16. Ask Without Asking

—Mylle Mangum (GE and IBT)

This chapter is for modest, hard-working people who just want to put down their heads and throw themselves into a job they love—people who want to get noticed for doing a great job. Most of the time, I have to admit, just working hard isn't enough. Unfortunately, as Linda Rabb's story in Chapter 1, "The Compound Income Effect," shows, employers are notorious for taking advantage of hard-working people and paying them just enough to keep them coming back to work every Monday morning. But being an outsider who shakes things up—like Bob MacDonald—isn't a strategy that will work everywhere. So Mylle's story offers a middle way: If you find the right employer—one who appreciates entrepreneurial thinking and hard work—you can build a great career and a decent amount of wealth.

Mylle, who started her career at General Electric more than 35 years ago, says her philosophy working in large corporations was to let her work speak for itself: "I always got a job and got paid after I'd done it," Mylle says. This is similar to the attitude I've heard from entrepreneurs who run their own companies: They create a reputation for great value first, and then the monetary success follows. In a corporate job—in a company that values employees' contributions—money rewards come each year at the annual review. Setting yourself up to be in a great position at these reviews requires the kind of overachieving that Mylle is great at. By finding solutions to business problems, Mylle would ask for more money without actually asking.

When she started out as a computer programmer for GE in 1972, Mylle didn't know she'd stumbled onto a job with an entrepreneurial company. Really, GE wasn't all that entrepreneurial at the time by some people's reckoning. Mylle had a degree in education and psychology, an internship working with juvenile delinquents, and a short stint teaching gifted children, but she was seeking new challenges. Mylle became aware that GE was hiring, and she got an entry-level job at GE as a computer programmer.

Obviously, Mylle was not a traditional hire, or as she likes to say, "I think I was hired for entertainment value." But, seriously, Mylle probably got the job because she told the interviewer she would teach herself how to program computers. "I told them, 'If I can't learn, I'll quit before you ever have to fire me.'" That's a gutsy thing to say.

From the beginning, Mylle started off with that refreshing attitude: She would learn whatever she had to in order to accomplish her job. Little did she know, at the time, GE executives were going through some learning of their own. Jack Welch, who would become CEO in 1981, was shaking up the ranks. He'd nearly quit GE in 1961 when, as a young engineer, he felt stifled by the company's bureaucracy and underappreciated by his boss. When an executive persuaded him to stay, promising a small-company environment, Welch stayed on. As he outlines in his book, Jack: Straight from the Gut, Welch understood how frustrating it was to work in a bureaucracy, so he created an entrepreneurial, small-company atmosphere at the GE behemoth.

All Mylle knew was that in her job as a programmer, she would work on different aspects of GE's locomotive business. With youthful enthusiasm, Mylle cheerfully dug in to learn how to be a computer programmer. And with each problem she tackled and solved, she was asking for more challenges and more responsibility. Her style was to give value that was one step ahead of her paycheck, and then the paycheck—fueled by performance bonuses and raises—would constantly catch up with her. It might not work everywhere, but at the right company it can be a clever strategy.

Starting from Scratch

As a modest person, Mylle says her success at GE "had a lot to do with youth and stupidity." After dealing with juvenile delinquents, she says, programming computers just "didn't seem hard." Here she was, far from where she'd grown up in sunny Georgia, working at GE's location in Erie, Pennsylvania, where she was steeped in manufacturing and computers. Instead of being intimidated, Mylle says, "It was fabulous to learn." And what she learned was that "computers are just tools for getting results."

From the beginning, Mylle loved how computers could be used to track and map the business to be more and more efficient. At the time, the 1970s, technical people tended to get "put in corners by themselves," Mylle says. But Mylle wasn't in love with programming; she was more enthusiastic about how to use the technology to build locomotives. "I worked hard to relate technology to results," Mylle says. "The way you put the locomotive together was you brought in parts and moved the pieces through the factory. I got very good at figuring out how to do it better."

Throughout her first 7 years at GE, Mylle was part of the team that was battling to increase the company's market share in the locomotive industry. GE's strategy was relentless innovation that competitors couldn't keep up with. Thanks to hard work from people like Mylle, GE crowded out the competition by bringing market share up from 12 percent to 70 percent throughout the 1970s. There's even a book written about how the locomotive industry changed dramatically throughout the twentieth century, with GE being the winner.^[1]

^[1] Churella, Albert. From Steam to Diesel: Managerial Customs and Organizational Capabilities in the Twentieth Century American Locomotive Industry. Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey. 1998.

So Mylle got herself noticed. From her point of view, she was a good team player, tackling problems and pushing herself to learn new things along the way. But I have to emphasize how important it was that she worked for a company that valued the entrepreneurial approach. She didn't have to buck the system, like Bob MacDonald in the insurance industry (Chapter 14, "Reminisce About Your Future"), because GE executives were already shaking up the old ways of doing things—using new technology and an enlightened company culture. In Mylle's case, it was more important to be a team player and join the program.

Unfortunately, someone like Mylle—who says she never directly asked for a bonus or a raise—could have been eaten alive in a less innovative company culture. That's why when I tell Mylle's story, I keep mentioning you should choose your employer wisely. Look up case studies and research what companies are getting results. For instance, a case study of the locomotive industry by Albert Churella mentions that GE's managerial style was what won out over General Motors' more traditional culture. Both companies had access to the same technology, but GE's culture helped it adopt technology faster and with better results. The key to Mylle's success is tied to the fact that she was working for a company with a culture that recognized results and valued hard work.

