Early Career Blunders.

Today's Marketing Cookie is a little story from early in my career when I learned the consequence of being tactless in a meeting and a clumsy way of navigating the moral choice between advancing myself at the expense of others or letting the opportunity pass.

It was the first week of my first real job in a big company. Each morning, my task was to print out any chat rooms on AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe where the company was mentioned. Once that was done, the big boss, who had hired me from a grocery store deli, wanted me to "go to meetings around here and learn something." So I did.

In one meeting, people were discussing the need for a new ad. A newspaper with the current ad circled in black magic marker was being passed around the table. When it reached me, I saw a square box on the page with a tiny logo at the top, crammed with words. I chuckled and blurted, "This is our ad? I can see why you want to change it." Everyone laughed.

A consultant who kept telling the big boss in another meeting that day, "They're eating our lunch!", gave me an approving wink. The consensus was that the ad needed to be totally redesigned, and the meeting ended. Everyone dispersed except for a woman still sitting at the table, writing in a notebook. She looked up, smiled, and asked, "What don’t you like about our ad?"

I started blabbing about how there was too much text, the logo needed more space, and on and on. I would have kept going, but I noticed she wasn't looking up anymore. Trying to reengage, I asked her, “What do you do here?”

She said, "I create the ads."

I felt terrible. About 10 days later, the big boss’s voice came over the intercom asking me to come to the conference room. I opened the door and saw the big boss and the winking consultant seated at the table. He motioned for me to sit down and offered me the ad designer’s job. If I took the promotion, I could have quit working nights at the grocery store, but the guilt was too overwhelming, so I declined.

When he asked why, I felt my face blushing as I endured an inner dialogue, comparing myself to Judas. So, I explained I had never used the graphic design software before. It was kinda true. He pointed at the consultant and said, "Mark here thinks you can do it. I'll pay for some classes, and you'll learn it fast." I agreed to take the classes but still declined the promotion.

A few weeks later, I started to see chatter in the chatrooms about something called a “website.” I did some research and learned that by using 18 HTML tags, you can build a series of pages that link to one another. I downloaded the browser, played around with it a little, and an idea was hatched! When I delivered the next morning’s AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe chat room report, I did something different. Rather than just printing everything out, I used a highlighter to call out those specific conversations and wrote a few notes for him in the margins. I handed the report to his secretary as I always did, went back to my desk, and waited.

Within about 25 minutes, the big boss called my name over the intercom, asking me to come to the conference room. He asked, “What’s all this?” I explained that his customers were asking each other if there were any websites for the industry and that we have a chance of being the first. I explained what a website was and that I had learned HTML. The big boss let me build the company’s first, and our industry’s first, website. It took off. Within two years, 90% of his company’s revenue came from the web.

I’ll never know what the consultant told the big boss about me or if my lack of tact in my first week led to the ad designer’s departure. Nor will I ever know where I’d be today if I had taken her job making newspaper ads. What I do know is that finding the right balance between tactfulness, assertiveness, and good timing is a crucial skill that I am still trying to perfect. When the big boss agreed to let me build the company’s first website, it opened a new department and allowed me to develop an exciting new career—without stepping on anyone's toes—and hopefully illustrates today’s fortune: “Be tactful: do not overlook your own opportunity.”