April 1, 2009: Spark on the CBC.
November 20, 2008: I recorded this Marketplace segment back in early September. Thought they’d decided not to run it, but no! Happy surprise when it finally aired.
October 25, 2008: The Bat Segundo Show.
September 23, 2008: What a way to make a living.
August 19, 2008: Seeing my photo attached to this latest Marketplace commentary makes me wish I’d sprung for better powder. Face is reflecting a lot of light.
August 16, 2008: Says Donna Nebenzahl of The Gazette (Montreal): “[S]ometimes, great advice comes from the strangest places, like the odd little book that crossed my desk the other day, titled How to Be Useful: A Beginner’s Guide to Not Hating Work…. In one chapter, former book editor Megan Hustad managed the astounding feat of channeling points of view on the workplace offered by the ambitious Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl.”
August 14, 2008: A nice write-up on 800-CEO-READ. (You may have to scroll down for it. Here’s a snippet: “…show[s] how to restore courtesy in your work and your organization, and move up in the world while doing so…a refreshing take on business.”
August 12, 2008: I say way too much to a reporter from The New York Observer.
July 28, 2008: From the Las Vegas Business Press: “Finally, career strategies for an office newbie… Many workplace improvement books direct managers to whip staffs into shape. Raise the bar! Win now! Forward march! Try our tactics, and, whatever mantras you mouth will work, fail-safe, resistance-free. Trouble is, this approach suggests people are as simple and compliant as cardboard cutouts. Simplistic tactics almost never work with complicated people, Hustad argues. And everyone is complicated, she adds…. Like a pin-wielding kid in a balloon shop, Hustad uses her insightful little book to burst workplace-attitude myths.”
July 27, 2008: I’m typing this update from a pizzeria in Sofia, Bulgaria, and so can’t vouch for the accuracy of this news, but star Houghton Mifflin publicist Patrice Taddonio tells me Canadian newsweekly Maclean’s has published the phrase “Hustad manages to be useful and amusing.” Whether this is from a longer review, I don’t yet know, and it’s quite possible that the full passage reads something like, “How to Be Useful barely rises above the limitations of its bankrupt genre, but through sheer pluck and some endearingly clumsy intellectual tap dancing, Hustad manages to be useful and amusing.” In other words, don’t swallow short book jacket blurbs — much like you shouldn’t trust — never, not fully — those movie ads sprinkled with “Brilliant!” and “Pure…entertainment!” and “I laughed!,” especially when the only critics quoted are from WKRP in Cincinnati and a Fox affiliate in a town — and state — you’ve never heard of.
June 25, 2008: More affection for a local girl gone…somewhere else. This in the Minneapolis City Pages. I enjoyed this interview, and the reporter was whipsmart and pleasant and everything else one wishes for in an interviewer, but something about the editing of this piece rubs me the wrong way. Many thoughts were abbreviated; I don’t sound quite so clipped in real life. I mean, not when I’m in a good mood, I don’t. Anyhow, it’s of no consequence but it reminded me of how much gets communicated by the rhythms of our speech alone. Ambiguity and openmindedness and nuance — all good things, in my book — are understood through long sentences, commas, and frequent pauses.
June 15, 2008: “A sharp witty book brimming with advice,” says the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
June 5, 2008: The think: lab blog adds it to Self-Imposed Summer Reading List #1. “A great re-think of why ‘intellectual’ types bah-humbug ’success’ or ‘motivational’ literature often found in the business section of the bookstore, when perhaps much of what causes us to ‘fail’ in our work settings could be minimized if we took stock in over 150 years of advice for organizational employees,” writes Christian Long.
June 3, 2008: From Utne Reader’s “Great Writing“section: “Hustad’s career counseling comes at a fortuitous time for the under-30 set entering the workforce and struggling to find their niche, while their older colleagues wonder, sometimes bitterly, how to best manage coworkers in this generation.”
June 3, 2008: I dropped in on Martha Stewart Morning Living Radio. Whew. Intense.
May 30, 2008: Kai Ryssdal has spoken my name. I can die now. Here’s a bit from American Public Media’s Marketplace.
May 28, 2008: January Magazine introduces me to the term “marketing gewgaws.” I like this phrase; I’ll use it.
May 27, 2008: “An engaging blend of prescription and cultural history,” says the Washington Post.
May 24, 2008: From The Guardian: “[A] book that presents itself as a guide to workplace success but that is really a (frequently hilarious) meditation on the notion of ambition…. We could all learn something, she suggests, from the much-mocked American ’success literature’ of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — books including [Napoleon] Hill’s, and Emily Post’s etiquette guides, and others with titles such as Getting On In The World, or Pushing To The Front, an 1890s bestseller.”
May 22, 2008: The Save the Assistants interview.
May 21, 2008: More Q&A, in which my rambling non-sequiturs, relayed over the phone, approximate the (sometimes) frustrating experience of talking to me in person. This one from Newsweek.
May 19, 2008: Craig Silverman from the Globe and Mail (Toronto) made me laugh. Money quote: “Most people wouldn’t think that Dale Carnegie, Benjamin Disraeli and Paris Hilton belong in the same book; but they aren’t Megan Hustad.”
May-June 2008: “A Cynic’s Guide to Success.” Minnesota magazine — the house publication of the U of M alumni association — features HTBU and an interview. Full text here.
May 2008: Glamour magazine determines it’s “full of timeless bits of mood-boosting wisdom.”
April 30, 2008: New York magazine’s Agenda recommends it.
