BEYOND LEANING IN

An aging CEO tries to stem the flow of female talent away from her California company in this novel.

Debra is the co-founder and CEO of a Santa Monica–based tech firm. Sales are down, and people are jumping ship, including her star CPO, Natalie. Debra knows how hard the business world can be for women, but at age 60, she’s afraid she may be losing touch: “Debra had been feeling for some time that there was a generational gap; that she didn’t understand the concerns raised by some of the rising senior women….Natalie was the fourth senior woman in the past year to depart. The other three had also been on the younger side of the leadership team.” It’s especially frustrating for Debra because she’s worked so hard to promote women to leadership positions. Things don’t improve when Debra passes over Natalie’s preferred successor, Amber, senior director of product development, to bring in a man from the outside. Sales continue to fall. Debra can sense a crisis brewing, but she doesn’t know how to stop it. There is more holding back the young women around her than a simple lack of confidence—more than can just be solved by “leaning in.” To figure out how to save the company, Debra will have to listen to the young women still around: people like the frustrated Amber, who is secretly scheduling interviews; Debra’s new mentee, Cassandra, with whom she’s struggling to click; and even Kyle, a younger male manager who sees the flaws of many of his male colleagues. But can an old dog like Debra learn new tricks, even ones she wants to learn? Can she turn around her company before her investors rebel? Written with the express purpose of dramatizing the issues that many companies face concerning female engagement and leadership representation, the book attempts to get at the problems that persist despite the fact that everyone seems to want to solve them.

Ho’s prose is subtle and taut, as here, where she describes a tense work lunch: “Amber’s hands were beneath the table, but she was studying the menu as if it were the most riveting laminated sheet in the world. Her eyes were currently fixed on the meats page, even though she was a vegetarian. Sometimes Debra wished it didn’t always fall on her to break the ice in uncomfortable situations.” The story isn’t so compelling that it would satisfy readers with no interest in restructuring a corporate work environment, but it is much better than it has to be. For a novel with such overtly didactic purposes, the interpersonal dramas are well drawn and compelling. The author captures the way that colleagues interact: invariably polite on the surface while simmering underneath. What’s more, it makes Ho’s points in a way that a normal, prescriptive work of nonfiction could not. The characters easily embody the various perspectives, and they help readers see the situation from outside the blinkered viewpoint of a CEO. The result is an engaging evolution of Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” mantra.

A well-crafted instructional tale that explores gender in corporate America.