NAKED IN THE BOARDROOM: A CEO Bares Her Secrets So You Can Transform Your Career

Wolaner rose from office temp to become president and CEO of Sunset Publishing before moving on to write, consult and serve on private corporate and nonprofit boards. Her own stories, and anecdotes from other achievers, are the basis for this chatty instruction manual for the distaff up-and-coming, which begins with the predictable assertion that women are generally different from men. The following chapters exhort readers to burn their career plans, listen to their guts, learn by example, benefit from smart moves, recover from bad ones, hire and fire well and manipulate situations to their advantage. Eighty-one "Naked Truths" punctuate her upbeat tale of mostly serendipitous and intuition-driven maneuvers. These aphorisms range from the obvious ("Return phone calls and emails") to the dubious ("If you undo a bad decision quickly, it doesn't count"). Sidebars labeled "Stripped-Down Wisdom" address corporate basics like how to dress, how to fire and how to cope as a working mother. In "Baring It," successful women recount their biggest mistakes and the lessons learned. Despite the book's intrusive theme of nudity, Wolaner gives some genuinely helpful advice, but often overplays the roles of ambition, networking and gut instinct at the expense of expertise, competence and plain hard work. (Mar.)