Our Turn (11 page)

Sandberg makes a case that, essentially, women are not reaching professional heights because we don't really know how to try. Her focus is mostly on what women are not doing, or not doing well: negotiating, tooting their own horns and so on. There's a lot of truth to what she says, but I think it's better to focus on what women do right and how what we bring to the table is crucial for corporate success moving forward. This past May, as I was finishing this book, Sandberg's forty-seven-year-old husband and the father of their two children, David Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMonkey—a man she described in her book as a true partner, her best friend and love of her life—died in a tragic accident during a family vacation in Mexico. It was a brutal reminder of the fragility of life and of what truly matters. In moments like these, it feels like what matters most is creating the life that fits each of us best—whatever our backgrounds, ambitions or definitions of success—so that we live every day without regret.

Isn't it true that our ultimate, seemingly elusive goal as women, and men, is to find fulfilling ways to work that still allow room for pleasure, personal happiness and loving relationships? Succeeding shouldn't mean having to work ever harder just for the sake of “getting ahead.” Many of us have
no need to scale the heights of the corporate world to feel successful; definitions of a life well lived are personal.

That said, there are definitely times in a career when putting your shoulder into it is critical—yes, as in
leaning in
. And as women, we need to keep our heads up enough to recognize when those important times appear. Taking the right chances to distinguish yourself, show initiative and make a contribution can happen anywhere along a career path. Those opportunities don't always lead instantly to a promotion or a raise. But they become moments that matter and pay important dividends down the line; every time a woman establishes herself as a leader, she builds important professional and personal capital. Eventually that capital translates into professional flexibility, giving you greater control over how, and even when, you work.

I don't always juggle my work, business travel and home life with the deftness people assume I must, given my responsibilities and accomplishments. Balls do get dropped. I forget to check the kids' homework. I'm forced to reschedule a meeting because I took on too much in one day. The saving grace is that my position affords me the luxury of flexibility. I am not watching the clock on a double shift, worried that I am going to be fifteen minutes late for the daycare pick-up time and not only collect a tired and hungry toddler but be charged $35 extra. For many parents, and especially women, that is working life. And I'm in awe of every day people in such situations who keep pulling it off.

As Anne-Marie Slaughter noted in her
Atlantic
feature, the ability to have a flexible work schedule depends largely on the career path you choose. In my own case, I never could
have been that go-to parent when my daughters were young if I had not first invested several years of effort into building my career. I wouldn't have had the same freedom if I was still working as an assisstant. I am grateful every day for the flexibility a job like mine allows. It's why I advise younger women to take stock of why they are afraid of taking the next career step. What looks like a more demanding job may bring with it the flexibility a lower-level job doesn't allow, and in some ways life may become a little easier.

Like it or not, the work world is still, and will always be, a results-driven realm. Maybe that's where the saying “work hard, play hard” comes from. My performance gave me the freedom to stay home when I needed to, or spend a blurry-eyed morning in the pumpkin patch. The good news is that with companies hungrier than ever for a skill set women can bring to the table, the more opportunities there are for women to show how they can lead and earn the power to work, play and live by their own rules.

And this is important, because along with the elusive “have-it-all” brass ring we've been primed to capture, the other concept that does a disservice to parents everywhere is the idea that you should strive for work–life balance. You may as well hunt unicorns. The very word “balance” suggests that somehow you can give equal importance and time to all corners of your life at the same time. The person who loses most in that equation is you; if exhaustion doesn't get to you, the guilt will.

The idea of balance doesn't reflect how the world works, or how we truly spend our time. It's not about achieving balance, it's about flow. We swing from one priority to the next,
pushing hard at work and then pulling back to be with family. How hard you push and pull depends entirely on the moment. There are high-pressure times on the job when deadlines loom, trips need to be taken, or tough decisions have to be made, and you work flat out for a long stretch without making it home for dinner. But there are other times when a sick child or parent or spouse, say, or simply a much-needed vacation, takes precedence over any job. The key is to aim for a career in which you can earn the freedom to achieve work–life flow.

