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In the press coverage, I'm either portrayed as a hard-bitten bitch, pardon my language, or a superficial salesperson. But that's not what I choose to focus on.

Day in and day out, I see people who had to overcome a lot frequently deliver more than people who haven't. As part of this internal compass thing, whatever people think about you, prejudices they have, those things are their problem. Don't make it your problem.

You will find that the most important decisions you make are probably the ones you make alone. 

There are moments in life when you have to come down and decide something. Then it comes down to all your experience you have and all the data you've gathered and all the judgment.

Have your own sense of where you want to go in life. If you start making decisions on the basis of conventional wisdom or the chatter in the hall, generally speaking you'll make the wrong decision.

You have to work hard to stay connected. You have to really work hard to be sure the environment is one that tells you the bad news. Every meeting becomes an opportunity to suck up, not tell the truth. You have to reward people who bring in the bad news.

One reason I have put confidence in people is that every person can lead. Leadership isn't about a title, statistics, how to report your budget. It's having a positive impact.

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"She would get on the same track with you, and listen, making you feel that what you had to say was the most important thing in the world." ///

"I never thought Jackie got enough credit for her leadership qualities. I wanted to find out what her challenges were, what her mistakes were and how she overcame them," the author said.

"When a woman is glamorous, it often stops there. With Jackie, it stopped with her big sunglasses and jet-setting image. But there were a lot of brains under that pillbox hat."

A voracious reader who took on as many as 10 books a week, Onassis worked as a book editor during the years she spent in New York City following President Kennedy's assassination.

As Jacqueline Kennedy, the author said, Onassis changed America's unsophisticated world image with culture, food, fashion and music, and restored tattered parts of the White House to make it "a living history lesson."

In private, Onassis reversed her "very negative self-image" from a childhood filled with a torrent of criticisms from her mother, Janet Auchincloss.

"Her mother told her that she was not feminine, that her hair was too frizzy, that her size 10 feet were too big, her shoulders too broad and her eyes set too wide apart," Flaherty said.

Jackie's response was to grow into an icon of style and social allure, coached by her father, Jack Bouvier, whose seductive energy broke women's hearts -- and inspired his daughter. It was from him that she learned to become the social light beam.

"To be noticed in a crowd, he advised, walk to the center of a room, put a dazzling smile on your face, and keep your chin up. Don't let your eyes dart around the room," Flaherty writes in the book. 

"Never act as if you're looking for someone; they should be looking for you."

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***Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever. Women Don't Ask: 
Negotiation and the Gender Divide

Why do men still make more money than women? The answer begins in the playroom, say Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, authors of Women Don't Ask...

"Girls learn from the toys they receive that it is important for them to take care of others - bathing and dressing their doll 'babies,' serving 'tea' to friends, preparing food and cleaning up after meals," Babcock and Laschever write. 

"Boys learn from their transportation toys that they can move freely through the world and from their construction toys that they can define the earth around them by constructing buildings, roads and complicated machinery."

Not only do women learn early not to ask for too much, they also feel more anxiety about negotiation. 

Babcock, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon, conducted an Internet survey that found 2.5 times more women than men felt "a great deal of apprehension" about negotiating. 

Men described negotiation as "fun" and "exciting"; women said it is "scary." ....

What can we do? Babcock and Laschever found that negotiation training helps women set higher goals and reduces their anxiety.

Managers and others in positions of power should try to become more aware of what may be automatic responses to women's attempts to negotiate. 

Interestingly, though, research shows women are better than men at two kinds of negotiation: asking on behalf of others and cooperative bargaining to find win-win solutions. 

This is important, Babcock and Laschever say, because those often lead to better solutions and stronger relationships than the adversarial male style.

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"It took me a while to figure out that what might not be important to me might seem very important to many men and women across America."

People were deeply ambivalent about women in positions of leadership, she says, and in an era of changing roles for the sexes, "I was America's Exhibit A. The scrutiny was overwhelming." ...

"I did what I often do when faced with adversity," she says. "I threw myself into a schedule so hectic that there was no time for brooding." ...

The former first lady says she threw herself into her duties partly to escape all the troubles of her eight years with President Clinton in the White House. 

"Eleanor Roosevelt once said, 'If I feel depressed, I go to work,'" she writes. "That sounded like good advice to me."

**Lynda Obst
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To wit, Paramount Chairman Sherry Lansing, the foremost of the great dames of Hollywood, recalls her expectations at the beginning of her career: "[I]f we sought careers," she tells Gregory, "we could become a nurse or teacher. 

"They are wonderful professions but they were practically the only ones open to women. I sort of accepted the fact that a woman would never run a company."

Now she has run Paramount for an unprecedented 10 years and is still standing. Yet women all over Hollywood are in retreat.

Pop culture indicates that this is not just a local backlash -- indeed, it is endemic to the culture at large -- but like everything else in Hollywood's value system, it is most bald and cravenly unapologetic here. 

I first noticed the sea change when I read Drew Barrymore -- a woman I know to be smart and ambitious -- deny with horror that she was a feminist. The word suddenly had an icky old-fashioned quality that she took for granted. It stunned me.

But this is a female-driven backlash from formerly driven women or their proteges, all under the approving gaze of the men in power, denouncing the life of the Big Career. 

These are the newly chic stay-at-home mothers who shine at their children's schools' fund-raising but are free enough for a manicure in the afternoon.

Women in Hollywood are dropping like flies. Off to the suburbs to bury the hatchet of the dream career and erect the white picket fence we once saw as jail. Say goodbye to striving for success. 

Say hello to striving for status, for safety, for the comfort of the husband's financial umbrella, so that only he will feel the tremors and dread of the fray. 

We're off to redecorate, to wax -- the floor, whatever. It was far more horrible out there than anyone led us to expect. Where have all the brave women gone?

At Woodhull, we won't tolerate it. We expect women to feel fear and anxiety, and talk about it -- and then get over it. 

What's fascinating is that a lot of our graduates say that the best thing about their Woodhull experience is that we have higher expectations of them than the real world does, and that they didn't want to go back to their ordinary lives, where expectations were so low.