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Summary
Summary
The #1 international best seller
In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg reignited the conversation around women in the workplace.
Sandberg is chief operating officer of Facebook and coauthor of Option B with Adam Grant. In 2010, she gave an electrifying TED talk in which she described how women unintentionally hold themselves back in their careers. Her talk, which has been viewed more than six million times, encouraged women to "sit at the table," seek challenges, take risks, and pursue their goals with gusto.
Lean In continues that conversation , combining personal anecdotes, hard data, and compelling research to change the conversation from what women can't do to what they can. Sandberg provides practical advice on negotiation techniques, mentorship, and building a satisfying career. She describes specific steps women can take to combine professional achievement with personal fulfillment, and demonstrates how men can benefit by supporting women both in the workplace and at home.
Written with humor and wisdom , Lean In is a revelatory, inspiring call to action and a blueprint for individual growth that will empower women around the world to achieve their full potential.
Author Notes
Sheryl Sandberg was born in 1969 in Washington, D.C. Sandberg enrolled at Harvard College and in 1991, graduated summa cum laude with an A.B. in Economics and was awarded the John H. Williams Prize for the top graduating student in economics. She attended Harvard Business School and in 1995 she earned her M.B.A. with highest distinction. After business school, she worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company. From 1996 to 2001, Sandberg served as Chief of Staff to then United States Secretary of the Treasury, Larry Summers, under President Bill Clinton where she helped lead the Treasury¿s work on forgiving debt in the developing world during the Asian financial crisis. She joined Google Inc. in 2001 and served as its Vice President of Global Online Sales & Operations until March 2008. At that time, Facebook announced that Sheryl Sandberg would be hired as the company's COO.
In 2011, Sandberg was ranked #5 on "the world's 100 most powerful women" by Forbes magazine. She was named as one of the top 100 influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2012. In March 2013, Sandberg released her first book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which deals with business leadership and development, issues with the lack of females in government and business leadership positions, and feminism in general.
Sandberg is also on the boards of The Walt Disney Company, Women for Women International, and the Center for Global Development and V-Day. She was previously a board member of Starbucks, the Brookings Institution and Ad Council. Her title's Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead and Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy made The New York Times Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Facebook COO Sandberg examines the dearth of women in major leadership positions, and what women can do to solve the problem, in this provocative tome. While acknowledging that women have made great strides in the business world, she posits that they still have a long way to go and lays out a plan for women to get there. "I have written this book to encourage women to dream big, forge a path through the obstacles, and achieve their full potential," she explains. The author's counsel-gleaned from her own experiences-includes suggestions for increasing self-confidence, particularly in the business world; understanding the role of mentors and how to identify them; building emotional relationships at work; not focusing on being liked; juggling marriage and children with a demanding job; and the importance of taking risks. "Hard work and results should be recognized by others, but when they aren't, advocating for oneself becomes necessary," Sandberg opines. A new generation of women will learn from Sandberg's experiences, and those of her own generation will be inspired by this thoughtful and practical book. Agent: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* If Facebook COO (and first-time author) Sandberg succeeds, it will be because she's made us mad and more than willing to act. With no small amount of self-deprecating humor, a massive quantity of facts and research, plus a liberal dose of very personal anecdotes, Sandberg forces each one of us woman and man to reexamine ourselves at work and in life, using a unique filter. Are we more concerned about being liked than succeeding? Do we think of our career as a series of upward ladders rather than a jungle gym? Do our authentic selves and honesty show up in business? In short, every single undoing of a woman's career is examined thoughtfully and with twenty-first-century gentleness and exposed with recommended remedies. Her colleagues act as advocates for her theme: lean in, or take a risk and drive change for us all. And though there are no solutions offered, except in the formation of communities around the country and (we hope!) around the world, there's tremendous reenergy in feeling that, thanks to Sandberg, the world just might be a different place.--Jacobs, Barbara Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