In the next chapter, I'll explore how technology is not just changing the way business works, but profoundly altering the way people work. It's allowing women, and men, to manage the conflicting demands of career and family in ways that were never before possible, allowing us to multi-task, virtually be many places at once and change roles in a click.

Now we ditch that superhero cape for a really good smartphone.

[ VII ]

No Walls and No Corner Offices

IN TALKS I GIVE ON THE
new opportunities for women in leadership, I often include a reminder of the old guy in the corner office: a slide of the evil Mr. Burns from
The Simpsons
. The sight of Homer's boss—obsessed with inflating his own power and forever forgetful of his employees' names—never fails to spark a roomful of laughter. It's not just that the old stereotypes of corporate leadership Mr. Burns represents are passé, they are
so
passé, they're a joke.

Not that long ago, leading by decree was the norm. In the golden age of industrialization, there was a big boss on high and an army of general managers to do his bidding. And it was
his
bidding, as it was a golden age of patriarchy too. Each employee had a defined role with specific tasks, all of which were assigned and assessed by his manager. Employees showed up to the same place at the same time, and the pattern of a working day was more predictable than the weather. What customers knew about your product or service was
basically what you chose to tell them. It was the heyday of hierarchy represented by a primitive command-and-control culture probably best summed up by an infamous complaint from the legendary Henry Ford: “Why is it that every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?”

Managing became a little more complicated through the second half of the twentieth century. Competition went global, markets were deregulated, and along came new industries, companies and some seventy million Baby Boomers. According to a 2002 article, “Understanding the four generations to enhance workplace management,” published in the
AFP Exchange
, a magazine for global finance executives, Boomers brought their own spitfire culture to the workplace: “On the job, Boomers arrive early and leave late, visibility is key. The longer the day, the higher the pay …” That generational shift in attitude added spokes to the centralized hub of the former leadership model, bringing the rise of the C-suite that has blossomed ever since. Corner offices expanded to become corridors of power, with a specialized chief who reported to the CEO, manning every division: CFOs and COOs, CIOs and CMOs and so on. And yes, it's mostly been men doing the manning.

The point is that for more than a century, all variations on the management model have been hierarchical, whether the hierarchy was centralized or spread out among the C-suite. But the information age has changed almost everything about the way we work—the where, the when, and, most significantly, the how—and as a result the top-down model makes no sense. Our customers have become our bosses and we need to manage “out,” not down.

Small-Town World

TECHNOLOGY HAS BEEN THE
great leveller. It's reshaped the world in ways that are profoundly different from the past. The last thirty years alone have brought us personal computers, email, tablets, smartphones, cloud computing, Wi-Fi and social networking. More than three billion people are active online. Nearly two billion, or close to a quarter of the world's population, uses social media, and, according to a 2015 report compiled by the global marketing firm We Are Social, there are now more active mobile connections than there are people on the planet. Call it disruptive, or transformative, but tech really has turned the world into a global village; everyone is connected to someone and someone else's business, and news, truth and gossip travel at small-town speeds. And like a village, rightly or wrongly, the online court of public opinion metes out its own brand of justice, swift and sometimes merciless.

What companies, corporations, and, to some extent, even countries have lost in this global village is the ability to control the agenda. The power of institutions and organizations to direct people's behaviour has been eroded, and with it the ability of any leader to arbitrarily call the shots. Power has shifted. When governments want to exert control over their citizens, they fight the public's access to social media. When companies want to reach consumers, they turn to the net. When consumers want to consume they do their due diligence online. With individual voices that can be heard far and wide, the information age has brought a new transparency to society. It's made every organization beholden to the individual
customer as a new kind of stakeholder and forced the flattening of hierarchies. It's put real power in the hands of people.

