ore Sharon
joined the team, a male friend told her, “Amy’s a bitc h, but an honest bitch.” Sharon found that Amy
was a great boss, and over the next few years, the derivatives group was transformed under her
leadership. Once there were more than five female managing directors in the division—a critical
mass—the negativity and grumbling began to die down. It became normal to have female leaders, and
by 2000, the stigma seemed to have dissipated. Sadly, when those senior women later left and the
critical mass shrank, the faith that women could be as successful as their male peers shrank with it.

Everyone needs to get more comfortable with female leaders—including female leaders themselves.
Since 1999, editor Pattie Sellers of Fortune magazine has overseen an annual conference that she calls
the Most Powerful Women Summit. On my first night there in 2005, I was in the lounge with two
close friends, Diana Farrell, then head of the McKinsey Global Institute, and Sue Decker, then CFO of
Yahoo. We were talking about the name of the conference, and I mentioned that when I saw the title
on Google’s corporate calendar, I ran to find Camille to ask her to change the name to “Fortune
Women’s Conference.” Diana and Sue laughed and said that they had done the exact same thing.

Later, Pattie explained that she and her colleagues chose this name on purpose to force women to
confront their own power and feel more comfortable with that word. I still struggle with this. I am fine
applying the word “powerful” to other women—the more the better—but I still shake my head in
denial when it is applied to me. The nagging voice in the back of my head reminds me, as it did in
business school, “Don’t flaunt your success, or even let people know about your success. If you do,
people won’t like you.”

Less than six months after I started at Facebook, Mark and I sat down for my first formal review.
One of the things he told me was that my desire to be liked by everyone would hold me back. He said
that when you want to change things, you can’t please everyone. If you do please everyone, you aren’t
making enough progress. Mark was right.





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4

It’s a Jungle Gym,
Not a Ladder
◥本◥作◥品◥由◥◥網◥提◥供◥下◥載◥與◥在◥線◥閱◥讀◥
ABOUT A MONTH AFTER I joined Facebook, I got a call from Lori Goler, a highly regarded senior director of
marketing at eBay. I knew Lori a bit socially, but she made it clear this was a business call and cut to
the chase. “I want to apply to work with you at Facebook,” she said. “So I thought about calling you
and telling you all of the things I’m good at and all of the things I like to do. Then I figured that
everyone was doing that. So instead, I want to ask you: What is your biggest problem, and how can I
solve it?”

My jaw hit the floor. I had hired thousands of people over the previous decade and no one had ever
said anything remotely like that. People usually focus on finding the right role for themselves, with the
implication that their skills will help the company. Lori put Facebook’s needs front and center. It was
a killer approach. I responded, “Recruiting is my biggest problem. And, yes, you can solve it.”

Lori never dreamed she would work in recruiting, but she jumped in. She even agreed to drop down
a level, since this was a new field for her and she was willing to trade seniority for acquiring new
skills. Lori did a great job running recruiting and within months was promoted to her current job,
leading [email protected] When I aske