Underestimating Obstacles

All around her at GE, Mylle saw change: new technology, new bosses, new ways of doing things. After all, her whole job at GE (as computer programmer and then systems analyst) was finding new ways of doing things. And all around her, Mylle saw the old guard of GE employees dismayed with all the change. "When I started at GE, there was still a sense of fraternity. People worked for one company for all those years," she says. "I was on the front end of the transformation. You learn a tough lesson, that it isn't secure." Mylle was beginning her career at a moment in history when the idea of working for one company all your life was giving way to today's reality: careers with a patchwork of different employers. Mylle learned early that if she could find new ways of doing things—find ways of getting over obstacles—she would always have a job, somewhere.

"I'll never design a nuclear power plant," Mylle says, "but can I figure out the dynamics, the drives, the markets." That's the kind of confidence she learned while analyzing systems at GE.

Mylle was willing to take chances when she hit obstacles—both in her day-to-day job and in her career advancement.

In her day-to-day job, for instance, one of the risks she took was to push for GE products to always be better than the competitors'. For instance, if her analysis found that a GE system could cut costs by 30 percent by using non-GE circuit breakers, she would work with her teams to improve the GE product to achieve equal if not greater efficiency than the competitors'. She would continue to support the company policy of using GE products while also finding ways to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

In her career, her way of approaching barriers was to ask for a challenge without asking for a raise. This is maybe what makes being an entrepreneur inside a corporation so different from being an entrepreneur on your own: You have to be a team player. Mylle says her way of getting ahead would go something like this: She would ask for the duties of the job above her—without the increase in salary. She would say, "You don't have to pay me for it, just give me the opportunity to show what I can do." Again, in a different kind of company this could backfire, leaving you with no free time and little salary. But at a place like GE, where performance bonuses and raises were handed out by merit, it worked great.

Mylle's volunteering to take charge of projects worked for her because being the one in charge—the person who is accountable for getting a job done—is the one who reaps the most benefit. After 7 years of programming and analyzing systems, Mylle was rewarded with a promotion to GE's corporate consulting business. She went from building better locomotives to working on all of GE's major businesses: nuclear, power distribution, factory automation. It's a good thing she saw change as positive because changes were coming.

Building Momentum—Sanely

Working in corporate consulting for GE, Mylle's work was pitted against big-league consultants such as McKinsey—so it was high-level competition. And it was gratifying when her team's analysis won out. There where hits and misses along the way, which Mylle is hesitant to talk about, even now, because of her great loyalty to GE. But Mylle learned that no matter what happened in her job, her security didn't count on always kicking a field goal.

"Security comes from within," says Mylle, who thrived in the high-pressure world of consulting. "Even though I did well in this environment, you can't take that for granted. My work is not who I am. Be very careful that you don't get that intertwined, that company is your identity. Psychologically that gets dangerous. People attach too much to their business." That, in a nutshell, is a powerful statement about how to get through corporate America without getting bogged down. And I'll bet it did more for Mylle than just keep her sane. Mylle's upbeat attitude made her likeable.

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell talks about what he calls connectors, people who help trends catch on. The way they do this is by having more acquaintances and friends than usual. For fun, he has a little test to figure out whether you are a connector: It's a simple list of names from the Manhattan phone book. As you read through the list of names, you note how many people you know who share the same last names. If you know more than 50 or so, you're a connector. I didn't give that test to Mylle, but if I did I'd bet she'd be a connector. That's because she sprinkled our conversation with names of people she'd met along the way who might fit in my book. It dawned on me as we talked that this was probably another reason for her success. Not only is Mylle modest, she's also upbeat and nice to talk to—you can tell she genuinely likes to help people in any way she can.

Throughout her career at GE, which included tenures in systems, manufacturing, sales, and marketing, Mylle kept asking for challenges—and mostly meeting them. And she kept her sunny disposition.

Taking the Next Step

As a schoolteacher-turned-computer-programmer, Mylle didn't just learn technical things at GE. She learned how to take risks and how to lead. "It was as simple as knowing when to jump and when to step out," Mylle says. Managing small groups of the company, she learned that "leading is not always telling people what to do. Managing is sometimes by example. It is sometimes by goal-setting, sometimes by energy level, and sometimes by doing the tough things."

One of the tough things was knowing when to look outside the company for advancement. In 1985, Mylle got an offer from BellSouth to put together its international business strategy. And she took the job. It was the opportunity of a lifetime; BellSouth had just been divested from AT&T through a federal antitrust action. BellSouth, no longer a part of AT&T or privy to its business plans, had to build its international business plans from scratch. For someone from GE, which had a huge international business, it was amazing to Mylle that the international business plan had to be built from scratch. But like she always did, Mylle dug into the job, and within a year she was president of BellSouth International.

After she reached that level of expertise, Mylle's success was pretty much guaranteed. She went on to senior management positions at Holiday Inn and Carlson Wagonlit Travel. Now she's owner and CEO of IBT, a company specializing in designing, building, and consulting for financial services and specialty retailers. But even if she hadn't risen to that level, she's proof that you can be an entrepreneur inside a huge corporation—and keep your sanity—if you learn how to impress the right people.

So as you think about Mylle's story, try to make comparisons to the company where you work now. Is your employer more like Bob McDonald's first job, where executives were segregated from the rest of the workforce—even using separate bathrooms? Or is your employer more like Mylle's, where even a beginning computer programmer—driven to work hard and find solutions—could rise through the ranks? Most employers are probably somewhere in between, so Mylle's power to ask (and receive) without asking can be a lesson to us all.