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people don’t talkabout these things. The body is but a shell. It’s the mind and the heart that count.”
    Hiding who you are is not a value in the information age. And, like it or not, despite all the ways you think you can be anonymous on the Internet, hiding is increasingly harder to pull off when social media makes it possible to share parts of our lives, and the lives of others, in intimate ways: family photos, movies we watch, celebratory milestones, wins, losses, likes, dislikes and ordinary moments. The more we share the more we invite others to connect, and connections are key to building networks in the personal and professional spheres of our lives; networks, as we all know, are the breeding grounds of opportunity. The ability to be yourself, and show the world all the ways you are who you are, has become something to trade on. It might make you uncomfortable or wistful for walls, but in the web-driven selfie world, there is a perceived value in a certain vanity; it’s not a character flaw, it’s a commodity.
    Mommy bloggers have made small fortunes reviewing products that feature in their families’ lives. Job interviews are becoming desk-top auditions. (Jennifer Lawrence actually landed her Oscar-winning role in Silver Linings Playbook with a Skype audition from her parents’ home in Kentucky.) Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat create celebrities bigger than movie stars, and not just the Justin Bieber variety. Consider Michelle Phan, a struggling young student and waitress in Florida, who uploaded how-to makeup videos, attracted more than a million views, got a $1 million contract from Google to create more; four million clicks later, she found herself sponsored by L’Oréal with her own line of cosmetics.

    Standing out amid the world’s noise and clutter, online and off, can be an advantage, a competitive edge. And after a few bruising weeks, that’s how I came to see my own story at the CBC. Fighting dated perceptions that success had to look a certain way, or that smart and serious had to mean bland, was a key battle in the war to modernize the network. At HGTV and the Food Network, I’d seen how we could create domestic “stars” in Canada, but it did mean bucking convention and then taking on that all-too-Canadian urge to clip its tall poppies. To succeed I had to cultivate a bit of a red-carpet sensibility at the public broadcaster, to recast it as a place where hits were made, stardom was possible and women could still be “more than just our dresses.”

[ II ]
    Next, Buy into Your People
    A COUPLE OF YEARS INTO MY TIME at Alliance Atlantis, I organized a field trip. The executives from HGTV and the Food Network were, as you might imagine, passionate about helping people live their best lives and were expert in the ways of duck confit, Le Creuset cookware and elegant decor. Increasingly, the program pitches that caught their discerning eye reflected the best in taste and style, shows that would elevate the experience and expertise of the audience. They were aimed at people who had all the right knives and all the right pans and all the right tastes. The lives they presented were exquisite, the locales even more so. I asked, “But what about the people watching in Moncton who only have time to shop for their potatoes and their pillows at Walmart? How do they relate to Fine Cooking and World of Interiors when they’re reading Canadian Living ?” We had focused so hard on presenting the best, most exotic and aspirational shows that we were at risk of building a dreamland that depressed rather than inspired.
    Without a real research budget to prove my instincts about our target audience, I decided to take the networks’ executiveson a train ride out of Toronto and as far west into suburbia as a GO ticket could carry us. I had a real estate agent meet us at the other end and show us around four houses for sale—two-storey family