Happy occasions can be casual. Sad or serious ones require a personal touch.
Fighting by e-mail is bad, too. I’m all for writing down the angry e-mail, but don’t send it. That carefully crafted note never has the effect you want it to have. It just inflames the situation. Print it out and then delete it. Then you have the reference for the phone call or the meeting. It will save you a lot of stress and conflict. Every time I’ve blown up in a moment of frustration I’ve regretted it.
The worst was a few years ago when I sent an angry e-mail late at night to a TV executive. He’d called to yell at me about something I’d said to the press. I took the high road at the time and was contrite on the phone. But then I stewed about it all night. I thought: How dare you?And I started thinking counterproductive things like: I could have said this much worse thing to the press!I wrote it all down in an e-mail and rather than just saving it and cooling off, I hit send.
The next morning, I woke up with one thought: I can’t believe I sent that.
I sent a new e-mail apologizing and called later and just said, “Sorry.”
It blew over, and I learned that many mistakes can be undone. But I thought, Never again.When you take into account the emotional wear and tear, you realize it’s better to let most sleeping dogs lie. I’ve learned at the age of fifty-seven that as much as I’d like to say X, Y, or Z, I must consider how I am going to feel afterward. And the answer, in the case of angry or snide remarks, is: not great.
I also learned about e-mail attachments the hard way. Someone sent me an e-mail when I was at Parsons with an attachment saying, “What kind of a jerk is this guy?” I wrote back, “He demonstrates every time he puts a word to paper that he’s a complete and total asshole.” I thought I was responding to her, but in fact I was responding to the guy. He had a good sense of humor about it, luckily, and wrote me back, saying, “I’ve been called worse.” I was mortified.
And yet, I will say a misdirected e-mail saved my fiftieth birthday. My dear friends the Banus and a colleague at Parsons were planning a surprise party for me. Meanwhile, I was having a huge falling-out with the colleague at Parsons. There was a volley of e-mails about the details of the party, and someone cc’ed me by accident. Suddenly, I see the whole sequence of correspondence and learned that my mother was coming; my sister and her family were coming; I even think that the Queen of England was coming.
Furthermore, this was during the time when tumultuous curricular and pedagogical changes were taking place in the Fashion Design Department, and I was woefully unpopular with the faculty. They were invited, too. So I responded to this unintentional “cc” and called the whole thing off. Thank you, technology!
Things do happen for a reason. As terrible as I would have felt doing this to my friends, had I arrived at the Banus and been met with this surprise, I would have walked out. They were inviting people I was all but at war with, and I really doubt I could have played nice.
I am really against surprise parties, especially if they involve people from different spheres. Assumptions that are made by either group about who should be included are almost always wrong. There are a lot of people with whom I interact because I have to; that doesn’t mean I want to eat cake with them. And then if they brought me a present, I would have to write a note.
One little technology-taming tip, If you, too, are surprised by typos: I like to print out things I’m working on to read them on paper before I send them off. You miss a lot of things on the screen that are apparent when you’re looking at them on the page. Yes, there is the environment to think of, but—to paraphrase a certain celebrity on the topic of her fur coat being dead when she got it (“I didn’t kill it!” she said)—the tree’s already been taken down.
Don’t Lose Your Sense of Smell
WHEN PRESENTED WITH BIZARRE circumstances—such as radical (and radically unappealing) cosmetic surgery—I’ll mutter, “That person is living in the monkey house.”
What does the phrase mean? I’m assuming that most readers have been to a monkey house at a zoo. The stench of it is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. Every time I visit, I can’t help but declare, “This place stinks!” Well, after about ten or fifteen minutes, it no longer smells as bad. And after half an hour, it doesn’t smell at all.
The trouble with that is the following: It still stinks. We’re merely used to it, so the smell disappears to us. However, anyone walking into the monkey house anew is going to scream, “This place stinks!”
Once I bought a lamp, and the wrong color was delivered. It was pretty garish. But I was so desperate for light that I set it up. I thought: That is horrible looking.But as time went by, I grew used to it, and after a couple of weeks I even started to like it. I began to refer to its garish color as being “unexpected.” Then a dear friend, an interior designer, came over to my apartment for a visit. She gasped when she saw the lamp and said, “What possessed you to get that?”
I’d been living in the monkey house.
You can tell when what you’re doing is what you’re meant to be doing. If it’s fun, and satisfying, and comes together in a great way, then you know that’s something you’re in some way destined to do. If it feels dishonest, it probably is. While I think that it’s good to step out of one’s comfort zone and try new things, if in doing so, the particulars don’t feel right, then they’re not. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try new things, just that you should listen to yourself and learn from mistakes and not get so comfortable in a gross situation that you forget it smells.
So many people these days are switching jobs, or looking at new industries, and I think that, as tragic as the circumstances are, potential exists to try new things and find something truly fulfilling. But you really have to be flexible.
I see this all around me. We have been through meteoric adjustments at Liz Claiborne Inc., where I’ve been chief creative officer since 2007. Since the recession began, we’ve received completely new messages from the executive team. They are clear messages, but they require big changes. And yet I see so many associates failing to acknowledge that things have changed. The whole world has changed. And we need to adjust constantly.
We’re going to need to rethink completely what we’re doing in my own department at LCI. I actually really enjoy this kind of upheaval. I like the opportunity to evaluate what we do, and how we do it, and how we could do it better, or do it just as well with less. It’s great to have the opportunity presented to us, because ordinarily we’d just keep slogging on in the same way. So many people I see complain when they’re faced with changes, “But that’s not the way we do things.”
We knowthat. That’s why we’re having this discussion. Put it behind you.
It was like the curriculum development at Parsons. Whenever I would declare that we had to make changes, someone would say, “But this is the way we’ve always done it.” I banned that phrase from my office. You just mustn’t think that way. There is always room for improvement.
LCI’s fabulous and inspirational CEO, Bill McComb, is always saying, “Don’t look back.” He’s right. You can’t bring all that baggage with you.