How to Be a Star at Work: 7 Rules for a Really Big Career

By Cathie Black

Rule 4: It's best in the long run to make your life a grudge-free zone.


Several years after I became president of Hearst Magazines, a Hearst executive walked into my office with a complaint.

"Cathie," she said, "I just heard there's a meeting this afternoon that I should be in on, and nobody told me about it. I don't know why I'm being shut out, but I should definitely have been included."

"So go to the meeting," I told her. "Assume it was an oversight, and go take your rightful place." She looked surprised, but later in the day she did just that. And as it turned out, she hadn't been intentionally excluded at all—it was an honest mistake. But she'd made a mistake of her own, in forgetting this important rule: Don't personalize things that aren't personal.



Adapted from Basic Black: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life), by Cathie Black. Copyright © 2007 Cathleen Black. Published by Crown Business, a division of Random House.