Every now and then, I read a business book that strikes me like a bolt of lightening and buy copies for people I work with. In the past, I gave copies of The Inmates are Running the Asylum to the IT team; Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers to the Operations team; and First, Break All the Rules to the managers who were my peers at the time. I’m not sure how people received first two books – thinking back, it was a little in-your-face to share the inmates book with my tech buddies and it doesn’t seem to have made any difference – but the other managers told me FBATR was just wrong, that their job as managers were to have all the ideas, know all the answers, tell people what to do, tell them what they were doing wrong and how to change it, they didn’t have time to babysit their employee’s emotions, and I should stop taking these business books seriously.¹

Now I am tempted to do it again, with Beyond Leaning In.

The concept of Sandberg’s Lean In is… well, bullsh*t. I agree that women should speak up, ask for plum assignments, and take a seat at the table. But do I believe that this will automatically get her the promotion, a raise, agency over her role, the power to change the world? No. It will not.

And too many people have used this phrase with mal-intent. One time, a senior executive called me to ask that my team haul her ovaries out of the fire after she had disregarded our direction on how to get her new product into the supply chain and it had blown up in her face. My team was exhausted. We had been working long hours to prep for a huge release that was a priority and were running entirely on passion and mega-doses of sugar. When I offered our help the following week, when we had more bandwidth – and after a much-needed break, when we would be fresh – she said quite indignantly that we should “Lean In.”

I hung up the phone on her.

It had become normal, at that point, for female senior executives at that establishment to miss deadlines, change everything at the last minute, rewrite documentation to within an inch of their lives, and then – when pointed out how this was going to require someone to cancel their dinner plans, extend their babysitter, work yet another 14-hour day, miss their deadline for something of higher priority – to tell the young woman that, if they wanted to get ahead, they needed to Lean In.

All that to say that the title of this book caught my eye. Oh god, I thought, what comes beyond leaning in, how much worse can this get? But the summary of the book reassured me a little so I downloaded a sample. And forgot about it.

On the train the other day, I was skimming through my samples, deleting things that didn’t live up to expectations and adding others to my wishlist, when I stumbled across this one. Okay, let’s give this a shot, I thought. Yet another business fable. Hmmm… page 1…

I read the next 25 pages with a growing sense of familiarity and dread. Imagine you’re cruising your favorite binge-streaming service, and a title catches your eye. You start watching and an actor that looks vaguely like you, who lives in a small New York apartment like yours, is sitting in a chair that needs reupholstering like yours does, drinking Syrah from a wine glass that is marked with depth-lines indicating deadlines for major projects (just like the one gifted to you by your team), when her cat that looks just like your cat knocks the glass over and, when she reaches down to pick it up, she sees, reflected in the broken glass, a man in a mask, standing just behind her with a knife.

Wouldn’t you look over your shoulder?

This fable felt so familiar to me. When I got to my destination that night, I downloaded the rest of the book. And, when I had time over the weekend, I read the rest of it, my sense of unease and dread continuing page by page.

I feel like I’ve been here before.

The story starts with a female CEO for a small firm, who has worked her whole life to open doors for other women. She and her firm have won accolades for their work in this area. Business is tough – sales are down – and she is under pressure from her board to fix things. Then her CPO – a talented woman whom the CEO has personally mentored – gives four weeks notice and refuses to explain why. How is the CEO supposed to turn things around when her CPO has just given notice?

The CPO has been mentoring another talented woman as her succession plan, a woman who has been put in charge of two new product launches. The CEO and CFO are reluctant to promote that woman, however, because the responsibility of taking on the entire product team may be too much for her – she may struggle with just launching the two new products, much less the 7 relaunches that need to happen to right the ship. So they bring in a guy from the outside, a more experienced manager who the CFO knows from his club.

The story follows this guy, the woman who got passed over for the promotion, a cohort of younger hires, an HR manager who is responsible for culture change and training, and the stories of the CEO and CFO as they navigate the horror that is the following 12 months.

The story is filled with missteps, good intentions, bad intentions, desperation, assumptions, secrets, glad-handing, and “it is what it is” moments, as layer after layer of what the CEO thought was working are peeled back to reveal that all is not well in Denmark.

Two of the scenes that stand out in my memory – although there are many:

First Scene

The CEO and CFO – who graduated from Wharton together – do a joint presentation at a fund-raiser for a non-profit that they support. During the ensuing cocktail party, the two of them are chatting with the CEO’s rebellious Millennial daughter, when they are approached by a slick young man. He introduces himself to the CFO as also having attended Wharton and – surprise – states he is a legacy and perhaps the CFO knew his father. The CFO demurs, introduces the CEO, and says perhaps she knew the father, having graduated at the same time. The young man ignores the CEO, and starts name-dropping other men whom the CFO might know.

After they get rid of the young man, the CEO’s daughter calls her out: wasn’t she angry that the young man had ignored her? Why didn’t she say something? The CEO states that you can’t let these things anger you; you have to rise above; you have to let it roll off your back; if you get angry, they win; if you let yourself get angry every time it happens, you’ll just be angry all the time…

And you realize she has been saying this throughout the book, she says it on auto-pilot, she says it reflexively, she is in denial that, although CEO, she is still putting up with the same BS she has put up with all her life and, by putting up with it, she is accepting it in others. And, based on her daughter’s reaction, she said it at home the whole time she was setting an example for her kid.

She has been, and is, tacitly endorsing men dismissing her because she is a woman.

And that’s the problem at her organization.

She doesn’t see it anymore.

Second Scene

The other scene, and I won’t go into details, is when a trio of young women take over a product meeting, a meeting usually useless because the senior men in the meeting use it as a chance for sword-fighting with their d*cks. The meeting is described by a young man who is an ally for these women – and, at the same time, finds himself benefiting from the male dominance of the meeting. At first he is surprised, then appalled, then impressed and engaged by watching the women control the room and repurpose the meeting for the benefit of the organization, not for the stroking of their egos.

Now I’m not saying – and this book is not saying – that this is women over men. I’ve sat through waaaaay too many meetings where the competitive egos dominating the room from either end of the table were women.

And that’s part of the point of this book.

The current management model – as developed in the past, when the working world was run by and for OWGs – is not working. Men are unhappy – god knows they tell us that often enough – and women are unhappy. It’s not working for anyone.

When people complain about coming into the office and decline to attend your lunchtime employee engagement events and take off early instead of attending after-work happiness hours, this is what they’re telling you: your old-fashioned, competitive, command and control, bullsh*t is not working. It’s not working for POC, it’s not working for white women, and it’s not working for white men either. Just look at the number of news stories about young white men who are failing to thrive: they don’t graduate from high school, they don’t go to college, they don’t get employed in jobs that will lead them into the future. They are opting out.

And the problem isn’t that more women are graduating and getting jobs. The problem is that the system is broken for everyone.

It’s been years since I bought multiple copies of a business book and handed them out at work. But it’s time. And, in the back of every copy I buy, I’m going to post a sticky-note with three words:

Pay. This. Forward.

The revolution is on!

1. Later these same ladies told me I should read Good to Great. What BS. ↩︎