

Maximize your connections

Get the best

• Upload your work and personal address books to LinkedIn to discover potential connections and sources of recommendations. Then begin inviting connections beginning with people who are already on LinkedIn.
• Leverage other social networks such as Facebook to find people with whom you can also connect on LinkedIn. Facebook is better than LinkedIn at finding former teachers, classmates and other people who knew you in the past. Once on Facebook, asked them to connect with you on LinkedIn too.
• When you invite new connections, write personalized messages instead of the boring default suggestion from LinkedIn unless the recipient is already waiting for your invite.
• A great way to grow your network is to write recommendations about potential connections. If the person isn’t on LinkedIn, the recommendation will give them a reason to join. Even if they don’t join, you will likely leave a positive impression that may help later.
• Invite or accept connections only with people you trust and share the same social networking values. This isn’t MySpace where the objective is to have as many friends as possible. Your objective is to leverage the network to find a job. You need help from people you can depend on. Only people you trust can possibly write truthful recommendations.
• Remove connections that have lost your trust before they can do any damage to your network or waste more of your time.

Reach the best

• Install the LinkedIn Toolbar for your browser to make searching LinkedIn easy. The Toolbar also allows you to bookmark other users’ profiles from LinkedIn search results.
• Use the LinkedIn JobsInsider (part of the LinkedIn toolbar) if you’re looking for work on major job sites such as Monster, HotJobs, CareerBuilder, Craigslist, Vault, or Dice. It will save you time by automatically display your inside connections for the company mentioned in any job listing.
• Whether via the Toolbar or LinkedIn’s onsite Jobs Search, be specific when searching for contacts. Include job titles where relevant and geographic location if you’re aiming to work in a specific city or region.
• Search for headhunters and recruiters in your domain of expertise. They will always want to talk to you since you represent a business opportunity for them.
• Ask your connections to send over profiles of people relevant to your job search.
• To contact specific LinkedIn users that aren’t in your network even to the 3rd degree, use free OpenLink messages if those users are accepting them or join a LinkedIn Group they’re in. As a last resort, consider buying individual InMails.
• Use Introductions to contact people in your network at the 2nd or 3rd degree. You’ll be more successful if your message includes a suggestion describing how you can help them – even with a simple tip – instead of vice-versa.
• You can also use Introductions to reach inside connections as a way to request referrals to hiring managers. This is especially useful if the inside connections’ companies have win-win employee referral bonus programs.
• Other conversation starters over Introductions are to do company reference checks by asking former employees about a company or hiring manager. This way you get your research done without the company knowing.
• Respond to LinkedIn Answers on topics in your industry. Answering relevant industry questions looks great on your public profile where you can display “questions you have asked, answers you have provided, and expertise you have earned by providing the best answers to questions.”
• Ask your connections to send you questions they think you can answer via the Share This link beneath the question.
• Respond to LinkedIn Answers from employees in targeted companies as a lead-in to generating inside connections.
• Join industry-related LinkedIn Groups, as many as you can handle. It’s a terrific way to meet people and get relevant new connections. Remember that you can contact group members directly as if they’re already connected with you.
• Create your own LinkedIn Group as a way to build stature in your industry, but only if your Group will creates value and so will attract users that you currently can’t reach directly. Simply copying an existing group for no apparent reason will only lower your credibility.

Guy Kawasaki has more tips in his article Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn.

Useful Links

• LinkedIntelligence
• Using LinkedIn to job hunt
• I’m on LinkedIn — Now What???
• How do I use LinkedIn to find a job?
• Official LinkedIn advice for job seekers
• My LinkedIn Power Forum (Yahoo Group)
• Getting Started Building Your LinkedIn Network
• What are best practices for a LinkedIn job search?
• Free e-book: LinkedIn for Job Search

To read this entire post, go to Gigantic Tips Guide for Finding Jobs With LinkedIn

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Can You Tell Me Something About Yourself! – Careers-Employment- AdvancingWomen.com

“Tell me about yourself” is a question, usually posed at some point in an interview. In Can You Tell Me Something About Yourself? Don ‘t Let That Question Stop You Cold we discussed the fact that interviewers use the interview process as a vehicle to eliminate your candidacy. Every question they ask is used to differentiate your skills, experience, and personality with that of other candidates. And we also discussed the process of preparing for the interview and how to handle the question.  To review that discussion, go here.