Through the net and social media, everyday people, regardless of status or station, have an unrivalled ability to inform and be informed, to praise and to punish. It's a power that drives customer reviews, boycotts, protests, revolutions and web uprisings that can blow up in an instant. It's the kind of power that can prompt Nestlé to find a sustainable source of palm oil and stop the deforestation in Indonesia by Sinar Mas. It can cost United Airlines 10 percent of its share price—a whopping $180 million hit—for refusing to compensate a Canadian musician for breaking his guitar. It can push Coca-Cola and PepsiCo to drop a controversial ingredient from their beverages, convince the Bank of America to abandon an unpopular debit-card fee and enable a class of fourth graders to persuade Universal Studios to add an environmental message to its promotion of
The Lorax
. Social media have prompted a modern-day recasting of David and Goliath, in which ordinary people—even children—can make titans buckle.

It's no surprise that businesses feel vulnerable and exposed. Old business models and leadership structures are broken. Even basic principles of how to run a company have changed and so must our thinking about what it takes to succeed in business. While it might be tempting to focus on nothing but the minefields ahead, what I see from the frontier of these changing times is a landscape of tremendous opportunity for those who are willing to listen, to learn and adapt. And that translates into golden opportunities for women especially, for whom listening, learning and adapting have always been among our strong suits. It won't be easy.
Mistakes will be made, and uncertainty will be a devoted companion. But if you are keen to collaborate and form new kinds of partnerships with the people you work
with
and
for
, the future is yours.

We've Come a Long Way from Mr. Burns, Baby

THERE WERE NO RULE BOOKS
for me to follow when I started Twitter Canada. The playbook was ours to create. In the first year, “ours” meant me, a smartphone, and six staff who didn't yet know each other. We were all in it together, starting something brand new in a country that hadn't yet done much business with Twitter. We didn't have precedents to fall back on, so when one of us learned something, we shared it with the others:
“Who has a presentation I can use with a bank?” “Here you go.” “Anyone have the information on how Twitter appeals to moms?” “I saw it here: let me flip it to you.”
We occupied an open office space, literally and figuratively without walls, and we built the business on a strategy that every team member helped to create.

The beauty of Twitter is that it is a platform for expression, and open conversation. As I figured out how to build a team that could help our clients overcome the challenges of operating in a world gone digital, we abided by the principles of listening and discussing. We were able to build the Canadian office quickly by creating a safe place for our partners in a digital environment that can feel like the Wild West, where we and our clients could try new initiatives, and sometimes fail, but always learn something important about this curious new world.

From my experience in television, I'd already seen how valuable social media could be in connecting a corporation to its customers, or, in my case, viewers and listeners. The web provided an unparalleled and precious chance to gauge audience reaction and understand viewers better. Instead of having to rely solely on focus group feedback, or wait for nightly ratings report cards that estimated how many people watched a show without the context of why they watched or how they felt about what they saw, Twitter suddenly gave me a glimpse into the real-time opinions of viewers. It was like eavesdropping: on Twitter I could listen in on those streetcorner conversations I knew were so important. Some of what I “overheard” informed key programming decisions I made. Fan reaction over the cancellation of the
Murdoch Mysteries
TV series on Citytv, for example, was a major tipoff to make a deal with its producers to revive the show on CBC (it's still going strong).

The possibilities for business to benefit from what it sees and hears online are limitless. All sorts of companies and executives now turn to social networks to “read” the word on the street. Guest reviews on TripAdvisor, for instance, have become a daily must-read for many hotel managers, and the smart ones respond to each one directly. One of the fastest-growing e-commerce fashion retailers to emerge in a decade is built on a model of very personal interactions with its shopping community. Using online outreach programs to gauge precisely what buyers want and to supply only what people are buying, ModCloth has gone from its one-woman launch in a home basement to a reported $100 million in sales, 450 full-time employees and offices in Los
Angeles, San Francisco and Pittsburg. And the ModCloth story is not unique: a recent
Forbes
report estimates that customers reward companies that have a social media presence with 64 percent more business, and almost a third of companies with a social media presence report higher profit margins. Twitter itself has benefited immensely from the ecosystem of its own users. Twitter didn't invent the retweet, or even the hashtag. Both were dreamed up by savvy users of the platform in 2007 and are now among the most widely used forms of distributing information on Twitter. These kinds of consumer-driven initiatives, whether co-creation, crowdsourcing or customization of everything from clothes to cars, has become a hot trend. When CEOs of the fastest-growing private companies in the US, as ranked by the 2014 survey of the Inc. 500, were asked where they go for ideas, 28 percent said they go to their customers. It's increasingly a bespoke world, custom-tailored for individual tastes and needs.

