Christine Hefner Offers Advice to Students at Syracuse
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Del.icio.usCollege students can learn everything they need to from a book during their years in school. But how do they prepare for the real world once they graduate? When students are getting ready to head off in to the world of business, advice from someone who has been a key executive can be invaluable. Christine Hefner recently spoke to a group of students in Syracuse.
Hefner came to Syracuse to share what she’s learned via her journey at Playboy, and reflect on two decades of leading a multi-billion dollar international company.
Here are few pieces of advice Hefner offered to the packed auditorium of Syracuse University students:
Lose the jargon. “Try not to be either intimidated by or a captive of jargon. Even though it’s language, and language is about communication, it often exists actually to obfuscate, and to control power, and not to communicate.”
Don’t ever stop meeting people. “I don’t think you can know too many smart people. I don’t think you should ever stop meeting people. In the course of constantly trying to meet people, and constantly expanding my network, I met a person named Jim Clark who was the original founder of a company called Mosaic, which became Netscape, which is what turned the Internet into what we know as the Internet. And because I met him I was able to have a conversation about whether it was possible to take Playboy online, without simply turning the brand and the content over to a CompuServe and losing control of the brand and losing control of the creative commercial applications. And he said, because of his rich knowledge, ‘Why yes it is. I can build an infrastructure for you where people can simply type in ‘Playboy.com’ and they will be at your site.’”
Don’t ever stop trying to learn. “If you ever get to a point where you stop learning you will find your professional options and your personal satisfaction severely curtailed. Because this world is changing much too quickly.”
Read history. “If you do wind up in a position of leadership I would urge not to spend a lot of time reading books about leadership, which I find, in the main, a waste of time, and for sure if it’s got a number in the title. You can definitely skip those. Read history. I learned more about leadership reading about Abraham Lincoln than I ever learned reading The One-Minute Manager.”
Good advice is valuable, but only when you put it in to play. Students at Syracuse had a great opportunity to have an icon break down the fine points of being and remaining successful.
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Editor: Melissa Steele is a freelance writer and focuses her research on funding for higher education. She is a graduate of UNLV and endeavors to keep her readers up to date with the most relevant education information.