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.

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