But remember, one size does not necessarily fit all.  Yes, your core skills, competencies and value to the company remain the same.  But there is a slight difference in perspective, depending on who’s asking the question. For different people, with different roles in the company and therefore different perspectives  on qualities which will be reassuring to them, you should retain your core “elevator pitch” but pivot slightly to address the main concerns of a person whose role shapes his or her outlook and the qualities he or she is focusing on.

When Asked by Different People?

The HR manager or CEO of the company or the Departmental Head can ask the same question and your answer should vary slightly since the expectation of each such person is different.

When asked by HR Manager, who is all about people skills, your response should include something like this: “My career has been characterized by my ability to work well with diverse teams. I seek out opportunities to involve others in the decision-making process. This collaboration and communication is what has enabled me to achieve success in my department. People are the most valuable resource of any organization.”

When asked by CEO, who is all about the bottom line, your response should include something like this: “I have achieved success in my career because I have been focused on the bottom line. I have always sought out innovative solutions to challenging problems to maximize profitability. Regardless of the task or challenge, I always established benchmarks of performance and standards of excellence. I have never sought to maintain the “status quo.” An organization that does not change and grow will die. I would enjoy working with you to help define new market opportunities in order to achieve the organization’s goals.”

So, prepare, define your competitive advantage, think “elevator” pitch, and adjust your pitch every so slightly, depending who’s asking the question. Then go in and dazzle them with your capabilities! Good luck! And please write and tell us how you do or if you have any other thoughts to help with this process.

( If you think you may need some help clarifying and preparing any of your answers, go to Advancing Women Portfolios, email advancingwomen@gmail.com or call toll free: (888) 565-4627. We would love to hear from you and we will be happy to help.)

To read the whole post, go to Can You Tell Me Something About Yourself! – Careers-Employment- AdvancingWomen.com

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Can You Tell Me Something About Yourself? – Careers-Employment- AdvancingWomen.com

“Tell me about yourself” is a question, usually posed at some point in an interview , which can send cold shivers up and down your spine, if you’re not prepared to give the right answer.  In a nutshell, the right answer should be succinct, differentiate you from the swarm of other candidates, and highlight your value to the company for whom you are interviewing.

Purpose of the Question:

There is a purpose to asking each and every question in the interview.  Although the set of interview questions varies from industry to industry and position to position, interviewers use the interview process as a vehicle to eliminate your candidacy. Every question they ask is used to differentiate your skills, experience, and personality with that of other candidates. They want to determine if what you have to offer will mesh with the organization’s mission and goals.

Your Elevator Pitch

Before arriving at any interview, you should have prepared and internalized what many of us call “an elevator pitch”.  This is a description of yourself, your unique competitive advantage and your value to a company which is short enough to be delivered to someone whom you or one of your advocates…..your spouse or colleague, perhaps.. run into and have the opportunity to pitch on the elevator, somewhere between the 10th and the 3rd floor. Three to five sentences would make a good elevator pitch, so they’d better be good ones, whetting the appetite for more.

Defining Your Competitive Advantage or Unique Selling Point

Long, long before this, you should have spent some serious time figuring out what is unique about yourself…. your unique selling point… what makes you different from others… and you’d better have one. Not only that, you’d better be able to quantify it. ( If you’re a little foggy on this, or are afraid you’ll melt into the crowd, instead of standing out, it might be a good investment for you to develop a career portfolio that demonstrates the positive results of your career in a graphic manner which you can then share with others like the person who is interviewing you.)

Avoid This Type of Answer

Try to avoid a too general answer and one that focuses on what you are looking for.  For example: “I am a hard-worker who is good with numbers. After I worked as a financial analyst for a few years, I decided to go to law school. I just finished and now am looking for a new challenge.”  Trust me, they don’t care what kind of challenge you’re looking for: they want to know “what’s in it for them”, so……

Instead, be specific and quantify, something like this:” I began developing skills relevant to financial planning when I worked as a financial analyst for three years. In that role, I succeeded in multiplying the wealth of my clients by carefully analyzing the market for trends. The return on the portfolios I managed was generally 2% more than most of the portfolios managed by my company. After two promotions, as the manager of a team, I successfully led them to develop a more efficient and profitable strategy for dealing with new accounts”.( Give the numbers; better yet, show them in a graph.) “My subsequent training in the law, including tax law and estate law, gives me an informed view of what types of investments and charitable gifts would be most advantageous for your clients.” ( If you have a a career portfolio that demonstrates graphically the success you’ve had, now is the time to whip out your Blackberry or iPhone and share it with them.)