In today's environment, there's just no telling where inspiration will come from. But to tap into the possibilities, leaders have to bring a wide-open mind. Companies may once have had the luxury of creating strategic plans to take them through the next five years or more. Today, attempting to project out even two years seems crazy. When people ask me where TV will be in five years, I say, “Who knew Netflix would be winning Golden Globes and shutting out the traditional networks?” Yet just because it's harder to see far down the road doesn't mean you shouldn't know from the get-go where you'd like to end up. Having a vision and long-term goals are still crucial to building any solid career or business. But
adhering to a pre-formulated plan on your way to reaching those goals—
because it's the plan
—limits your opportunities.

Which is why most of our client meetings at Twitter usually involved epic brainstorms where we and the clients would imagine together what a campaign might look like. Maybe we wouldn't get the deal. But, more often than not, we did. And by doing it this way, we didn't just build a client list, we built relationships. Clients trusted us to try things out. Sometimes our ideas worked, sometimes they didn't. But when the relationship was there, they would come back for another shot whether we succeeded or failed. The same trust we'd engendered internally in our team extended to our clients and partners. In the two years I led the Canadian office, we grew from nothing into a thriving enterprise, and Canada became one of the highest revenue-generating regions in Twitter's global operations. I did not do it alone. My success had everything to do with the team, and the collaborative approach that's now also essential to my new management role as Twitter's vice-president of Media, North America. Leveraging content related to news, sports and entertainment, I head up a team of more than fifty employees who never go to an office together—
ever
. My team that handles government news is based in Washington, DC. The TV and film team runs out of Los Angeles and the crew involved in sports, news, music and entertainment works where I do now, out of Twitter's New York offices. When we do get together it's often to work at major events, as we did in Phoenix, for instance, at the 2015 Super Bowl, and then again at the Oscars and the NBA All-Star weekend. (It's my version of visiting the factory floor,
because our product—which is content—originates on-site.) While I was at the Super Bowl, our sports team liaised with our partners, journalists and the NFL, helping them get out the game highlights, behind-the-scenes colour and commentary, and related tweets from viewers and players. But outside of such big public events, the only regular face time I have with my team is through a screen: video conferencing. Otherwise it's text, DM, gchat, tweet, email and phone calls. I'm not there to lord it over them or tell anyone what to do at any microlevel. They are the experts in their field. My role is to listen to their best information, communicate the company's overall goals and offer my knowledge and guidance as we craft an ever-developing strategy to reach our aims.

Our job is to set up people for success. How they choose to use Twitter is completely up to them. We treat our partners with the same respect I give my team. I offer guidance and the right tools, then I get the heck out of the way to let them do what they do best. There's nothing Mr. Burns about it.

Influence Is the New Power

SO MANY OF THE DECISIONS THAT
matter most today are made by a group. Collaboration has never been more critical to leadership, whether it's among internal teams or with clients. Managing “out” is the new key to innovation. Yet for eons, the chiefs among us—from tribes to boardrooms—have operated on the principle that power is personal; you don't share it, you wield it. That style worked in a time when power belonged to the few people in the know and information would only be doled out as needed to accompany marching
orders—or not even then. But now being “in the know” is just a Google search away. Information as power has lost its currency. Today it's not
having
the information that counts, it's what you do with it. It's not having the answers, but knowing which questions to ask that makes you a leader. “Understanding ‘New Power,'” a hugely influential article by Jeremy Heimans (co-founder of Purpose, which has been called the “mothership of movement-building”) and Henry Timms (executive director of New York's 92nd Street Y and instigator of #GivingTuesday), published in the December 2014 issue of the
Harvard Business Review,
nailed the distinction between old ways of power and new: “old power” worked like a currency—held by a few, jealously guarded and leader-driven—where “new power” operates more like a current, made by many, participatory, peer-driven, and most forceful when it surges. It's not to be stockpiled, but channelled.