From the #1 New York Times bestselling “high priestess of French lady wisdom” ( USA Today ) comes every woman’s guide to navigating the world of work, living the good life, and savoring every minute of it. Mireille Guiliano, internationally bestselling author of French Women Don’t Get Fat and former senior executive for Veuve Clicquot, uses her distinctive French woman’s philosophy and style to share lively lessons, stories, and helpful hints from her experiences at the front lines and highest echelons of the business world. Guiliano offers every reader the practical advice she needs to make the most of work without ever losing sight of what is most important: feeling good, facing challenges, getting ahead, and maximizing pleasure at every opportunity. Mireille Guiliano is the bestselling author of French Women Don't Get Fat, French Women For All Seasons , and Women, Work & the Art of Savoir Faire . Born and raised in France, she is married to an American and lives most of the year in New York and Paris. She is the former President and CEO of Clicquot, Inc. Women, Work & the Art of Savoir Faire Business Sense & Sensibility By Mireille Guiliano Atria Copyright © 2010 Mireille Guiliano All right reserved. ISBN: 9781416589204 1 LIFE IS LIVED IN EPISODES AND STAGES In just over two months? time, I was going to start my dream job: translator at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France. Then chance or fate intervened. Six months earlier, my first serious position after college as a translator-interpreter and small-projects manager in the Paris office of a Swedish company had ended abruptly when the office was closed during one of those periodic tough economic times that leads to downsizing. I had worked there more than a year and was given a bit of severance pay. Quite a bonanza for a girl in her twenties. And it got better. I needed a job, of course, and that led me to set my sights on the Council of Europe, which for young and innocent moi was the ultimate employer on my radar screen. I aced the qualifying exam and was offered a position as a translator starting the next session, in the fall. So, in the meantime, I used my severance pay to travel to America and Greece and on the spur of the moment took a last-minute discounted American Express weekend to Istanbul. On a bus from the airport to the hotel there, a handsome fellow with longish curly hair, blue eyes, and a deep tan said to me in French, ?Vous ?tes tr?s intelligente de voyager avec un p?tit sac.?? (You are very smart to travel so light). I always travel light, but in this case it was because I had left my suitcase back in Athens. I figured he was Turkish. He wasn?t. He was an American from New York who had seen the same discounted trip from Athens to Istanbul. He became my companion for the next few days, and then for another few days back in Athens, and then for another few days, and then I was hopelessly in love. We wanted to continue our relationship, but he had to return to America, where he was completing his Ph.D. I went back to France. For the next weeks I faced what turned out to be the most important decision of my life. A classic: the job, the man, the city, the country? Familiar with it? The country, the city, the man, the job. The man or the job?the job or the man? Forget all my previous planning and dreaming, I chose the man and New York, my husband and home now for more than thirty years. I never took up my early dream of working at the Council of Europe. So much for planning, in business or in life. Lesson learned. Things happen. Opportunities are often unpredictable. Life is lived in episodes and stages. Episodes because they are roughly self-contained and somewhat arbitrary, at least as they relate to time and place. Stages because they evolve out of one another and are linear and in many cases inevitable, like adolescence or one?s first professional position. Business, too, is lived in episodes and stages, and it has a sometimes cruel way of disarming our passions and shrugging off some of our most prized abilities as commonplace or irrelevant. PURSUING ONE?S GIFTS One stage in my life began when I was a teenager in Eastern France and discovered a passion for languages?my native French, increasingly important English, and old-world German, then the preeminent first language in Europe (though no one outside Germany wanted to admit it). When we are good at something?and I was very good at the study of languages?aren?t we proud and motivated to pursue it and encouraged to do so by others? Sure. People who are good at music, dance, or athletics, for instance, fill their early years pursuing their gifts and pleasures, perhaps even becoming world-class performers or nearly so, and some even turn professional. But generally not for long. My interest in language and culture led me to become a high school exchange student outside Boston, then a college student in Paris, a