Preparing for the Answer:

Follow the steps outlined below to ensure your response will grab the interviewer’s attention.

1. Provide a brief introduction. Introduce attributes that are key to the open position.

2. Provide a career summary of your most recent work history. Your career summary is the “meat” of your response, so it must support your job objective and it must be compelling. Keep your response limited to your current experience. Don’t go back more than 10 years.

3. Tie your response to the needs of the hiring organization. Don’t assume that the interviewer will be able to connect all the dots. It is your job as the interviewee to make sure the interviewer understands how your experiences are transferable to the position they are seeking to fill.

4. Ask an insightful question. By asking a question you gain control of the interview. Don’t ask a question for the sake of asking. Be sure that the question will engage the interviewer in a conversation. Doing so will alleviate the stress you may feel to perform.

There you have it – a response that meets the needs of the interviewer AND supports your agenda.

When broken down into manageable pieces, the question, “So, tell me about yourself?” isn’t overwhelming. In fact, answering the question effectively gives you the opportunity to talk about your strengths, achievements, and qualifications for the position. So take this golden opportunity and run with it!

( If you think you may need some help clarifying and preparing any of your answers, go to Advancing Women Portfolios, email advancingwomen@gmail.com or call toll free: (888) 565-4627. We would love to hear from you and we will be happy to help.)

To read the whole post, go to Can You Tell Me Something About Yourself! – Careers-Employment- AdvancingWomen.com

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Assess Your Transferable Skills -Advancingwomen.com
Assess Your Transferable Skills
One of the most important parts of a job search, and particularly if your goal is to switch careers,  is assessing your Transferable skills. These are skills which you can use in other jobs such as: Communication, Information Management, Human Services, Managerial, Manual/Physical Labor, Personal Attributes, Organization.

Often, when people have been working in the same job for a long time, they become so accustomed to performing their duties that they fail to recognize the skills they have.

It is beneficial to sit down and write out a list of all the things you do in a work day and all the things you do at home as well. It is easy to forget that skills such as problem-solving, decision-making, and organization which you use at home and in volunteering are skills that you can transfer and use on a new job.

A benefit to this recognition of your skills is that you can come up with a variety of Ideas for jobs or places that these skills may be used.

When making the necessary modifications and adjustments to your CV, in order to target a new job or a new industry, first analyze your work history then make the appropriate refinements in your CV/resume.

Producing A Good CV When Changing Career , a British blog makes some excellent points about this which are themselves transferable to the job market globally:

“The key thing here is to consider the job(s) you have already done and to see if you can identify any skills you were able to obtain within these job(s) that could easily be transferable and be considered of value to your new chosen career and to focus upon them.” As example, if you held any kind of position where you had to talk to clients and interact with them to pinpoint their needs, that is a transferable skill whether you’re behind the scenes trying to understand what a client wants in a website, or you’re trying to sell him or her a high tech document management system or a new computer.  You are still trying to relate and discover a customer’s needs.  That is a skill that will fit almost universally into any business and many careers.

“The key point when producing a CV when you’re looking to change career is not to try to erase all of the experience you have gained up until this point but to tailor it in such a way and in a particular order which is likely to give an overall impression that you possess the necessary skills, personal qualities and qualifications that will be relevant to the career you’re now looking to pursue.

What a well-tailored CV will do, however, is make the switch to your new career seem like a natural and logical progression to the person reading it.

Finally, always remember that a CV isn’t designed to get you the job – it’s designed to get you the interview. You can elaborate on the reasons behind your career switch once you get to the interview stage.”

Good luck with your search….. and please share your experience with us.  Let us know if this post was helpful and what you would suggest to improve it.  Thanks.

Producing A Good CV When Changing Career

Why You Only Really Need Four Sample Resumes -AdvancingWomen.com

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• How to Make Career Decisions

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Changing Expectations and Strategies to Achieve Successful Career Integration

Society is sending women conflicting messages about which elements constitute success for a woman. Should she bake a perfect blueberry pie and chauffeur around kids with sparkling white socks, or should she aspire to be a corporate attorney for a Fortune 500 company and hire a nanny and a cook to shoulder some of the household duties.

In fact, both of those images conjure up a type of perfectionism women should aspire to, which, in itself, is a problem. The fact that both ideals are diametrically opposed makes a choice even more painful. To achieve great success in one area, almost certainly means giving up on great success in the other, at least, as both work and family are structured today.

