Sheryl Sandberg (MBA 1995)

In Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (Knopf), Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (MBA 1995) recalls her first performance review with CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Stop trying to please everyone, he counseled. "If you do please everyone, you aren't making enough progress," she recalls him saying. "Mark was right." The desire to please is a common character trait in women generally, she observes, but in business, it is just one way women can hinder their own advancement. Indeed, Sandberg finds that women often withhold valuable opinions, fail to negotiate what is due them, and let opportunities for advancement pass them by—at least compared to their male peers.

These observations are the real surprise thread winding through Lean In, and they have landed her in hot water with critics who prefer to pin most blame on institutionalized gender bias. Sandberg doesn't disagree, but she emphasizes that women must realize how their own actions can undermine the ultimate goal of 50-50 equality of opportunity. Sandberg backs up her observations with academic studies and personal examples from her own business dealings, such as a meeting she hosted for US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner at Facebook. The four women on his team refused to sit at the meeting table, even after Sandberg requested they join the action.

To fix gender bias, Sandberg says, women must not only become more assertive about what they want and why (to lean in rather than sit back, as she puts it) but also help each other. "It is a painful truth that one of the obstacles to more women gaining power has sometimes been women already in power," Sandberg writes.

Other sections of Lean In take a broader look at women's underrepresentation in executive suites, on boards, and in other places of power. Sandberg looks at what psychologists have to say about how women lose out when it comes to power dynamics, the different rules women follow in negotiations, and the social stigma they encounter for straying too far from the homestead.

Men have a role in the remedies, but not just those men in positions of corporate power. Male partners must step up to relieve women of the full burden of raising children and keeping house. "Yes, someone needs to remember what goes into the lunch box, but… it does not have to be Mom," she writes.

Besides writing the book, Sandberg is doing her own part by organizing the Lean In Community (on Facebook, of course). Some of her advice is useful no matter one's gender, given Sandberg's disparate career stops at Facebook and Google, the Treasury Department, and McKinsey & Company. For example, she forwards Google CEO Eric Schmidt's advice that the only criterion that matters when picking a company for career advancement is fast growth.

Lean In landed on bookshelves just as HBS was commemorating the admission of women to the two-year MBA Program 50 years ago and on the golden anniversary of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. Sandberg hopes her book ignites a second wave of feminism in business; she couldn't have picked a better time to lean in and take a stand.
—SEAN SILVERTHORNE

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