DiSesa - Seducing the boys club: uncensored tactics from a woman at the top

CONTENTS

To my beautiful parents, Leonard and Helen DiSesa, who were always proud of me and would have been absolutely delighted to see that I had enough concentration to actually finish writing a book.

FOREWORD

James Patterson

I vividly remember the first time Nina and I met during a lunch in New York City that she describes in this book. She came off as fiercely competitive, although she claims she was just flirting with me. At any rate, I got used to it. I even began to look forward to our times together.

There are a handful of copywriters who worked for me at J. Walter Thompson while I was running the creative show who went on to write books and novels. Im proud of all of them. Some, like Nina, are advertising people first and authors second. I think she would be pleased about that distinction, and I believe she will be as successful an author as she is a creative director and chairman.

With this book she combines several disciplines for a wise and devilishly amusing take on how to manage men without us resenting it, if we are smart enough to detect we are being handled. After all, she was manipulating me with her charm during that first lunch, and like all the rest of the men in her life, I didnt care. Women will devour Seducing the Boys Club, and it will be the talk of the town, the talk of many towns, actually. But men should read this book, too. Not that theyll have any defense against a woman who can truly seduce boys clubs, but at least theyll have a good laugh. At any rate, I advised Nina to make it a page-turner, and it is.

Finally, I have to add the opinion that this is an extremely powerful and important book. In writing about one womans unique and effective approach to not only surviving but beating the boys clubs that still control much of the business world, Nina DiSesa has brought to life the reality of those insidious institutions. And she does it with a smile.

SCREW THEIR RULES.
NOW TRY SOMETHING ELSE.

A bout halfway through my career I decided that if I was going to make it in the advertising business I had to aim for the top. After fifteen years, I realized that writing ads and winning creative awards was not going to last forever. This was a young persons business, and if I was going to thrive, I would have to become a manager and a leader before I turned forty-five. For a creative person in advertising, surviving and thriving means running the creative department of an agency. What I didnt realize at the outset was that it also meant breaking down the barriers of that impenetrable bastion of male arrogance and supremacy: the boys club. This is where male values, behavior, and sexual humor prevail, and where few women are allowed at the top. The only reason we even attempt to join these clubs is that theyre fast-paced, exciting, and challenging, and if you know how to win, playing with the boys can be a lot of fun.

The male bastion I wanted to join was advertising, and I wanted to join the biggest club I could find. My stepping-stone to that ultimate job happened in 1991, when I was hired as the executive creative director of J. Walter Thompsons Chicago office. For the previous five years Id been thriving at the quintessential boys club of McCann Erickson, so I embarked on the Chicago job confident in my ability to control men.

I got a confidence adjustment during the first hour of my first day on the job. The entire agency had gathered to meet me, and I gave everyone an impassioned speech about how we were going to change the fortunes of the agency. We were going to work together to succeed, kick ass, and bring back the glory that was once theirs. Blah-blah-blah-brilliant, I thought.

When I finished I expected that there wouldnt be a dry eye in the placehell, I almost choked myself up. But when I asked if there were any questions, there was dead silence. No one had a single question for me. Then, breaking the discomfort that disinterest creates, came a male voice from the back of the room.

Whats your sign?

Looking back, I wish I had just laughed and said something clever and wildly confident, like:

The sign of the times, baby. Or something inspiring:

Pisces. Whats your sign? Asshole?

If I had, I would have gotten the immediate respect of the bad-boy contingent that would seem to elude me for the next three years. But I didnt. I was too surprised at the blatant rejection. So instead I said something dorky, like Very funny.

In Brooklyn, when we couldnt think of a fast retort to an insult, wed sneer and say something like:

Oh, that was so funny, I almost forgot to laugh.

(What does that even mean?)

But in those first few moments in Chicago, I had committed a cardinal sin: I had taken something for granted. I thought that just because they needed a savior and I was in savior mode, all those damaged Midwesterners would welcome me with open arms. Instead, they were probably thinking about all the different ways they could string up one more smart-alecky New Yorker and hang her out to dry.

Being assumptive was one more mistake I would have to correct in dealing with men. My first mistake was that I believed in fair play. I thought that if I was a good girl, good things would happen to me. (Its a good thing I didnt hold my breath.)

My second mistake was that I didnt appreciate men and thought they were only useful in bed. In business, I saw them as adversaries.

And the most unfortunate of my errors in judgment was that I thought using feminine wiles was cheating, and that to make it in a mans world, I had to play by all their rules and not complain. It never occurred to me until I was in the thick of it that while some rules are sacrosanct and you need to be aware of them in order to win, many others are not. I had to learn to decide which rules needed to be followed and which ones were okay to ignore. Mainly, I learned it was okay to break with as many conventions as possible and that the squeaky wheels who pull a big load deserve all the oil they can get.

Business Is Not a Level Playing Field

No matter how much we hate to hear this, its still the truth: Men and women are not equal in the business world. You can ignore that basic fact, you can fight it, or you can use whatever youve got to overcome the imbalance. If youre honest with yourself, youll recognize that we are managed, rewarded, and regarded differently even when we do the exact same job. We are even punished differently when we commit the same transgressions. Men are often treated as above reproach. Many of them believe that even blatant misconduct on their part will be ignored, forgiven, or even admired. And often theyre right. This is not true for women, and we can never forget it. There is a double standard. It stinks, but its there nonetheless.

A case in point happened between a very senior advertising executive and a woman who worked for him. They were brazenly carrying on an affair, even though they were both married with young children.

One day these two were on a flight to make a big presentation to the board of directors of a very critical client. On the plane ride, which lasted only forty-five minutes, they couldnt restrain themselves, and under the flimsy cover of an airline blanket they spent most of the flight necking. Then it became very obvious to everyone around them that the guy was getting a special service.

The plane landed, and as everyone prepared to disembark, the people who were sitting near the contented couple got a good look at them. It turned out that most of the people watching the thinly blanketed sex were members of that very board of directors. Two hours later, the ad executive and his mistress had to present to all of them amid whispering, smirks, and poorly disguised laughter. It was humiliating, but the man never showed any sign of remorse. Nor did he suffer any real repercussions. The woman, however, was ridiculed unmercifully behind her back and never recovered her loss of dignity from the escapade. Neither one of them were reprimanded at the time, because the man had an important client in his pocket, but when that client left for another position, both the man and the woman were fired. He was fired a few months later. She was fired the next day.