Elites Meet:
Business Bushwah
20 May 2013
¶ We’re hoping that you haven’t bought a copy of Lean In, which, as Anne Applebaum notes, is remarkable only for being the first big business self-help exhortation to have been written by a woman. In her review at the NYRB, Applebaum not only identifies some of the more interesting contradictions in Sheryl Sandberg’s text but raises the key day-to-day questions that confront any would-be success.
In practice, a successful woman—like a successful man—must learn, early on, how much emotion to show and how much to conceal, depending on the circumstances. She must learn how much to speak and how much to keep silent, for that depends on the circumstances too. Above all, she must understand herself well enough to know which challenges are worth accepting and which—given her personal situation, her husband, her finances, her interests, her age—must be sensibly refused.
Sometimes it makes sense, in the lives of both men and women, to leap at opportunities. Sometimes it’s foolish. Some risks are worth taking and others are not.
That sort of calculation, unfortunately, takes up a lot of time and energy in the world of “work,” and a truly useful book about business would set out to suggest reasonable reforms. But there’s something else in Applebaum’s piece that’s even more disheartening.
Other factors, even harder to imitate, must also explain Sandberg’s rise. For example, she surely has an astonishing and unusual capacity to cope with difficult, socially awkward, borderline-Asperger’s men: Sergey Brin, Larry Summers, Mark Zuckerberg. This is not a talent that many women, or indeed many men, are lucky enough to possess. But then she has been very lucky in other ways as well. At Harvard, for example, Sandberg happened to take a class with Summers, who happened to hire her as a research assistant before he happened to become treasury secretary. Upon arriving in the government, he made her his chief of staff.
How can we keep men like these — and they are always men, and Steve Jobs was one of the worst — from becoming the hubs of networks which they manifestly lack the skills to direct in keeping with humane principles?