“Amy’s a bitch, but an honest bitch,” one man said about her. derivatives team she stayed at the company until 2001. She tells us it was a “seismic event” when, in the late ’90s, Goldman Sachs made a woman named Amy Goodfriend head of its U.S. Mind you, this book was published five years after that despicable outfit played a major role in almost bankrupting the country.

Sandberg invoked the name Goldman Sachs multiple times-in a good way. But where should they seek such power? In the crackling hellfire of C-suite America. This was a book about how women in corporate America could-and should-strive to get the most money and the most power. Almost immediately I saw that its main problem wasn’t the children. I did the honorable thing and read the book closely. It was a purely meretricious transaction, but I didn’t phone it in. Read: How Sheryl Sandberg lost her feminist street cred If I played my cards right, I could be looking at one large. Still, I myself had been leaning in to the lucrative book-reviewing space for a long time, and I could tell there was money on the table because these Sheryl Sandberg packages were obviously going to be lavish. Trust me, around 2013 I was the top crank for that kind of thing.īut when I looked through the galley, the whole thing was so manufactured and B-school-ish that I just wanted to put my head on the keyboard and have a little nap. They wanted some crank to pump out a “What About the Children?” sidebar, pointing out that to lean into work you have to lean away from your family, to lend a spirit of objectivity to their 21-gun salutes to author and book. I knew exactly what they wanted-not the main article, which would be a rapturous announcement of this bold American visionary. In the weeks before the big rollout, I was contacted by editors at several publications asking if I would write something about it.

It was a sort of “work-life balance” category buster, because she was telling women to pretty much forget about the “life” part. The book was about how women can make it to the top. She was the chief operating officer of Facebook, back when most of us had no understanding of the platform’s fearsome powers-in the halcyon days when we thought it was just for sharing pictures of the grandkids and ruining marriages. In 2013, that book was Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which sold more than 1.5 million copies in its first year. Very early on you get the message that this is a Major and Very Important Book. In publishing, there are some books that are too big to fail. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday.

Lean in author sheryl sandberg