Mogul

You Are A Mogul, How to Do the Impossible, Do It Yourself, and Do It Now, by Tiffany Pham, Simon & Schuster 2018 

Tiffany Pham is a graduate of Yale and the Harvard Business School.

Is that enough?  Forget that Sheryl Sandberg, author of the entitled volume Lean In, and her real, better book Option B, praised Mogul as the #1 millennial platform. 

But pay attention to how Ms. Pham got there, did it – as a young Vietnamese she came to the US by way of France – no English skills – and became a leading millennial entrepreneur.  She’s an immigrant, a female Asian immigrant, and she is driven.

Some people are convinced that the path to success is about single-minded determination:  you see a goal and you hammer away at it until you achieve it.  That wasn’t my path, and it hasn’t been the path of most of the women in the mogul community.  This is, in part, because old career models are fading away.  The corporate ladder that was once a straight path up is now old and rusty…Most of us will still spend years of our lives working for other people.  And that is a wonderful opportunity… I always approached every job I took on as an opportunity to learn a skill set that would help me down the road.   Chapter 3, “Crush it in Corporate Life”

Pham’s book made me realize how far corporate women have come, from fighting the environment and always being the first (my challenge), to delivering and being visible, uncrushable, continually out-performing.  The sub-heads through this well-organized and easy to read book tell the story:

1.     Develop your skills

2.     Stay focused on the end goal

3.     Tips for accepting a job offer

4.     Kill it by over-delivering

5.     Developing your hustler mentality

6.     Discover your differentiator

7.     Become an “intrapreneur”

8.      Developing your entrepreneurial mind-set in the workplace

9.     Ask for what you want (because no one else will ask for you)

10.   Asking for a promotion,

 For many of us there are new challenges in this list of tasks, just as there were for Tiffany.  But what opportunities!  To think that all we have to do is perform, master new skills, be visible and aggressive, and keep doing it, wow, that’s a great change!