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Excerpts from Cracking the Corporate Code

Sy Green, too, felt the profound isolation of being "the first" and "the only" when he began a training program at Chubb's New York City headquarters about the same time. Chubb was viewed as the 'Tiffany' of the insurance industry and had a very conservative reputation even within a conservative industry. All of the leaders were Ivy League, particularly Harvard, Princeton and Yale. So this move was a great leap for Green, who came from a small college in Ohio not far from his hometown, with his high school sweetheart.

His starting place in the corporation was above Trotter's - he was a management trainee - and his strategy for dealing with his isolation was appropriately different. In his mind, he turned it into a list of advantages.

"I had advantages kids today don't have. First of all it was just me, so who am I a threat to? No one. Mr. Chubb made the decision to hire, me, and I'm sure he made sure his leaders were committed to supporting me. My wife and I were even included in socializing with my peers. I got a lot of exposure that helped my early development. I also think I might have been better off being as naive as 1 was, because things were happening that I didn't know about. You can't care or worry about things you don't know about or have no control over. Kids today come in knowing so much, and they worry about it all."

Green was well aware of the downside of being the first. "It's terrible to be the center of so much attention, with so much riding on your every move." But he added a critical skill to that perception: he could look at the full picture, decide where he fit in and where he did not, and then identify areas of advantage, even in isolation.