When Alysia Abbott was a child, she constructed a fairy tale of sorts from the shards of her family's short life together. Barbara Binder, beautiful Smith College graduate and aspiring psychologist, and Steve Abbott, conscientious objector and budding writer, had been an ideal match. Drawn together by radical politics while master's candidates at Emory University, they were married in Atlanta in 1969. Late the next year, Alysia-Rebeccah was born. "We lived happily," she writes in her memoir, "Fairyland," hewing to her childhood fantasy, "until, one night late in the summer of 1973, my mother was out driving when her car was rear-ended. She flew into the street, was hit by a car and was killed instantly." Father and daughter soon moved to San Francisco, where Steve ventured with passion and determination into the local literary scene. He also shed the last pretense of heterosexuality and took up with a series of young men who, like him, found a gay never-never land in the City by the Bay. Through it all, Alysia clung fast to her origin story: perfect love, a happy family and the random accident that rent the cozy unit. As for her father's homosexuality, she told herself that this too was an accident, a kind of conversion through grief. In 1992, when Steve Abbott died of AIDS-related complications, his voluminous journals told a rather less convenient truth. "Fairyland" is his daughter's compassionate, cleareyed reckoning with this truth and many others that defined her singular girlhood at the dawn of the gay liberation movement. Stupid hope is what Alysia's flinty grandmother called the giddy optimism of youth. It was that same naïveté, searching and exuberant, that the author remembers her father displaying during their early days in California. Escaped from a strait-laced Nebraska upbringing, he was at last "his naked and profane self" in San Francisco, and nothing, not even fatherhood, would stand in the way of his progress. While Alysia colored or daydreamed, Dad tried out his poetry for audiences at the Cloud House. While Alysia watched TV or slept (sometimes in an empty apartment), Dad went looking for love at bars and bathhouses. Roommates - drag queens, addicts, Steve's occasional boyfriends - came and went. So did apartments. Loading their belongings in an increasingly geriatric VW bug, the Abbotts crisscrossed town, settling at last in a funky Victorian on the corner of Haight and Ashbury. When Alysia noticed a mushroom sprouting from the back seat of the VW, Steve wrote a poem about it that celebrated the "creative regimen of poverty." Alysia takes great pains to emphasize her father's loving if imperfect parental skills. Still, it was a chaotic and often lonely existence for Alysia, bobbing about in the "defiantly motherless" world of the "post-hippie" Haight. Harvey Milk and Anita Bryant were central characters in her consciousness as she marched with her father in the city's Gay Pride parade. But at school, she succumbed to a profound sense of otherness when "Fairyland's untidy corners stuck out from beneath the closet door." Abbott's writing is at its best describing the throes of adolescence. Living by her wits, she learned to deflect questions about her father's sexuality. And she became deft at wheedling invitations to classmates' houses for home-cooked meals. Her father "was always generous with hugs and encouragement." Still, certain lessons - hygiene, other feminine mysteries - would come from exasperated friends. And ultimately, Steve's unorthodoxies mortified his teenage daughter. Even in San Francisco, it's hard to be weird in high school. "Fairyland" is an elegy of sorts, written two decades after a father's death by a woman who is now a parent herself. Experience, and no small amount of rue, frame Abbott's narrative, particularly in the final sections of the book. In 1991, Alysia was a senior at New York University when her dying father called her home. AIDS had cut a swath through San Francisco; the community that had once embraced the widower and motherless girl was dying too. In the poet's final year, Alysia cared for him with the same impatient, imperfect, but abiding love on which she'd been raised. He bequeathed her little but his work, which counts among its lines: Come morning I'll be the only good fairy Left in town. Alexandra Styron is the author, most recently, of "Reading My Father."