‘Success Lit’ Distilled for the Meta Age: Tucked somewhere in the works of Helen Gurley Brown, Donald Trump, Dale Carnegie, and others are words of wisdom that might help in your career. Whatever! Don’t comb through all those; just rely on Megan Hustad. The former book editor immersed herself in “success literature” and distilled her findings into the slim, doodle-covered…[etc.]
April 26, 2008: The Chicago Tribune makes it an Editor’s Choice. “[T]his smart little book is a wry new entry in the burgeoning literature of the new economy’s workplace. There’s great advice.”
April 15, 2008: I get analytical about self-improvement for the Hartford Courant.
April 15, 2008: Publishing industry blog GalleyCat:
Hustad isn’t just interested in cataloging office bloopers and culling the highlights of How To Win Friends And Influence People, though. Her thesis is at once ‘duh’ and revolutionary: She posits that “middle-class young people have been suckered into adopting a cynical detachment that they can’t afford,” that we “get pushed towards a mindset that privileges being cute and clever, plugging away, and uh, yeah, that’s about it.” Also, she says, we’ve been fed the dangerous misinformation that “just being ourselves” is a good thing in an office environment. The solution: We must reclaim the word “ambitious,” which has become something of an epithet, and recasting it as a positive description of people who hope to actually enjoy their working lives. It seems obvious, but the thing is, no one else is saying this.
Long story short: This is the book you’ll want to travel back in time and press into the hands of your 22-year-old self.
April 1, 2008: The American Library Association’s Booklist ponders How to Be Useful and determines “[t]he writing is bright, brassy, and only occasionally awkward or annoying.” Terrific. I’ll take “only occasionally” irritating any day.
March 9, 2008: I get excited about phone calls for the New York Times. “The Office Phone Call Was Music to the Ears.”
January 2, 2008: I was going to ignore this because it struck me as best ignored. (It’s actually a piece about the article below. Meta!) Then I reread George Saunders’s magnificent essay “The Braindead Megaphone” and realized some good might come out of pointing this piece out, laughing, encouraging others to laugh at it, and then getting all self-righteous and moralizing about it! So here we go.
The comical bit is its tagging me as a twenty-something editorial assistant. (I’m neither.) But let’s cut New York’s Intelligencer some slack — it’s a gossip column and no one looks there for facts. Perhaps they were aiming for a more fundamental truth — like calling out a slew of “unapologetic self-promoters.” Here’s the choicest line:
“What about, even Ivanka ‘I’m a 26-year-old Wharton grad blonde heiress and I might as well have fun with that by posing half-naked with a drill’ Trump and her blond real-estate gobbling boyfriend, Observer owner Jared Kushner? Not to mention Megan Hustad herself, whose Website, meganhustad.com, sports a 600-word bio.”
Oh my, I made the same paragraph as Ivanka Trump. So perhaps my 600 words was and is indulgent, but the swipe misses the point: maintaining a web presence is not optional if you hope to maintain happy relations with your publisher. (Hi Houghton Mifflin marketing folks! How’m I doing?) And you could also say that whip-it hits of conjecture are really the coin of the internet realm, and these writers probably have quotas to fill.
But it rankled nonetheless because I worked hard on this book. Writing it was damn difficult for me, and I lived very modestly while doing so. I wanted it to be accurate, fair, wise, helpful, lively (hard to do, when you’re also aiming for fair and accurate!), and I made many sacrifices to get it done (as did my editor, and her two small boys — OK, I’m kidding; yes, she’s got kids but the point is…not a lot of cynicism crept into this production, and … and … and every time a book sells, an angel gets its wings). So whoever writes this column, Call me sometime! I’ll invite you over, I’ll cook, uh, lentils for dinner, and perhaps we can talk about life for a while, and how to live it. (Here, by the way, the last few lines from “The Braindead Megaphone”: “…keep reminding ourselves that representations of the world are never the world itself. Turn that Megaphone down, and insist that what’s said through it be as precise, intelligent, and humane as possible.”)
January 1, 2008: A nice piece — about How to Be Useful and similar books — by Leon Neyfakh in the New York Observer. “As Ennui Strikes ‘Creative Class,’ Self-Help Beckons.”
PLUS (in no particular order) A HANDFUL OF RADIO SHOWS:
Traders Nation Radio w/ Kurt Schemers
WIP-AM/Philadelphia w/ Peter Solomon
Cable Radio Network w/ Jack Roberts
Sirius Satellite “Broadminded” w/ Christine and Molly
XM Radio “Martha Stewart Morning Living”
WXMX-FM/Memphis TN w/ Drake and Zeke
KYMO-AM&FM/St. Louis MO w/ KYMO news
WXRX-FM/Rockford IL w/ Terry Turren
KCMN-AM/Colorado Springs CO w/ Tron Simpson
WATD-FM/Marshfield-Boston MA w/ Rob Hakala
CJAD-AM/Montreal Quebec w/ Tommy Schnurmacher
KNEWS Radio/Palm Springs CA w/ John McMullen
Santa Fe Public Radio w/ Journey Home, NPR Affiliate
WRVC-AM/Huntington WVA w/ Jean Dean
WCBQ-WHNC-AM/Raleigh NC w/ Dr. Alvin Jones
ABC Radio Network (national) w/ Richard & Lori
ESPN 950 Philadelphia w/ David Madee
CKLW-AM Windsor/Detroit Sunday Morning Live w/ Arms Bumanlag
WHAM Rochester NY w/ Beth & Chet
KPAM Portland OR w/ Bob Miller in the Morning