Welcome back. I'm now going to tell you about Sheryl Sandberg and the skills that she illustrates which are conveying values with stories, building supportive networks, and resolving conflicts among domains. Sheryl Sandberg is very humble when she speaks in public, about herself she is self effacing and is a real raconteur. She has become a great storyteller although she didn't start out that way. Her speeches, her public speeches are not only about Facebook and what the company is doing, and her role and responsibilities as COO, chief operating officer of Facebook, but about women's advancement, and women's movement in the modern era. She has become a great spokesperson for that movement and is regarded as one of the great business executives of our time. She's known to be tough, fearless, but also open and warm. In 2013, when she published her really groundbreaking book, Lean In, she was the public face of Facebook. She was the head of operations and still is. And she had learned that as a Vice President of Sales Operations at Google which is where she was hired from. She arrived at Facebook in 2008 and now that company as of this recording is earning 335 billion US in revenue. And has 1.8 billion users worldwide. At the same time, the changes that she's making at Facebook including such things as Women's Leadership Day where women gather and provide mutual support for each other and tell the stories of what is happening in their lives and how they can be helpful to each other. But also the Lean In Circles so part of the social movement that is Lean In, the core sort of social technology for driving that movement, are these circles which Lean In helps to organize the Lean In organization that she founded. And this involves helping to guide small groups of women and men now around the world to gather to provide support for each other in helping women to advance with very specific and concrete advice. There are now over 30,000 such circles worldwide in over 150 countries. So this is large scale change. Sheryl Sandberg has learned the importance of being talk about her struggles with confidence with gaining confidence. You wouldn't think that somebody in this world who has achieved such high level of impact and responsibility and success materially would be someone who has struggled with confidence, but she has. And that's what motivated her interest in creating the Lean In idea, the book. And the social movement that comes from the research and the stories in Lean In. She changed over the course of time. She learnt like every one of the people we're talk about here and probably the great leaders in your life that you admire. She learned through trial and error, through continuing to reflect on what works, what doesn't and getting closer and closer to her values and to bringing in the different parts of her life, to weave them together in a way that provided support sustenance confidence for her growth in the public or profession world and to use her personal experience to educate others, to serve others and so following the death, the tragic and untimely, from just a terrible accident, the death of her husband, the late Dave Goldberg, who was CEO of the tech company SurveyMonkey. This was Sandberg's second husband. They were on a vacation trip, and he was in the exercise room, and fell off the exercise machine and cracked his skull, and died, terrible, earth shattering for her and her family, two young kids. She's come through that, in a way that is, once again, serving as a model for so many people and using her experience, and bringing it to the world in a project, in collaboration with one of my friends and colleagues here at Wharton, Adam Grant. They're doing a project together that's going to be a book called Option B, and it's about what happens when Option A doesn't work out. And it's her story and their work together and his research being gathered from a lot of people studying resilience which is really essential to what we are focusing on here in this course. How do you get through life when your plans are shattered in the lessons from that? So she's doing that as she did with Lean In. Here's what I learned about what it means to advance as a woman in society and in business. And she then brought that knowledge with research support for it to help in very practical and concrete ways other people who are struggling with the same issues. She was raised in North Miami, Florida and in the 70s, her parents invested a lot of their time and energy in supporting Soviet Jewry and they did such things as making white chocolate into bars that look like soap for Soviet Dissonance who, when they went home they could see the soap as chocolate, which was highly valued, to raise money for their cause. So it was those kinds of things and having people in their home who were working on this social issues that help the young Sheryl. She's born in the late 60's. To learn that, you gotta give back, you gotta try to help other people who were in need. People who need your support. And when I met her mother, at an event, and I said, Paul, you must be so proud of her. And she said, she put her arm in my, her hand on my arm and said, people tell me that all the time, you must be so proud. But really, what I told Sheryl, I mean, she was growing up, it's not so much about what you achieve, it's, I want you to be I'm going to use a Jewish or Yetish term. I want you to be a Mensch and that word, look that up if you don't know it, it means a person, a human being, someone who cares. She has a lot of talent, Sheryl Sandberg. It's clear, graduated Phi Beta Kapa from Harvard in 1991. Went on to work for Larry Summers when he was the head of the World Bank, went to get a Harvard MBA and then, was chief of staff for Summers when he was at the treasury. Her first marriage ended in divorce, and it was a public failure, as she called it which was painful at the time, but from which she grew. And in the early 2000s, realized that she could have a bigger impact on the world through technology than through politics at least that's what she thought then. And so in 2001, joined Google which was a young company at that time and executives who work with her, people who work with her then, will say that she was always able, and this is something that seems to have been a signal, aspect of her career to look a few steps ahead, to look into the future, to see and to build for that future, to hire people in advance of when they would be actually needed knowing that they would be needed because of what was coming. She, at the same time, experienced some inner turmoil, especially as her career grew and as she met Goldberg, married, they started to have children. When she was pregnant with her first back in 2005, a reporter, I think it was a reporter or someone who was interested in asking