Choice Review
Sheryl Sandberg is a woman of impressive credentials: she is chief operating officer of Facebook and one of Time's 100 most influential people in the world, and is on the Fortune list of 50 most powerful women in business. In Lean In, Sandberg looks at the current stark reality of women in leadership. In 1980, more than 50 percent of college graduates were women, yet women still make up just over 4 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs and fewer than 18 percent of elected officials; the gap is even greater for women for color. In this well-researched and exceptionally accessible text, Sandberg presents solid research findings, blended masterfully with personal stories and experiences of her own and of other women. An engaging read, this book pushes at the perceived notion that women have "made it" and encourages women, and men, to change the conversation--or sometimes to have the courage to begin the conversation--about how society is "failing to encourage women to aspire to leadership." Sandberg invites the reader to consider the possibility and requirements of a more equal world for both women and men. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels and collections. T. M. Mckenzie Gonzaga University
Guardian Review
In 2010, Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, gave a TED talk about women in the boardroom. They were too small in number because they faltered on the way there, and they faltered because they "took their foot off the gas". I say "they" rather than "we"; one of the conclusions I draw from Lean In, the book that resulted from this talk, is that the women whom Sandberg addresses, the ones who are missing from their rightful place in the boardroom, are quite a distinct group, not interchangeable with "all women" and certainly not synonymous with "feminists", but we'll come to that shortly. The talk was an immediate hit, generated reams of comment internationally and has now had more than 2 million views on YouTube. It was only natural that it should become a book, but it's only in the elongation, I realise, that I fully understand what she meant. I took it for a motivational speech, thinking that by "gas", she meant "female power" and by "taking one's foot off", she meant women were frightened of their own power I took her for a sort of Nelson Mandela for girls, "our deepest fear is that we are awesome beyond measure". In fact, Sandberg's message is subtly different we hold ourselves back because of a raft of factors: social expectation, a lack of domestic assertiveness, a sense that, from the minute we reach maturity, we are forward-planning for our own subservience. She specialises in very tough messages to women: "I turned to look at the audience," she writes, of a speech she gave at Harvard Business School in 2011, "paused, and answered with brutal honesty. 'If current trends continue, 15 years from today, about one-third of the women in this audience will be working full-time and almost all of you will be working for the guy you are sitting next to.'" At the same time, her approach to the issue as a whole is emollient, carefully inoffensive; she is always first to jump in with what she isn't saying, always first to articulate what might be a criticism against her. "I know that some believe that by focusing on what women can do to change themselves pressing them to lean in it seems like I am letting our institutions off the hook. Or even worse, they accuse me of blaming the victim." An interesting segue, here: she identifies the opposite point of view in a way that neutralises it, making her opponents seem superstitious, with their "beliefs" and afraid of change, with their "institutions". Immediately afterwards, she appears wounded by their hocus pocus "even worse" and uses language more typically associated, in terms of gender, with sexual assault than with glass ceilings. She appears to be saying "we may have different approaches, yours is a bit more primitive, but we can all cohabit this space" and then immediately ups the ante "you think you're serious about female empowerment at work? Nobody's more serious than I am." Not for the last time, I'm impressed by the subtlety, but it's a negotiator's manoeuvre, not an intellectual progression. The aim is not to find a new truth; the aim is "gotcha". Sandberg peppers her exhortations with relevant experiences of her own; describing the "damned if you do, doomed if you don't" bind that women are in when they advocate in their own interests or boast about their achievements (if they do either, they are perceived as not being nice; if they don't, they won't get what they want). The author recalls having "most likely to succeed" taken off her yearbook because she didn't want to damage her chances of getting a date for the prom. She won a Henry Ford scholarship for her attainments in her first year at business school, jointly with six men, and didn't tell anybody. "I never really considered going public. I instinctively knew that letting my academic performance become known was a bad idea Being at the top of the class may have made life easier for my male peers, but it would have made my life harder." Most astonishing of all, she married at 24, having imbibed from her parents the message that "the most eligible women marry young to get a 'good man' before they are all taken". For a woman born in the late 60s, she seems to have had few remarkably few brushes with any feminist ideas. The way she describes her life betrays no concept of emancipation, be it social or sexual. It is, frankly, bizarre. If I read it blind and with all the internet startups removed, I would think she had been raised in quite a conservative household in the 30s or 40s. It could be a North American thing the country is not famous for its evolved attitudes