Starkly put, this ambivalence about women’s role assumes that it is not possible to fulfill both roles as well as one should and, consciously or unconsciously, results in the “dumbing down” of women, who often choose less demanding careers, or avoid some career tracks altogether.

At times, women have taken it upon themselves to lower their expectations at work, in order to fulfill their obligations at home. A woman might choose to stay in a position in human resources, for example, rather than seek as job as a line executive, responsible for profits. Her career prospects would definitely be enhanced as a line executive but that career path might force her to travel, or subject her family to frequent moves.

This avoidance of career opportunities not only extracts an emotional as well as career price, hindering advancement but also affects the balance of power in the home, as the primary wage earner garners more prestige and respect and increasingly dominates the decision making. This unfortunate cycle leaves the woman with even fewer choices and increasingly less opportunity to grow and move along a successful career path.

Kim Babjak in StartupNation Blog writes Take me serious, or else!: “How do we get taken seriously about being sister-preneurs?  My husband, I love to death and have been with for 25 yrs… needs to be continually trained and educated on the principals of homemaker/entrepreneurism. I am sad to say that the topic of the current Sara Palin phenomenon that I do not understand; how can you be a mom and run the world?

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Gretchen Glasscock

Being mentored by the right person is an important and viable bridge to achieving your career goals. Mentors can serve as role models and gateways, introducing you to the right people. Having savvy mentors is one of the key levers that can lift you from obscurity and fruitless toil to success. Because top leadership posts are occupied primarily by men, women must build the skills to enlist men as allies and mentors. As Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, said “Before you become a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.”

Therefore, the leaders you work with (or network with) should welcome the opportunity to mentor you, if you ask them directly and make it easy on them, not taking up too much of their time. When you network (an extension of mentoring), it’s a good idea to reach out to men’s established, powerful networks as well as the newer women’s networks.

• Get a mentor. For many daughters of prominent men, their father is their first mentor. From the age of about five, the author, along with her brother and sister, was in “entrepreneur training” with her father.  He would take us on business drives to oversee his properties, then point out a building and ask us what we thought it was worth.  The correct answer was, “Whatever you can get for it.” He also taught all of us to play poker, as a way of learning business and betting strategy.  But this isn’t just the author’s story; Governor Kathleen Sebelious of Kansas, the first daughter of a Governor in U.S. history to be elected to the same office, learned her lessons at her father’s knee. And Cheryl Miller, the first female analyst to call a nationally televised NBA game on Turner Broadcasting Team, was mentored by her dad.
• If your dad’s not the mentoring type, look to your mom or a teacher. Mothers can be mentors, too. Sharon Avent, president and CEO of Smead Manufacturing Company (a privately held, women-owned company founded in 1906 that manufactures and distributes home and office filing systems, supplies, and software, with $315 million in annual sales and approximately 2500 employees) took over as president from her mother.  Another woman leader told a story about her sixth-grade civics teacher, who after a class debate told her, “You know, if you were my daughter, I’d send you to law school.” She took it to heart, determined not to be a tobacco farmer all her life, overcame her mother’s admonition that she should aspire to be a school teacher, and went on to law school and a successful career.
• Get an incredibly successful woman to be your mentor. Ask for 15 minutes a month, and be willing to do it by e-mail. Gayle Crowell, who was a six-figure executive at a software company (but also a former school teacher) says she’s always willing to mentor, as long as she can do it by e-mail, while she’s waiting in airports or on planes.
• Turn to your supervisor. Your supervisor might be willing to mentor you if you ask for just 15 minutes, once a month, to tell you the expectations for your position; how well you are meeting them; and a plan to move you along a career path that will take you to the next level (as long as it doesn’t threaten his job, even if it’s a lateral move to another track.)
• Tap into powerful networks. Join the National Association of Women Business Owners, the National Association of Female Executives, your city’s Women’s Chamber of Commerce, and your Alumni Club. Janet Hanson, the founder & CEO of Milestone Capital Management, founded 85 Broads—a groundbreaking global mentoring network now with 4,200 18,000 members worldwide. It offers ‘Broad2Broad,’ a model for numerous other corporate/alumnae networks.
• Hire a coach. When the author was on the board of directors of NAWBO, she was enlisted to ask a friend of hers, an enormously successful millionaire entrepreneur, to be the keynote speaker at our awards event.  Linda had never spoken in public or gone beyond high school. She asked me to connect her with an executive coach, another NAWBO member, who helped her give a successful speech to a rousing response.