her about her career, asked the seven-month pregnant, Sheryl Sandberg. So what's going to happen when the child arrives and who's going to take care of what? And Sandberg just broke down in tears, like what am I going to do? She really didn't have a very good plan. She was fearful. She was afraid. Well, she emerged on the Fortune 50 Most Powerful Women in Business list after she had children, because she figured out some important ideas and methods for how you make it work. It's never perfect. One of the things that she does is creates non-goal lists. Most people have lists of goals. She has lists of things she's not going to do. So if you've got five great priorities, figure out which three you're going to do and put the others on the back burner. So she's become really good at prioritization, which of course emanates from her knowing what's important. In the context of her relationship with her late husband, she famously and a lot of people wrote about this following Dave Goldberg's death how their relationship was such a great model because you had two see sweet tech executives in the very fast and furious world of high tech who were both equal parents. And while it was never 50-50 exactly all the time, over time she told me, that's what they aim for and that's what they achieved. It wasn't ever exactly equal. But they had an understanding that they each were going to be providing support for the other's life beyond their family and that one of them would always be there with their kids. Yes, there were moments when she felt guilty and he did as well, but for example, he moved his company from Portland to Silicon Valley, so that they could be close together. There many instances in their life together, that show how their continuing negotiation for figuring out, how are we going to resolve the conflicts that always arise between work and the rest of life? How are they going to make it work? Another one of the really interesting aspects of her career, and her life was the formation of what's known as the Women of Silicon Valley. She had, Andrea Mitchell was the journalist and writer was I think at their company, and was going to be taking a red eye, and she said hey, how about if you come to my home and talk to some of my colleagues, some more about your most recent book, and I'll invite some friends over? And she realized hey, I've got Andrea Mitchell here, I should bring over as many people as I can. So she invited a number of women friends, last minute, to come to hear Andrew Mitchell speak, and they had a conversation. And that gathering became the basis of an ongoing group, the Women of Silicon Valley which has now emerged as a really important and powerful network, connecting women throughout the valley. Where traditionally, and still, it is rare for a group of women to be together where they are in the majority if not the sole gender represented. It became a very powerful way for people to provide support for each other, to get support for new businesses and other initiatives. And there'd be kids running around. It was a very important place in which she grew connection among and between other people. Her work at the World Bank, back earlier in her career working on leprosy, an African relief when she was at the treasury, gave her, in addition to what she learned growing up in her family, a really clear sense of needing to devote her energy and resources to world betterment and has grown in her philanthropic role. And that has become an important part of what she invest her and her company's time and attention. But again, [COUGH] throughout here growing as an esteemed and highly respected business leader, there is this underlying thread of increasing her confidence because of a lack of it to begin with and how difficult it is for women. So she tells the story of how a pitch at a private equity firm, she was the only woman present. And when they went to the break, the host didn't know where the women's room was, didn't know how to direct her. And said, well nobody's every asked, maybe you're the only one who's ever needed to use the restroom. [LAUGH] Not funny, but gets laughs because it speaks to a real important truth about the difficulties of being a woman in a man's world. And it's through those stories that she's able to connect with people telling the real stories of what's happened to her that other people can relate to. So when she first wrote the first drafts of Lean In, she'd work with researchers and laid out, here's what unconscious bias or implicit bias looks like. Here's what needs to be done to overcome it. This is what's necessary to help women to advance. In addition to important concrete advice like don't leave before you leave. In other words, don't check out psychologically and miss opportunities until you really have to go, if you've going to take time off to raise your kids. Get a seat at the table. Take the steps needed to assert yourself and your needs and interests and that's how you're going to get help and that's how you're going to increase the chances of your success in all the different parts of your life. So it's filled with concrete advice and research that's important, but it missed In the first drafts. The real story is like the one I just told you about the PE firm, the private equity firm. And her husband, as she told me, when he read the first drafts he said, this is kind of like eating your Wheaties. It's good for you but it doesn't really taste that good. You got to tell your stories. He told her, and she reluctantly did. She talked about her divorce. She talked about her lack of confidence. She talked about the difficulties of what it's like to be present and assertive and to get support as a woman in the business world, and that made that book really sing. And I think it had a massive contribution to its success, a combination of research and the personal stories. Well, there is more that I could be said about Sheryl Sanberg but I'm going to leave with it that. And ask you, are you thinking well, it's certainly easy enough for somebody like Sheryl Sanberg who has all the money in the world, an incredible talent and all kinds of friends and people that I want to help her to figure out how to live the life she wants and integrate the different parts of her life. If you had billions of dollars it can't be that hard, you might be thinking that and of course, you're right. It is easy with a lot of money but she didn't start with that, she grew the capacity to figure out what was important to her, to surround herself with people who would support her, to continue to adjust as she grew and in light of life circumstances, good and bad. How she was going to be leading the life that she truly wanted and so like all of us, she learned. And sets us a good example of someone who became the leader she wanted to be.