to gender. It is one of only four countries in the world to have no mandated paid maternity leave (the others are Liberia, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland). But even taking that into account, feminists of any nationality will find it hard to stomach being told what a "revolution" should look like, by a woman without the spine to admit she was clever in the 1980s. But that is exactly the point: this book isn't offering a new spark for a feminist revolution. Rather, it says, your revolution has stalled why don't you try getting what you want my way? Perhaps predictably, this involves a lot of flexibility, and even more smiling. "A woman needs to combine niceness with insistence," she concludes, having surveyed all the evidence that people respond badly to women who lobby in their own interests. "I understand the paradox of advising women to change the world by adhering to its biased rules and expectations. I know it is not a perfect answer but a means to a desirable end." We're back at the prom. Zip it, smart-arse, or you won't get laid. Except you probably wouldn't want to get laid, because it would erode your value proposition. This goal-driven, ideology-free approach has some fascinating insights into the world of business itself. Where Sandberg describes the thought processes that led her to Google (fast-growing companies always have more work than they have people; slow-growing companies have more senior people than they have interesting work, so senior people concentrate instead on eating each other it's obvious once somebody says it), or the interview process that led her to Facebook (dinner with Mark Zuckerberg, every night, for weeks), it's magnetic. But when she pans back to apply her approach to all women, her conclusions are often comically infantilising. She gives Arianna Huffington as an ego ideal. "Her advice is that we should let ourselves react emotionally and feel whatever anger or sadness being criticised evokes for us. And then we should quickly move on. She points to children as her role model. A child can cry one moment and run off to play the next." Sure. And a cat can go to sleep when it's bored. Emulating the cat may not be the best way to deal with a boring situation. Later, a superior intervenes on her behalf with a client who keeps trying to fix her up with his son, and she remarks: "I could not have been more grateful for Robert's protection. I knew exactly how that baby bird felt when he finally found his mother." This is not a book about how women can become more equal: this is a book about how women can become more like Sheryl Sandberg. You will be able to decide relatively fast how plausible a goal this is.
Kirkus Review
Facebook COO Sandberg (ranked fifth in Forbes' 2011 list of the most powerful women in the world) reveals how gender discrimination still operates against her and other less-fortunate women. When she learned about the list, she reports, "I felt embarrassed and exposed." Even in her position, she still felt the pressure of social conditioning, the expectation that women should subordinate themselves to men. Taking examples from her own experience, Sandberg shows how expected gender roles work against women seeking top jobs, even though they now earn "63 percent of the master's degrees in the United States." Not only are women forced to juxtapose family and job responsibilities, but they face more subtle pressures. From early childhood, females are discouraged from being assertive. "Aggressive and hard-charging women violate unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct," writes the author. While it is assumed that men who are committed to their families can have successful careers, for women, the choices are more difficult due to the fact that they will usually be the primary caregivers. The failure of social provisions--extended family leave, flexible working hours, etc., which are the norm in many European countries--make life especially difficult for middle-income families (and single parents) due to the high cost of good child care. Women internalize this, frequently making career decisions to accommodate their expectation of the demands that will be imposed by having a family in the future. In Sandberg's case, this involved rejecting a desirable international fellowship. She argues the need for a redefinition of gender roles so that men expect to share primary responsibility for child care, parents receive social support to accommodate work and family responsibilities, and stereotyping of male and female behavior is recognized as pernicious. A compelling case for reforms that support family values in the continuing "march toward true equality."]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Facebook COO Sandberg uses hard data, examples from personal experience, and decades of observation to support her assertion that competent women unintentionally hold themselves back from career advancement and personal happiness. She furthers states that hard work is not enough and that it never has been. Elisa Donovan's narration brings an effective voice to Sandberg's practical advice for both professional women (take more risks and do not be so silent about the risks) and any male managers or executives (look for and recognize women's contributions; encourage women to "sit at the table"). verdict This title should be encouraged reading for all working women as well as all members of management. ["A lively book on a topic relevant to all working women as well as the men they work with (and for). There will be interest because of the author's renown," read the review of the New York Times best-selling Knopf hc, LJ 4/1/13.-Ed.]-M. Gail Preslar, formerly with Business Lib., Eastman Chemical Co., Kingsport, TN (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
