Lady Business: Birthdays, Brené Brown, and ambition versus celebrity

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the forty-fifth issue, published October 4, 2018. 
 

Happy Birthday, Lady Business

Last week, a powerful man with a history of erratic behavior and a questionable track record with women suffered a career setback. His judgment has been thrown into doubt, with many coming forward to question his ability to lead. And yet as I write this, it seems likely that he will continue to do so, despite the long string of evidence suggesting that he shouldn’t be granted more power.
 
But enough about Elon Musk.
 
No, seriously: It’s pocket change for him, but during any other week, paying $20 million in fines to the SEC deserves to lead at least one news cycle, right? Yet the announcement of the fine and Musk’s temporary slight demotion at Tesla was pretty fully eclipsed by Christine Blasey Ford’s devastating testimony last week, and the ensuing, maddeningly incomplete fallout.
 
A year ago, when I sent the first edition of this newsletter, I did worry, slightly, that there might not be enough business news to analyze through a gender-focused lens every week. A few hours later, the Harvey Weinstein story broke.
 
I didn’t anticipate the ensuing flood of #MeToo stories, or the amount of information we now all possess about the drunken behavior (and, ugh, genitalia) of would-be Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh. But in a way I didn’t have to. Thanks to the past year it’s become more common to see gender considered in business news, but stories like Musk’s (and, thanks to Anita Hill, stories like Kavanaugh’s) have been around for decades. Wikipedia biases, CEO gender gaps, Nobel prize disparities (congratulations, Donna Strickland!), finance-shaming successful women, really terrible award-winning writing – all of these things have existed for years, generally unremarked and generally accepted.
 
So thank you, sincerely, for reading this every week (or the weeks that you do!) Thank you for your emailed notes when you like, or disagree with, something I’ve written. Thank you for staying through my rage and exasperation and silliness. And stay tuned in the next couple of weeks, as we’re going to be rolling out a new recurring Q&A feature with some very accomplished women.
 
Which brings me to a quote that pretty much sums up my reaction to the current hellish news cycle.
 

The Business of Being Brené

"Fuuuuuuuck." Sighing sotto voce, head falling into her hands, Brown is responding to the obvious question: How does she prioritize her load of researching, speaking, writing, and running her company?

As soon as she utters the exasperated expletive, Brown regrets it--and starts negotiating to erase it. It's a perplexing reaction from a self-described "fifth-generation Texan with a family motto of 'lock and load,' " who even admits to me that the F-word is "very comfortable. That's my cuss word." So isn't using it authentic and on-brand for Brené Brown?

Yes and no. "It's on-brand for me, but not for the work," she says, noting that being known for profanity risks alienating a wider audience. "Here's the tension: Not being my authentic self is incredibly dangerous to the work." She pauses. "My language can sometimes not serve the work."

For the cover story of Inc.’s October issue, now out on newsstands and gradually coming online, I interviewed Brené Brown, the researcher, PhD and best-selling author who first became widely known for her viral TedxHouston talk about vulnerability.
 
She’s in the midst of re-launching her 27-person consulting business, which was the impetus for the Inc. story, and one of the things I admired about Brown was her decision to stop her company from turning into something bigger than she wants it to be:
 

It's a process that's involved false starts, the shutting down of successful products, and being honest--or what Brown would call being courageous--about what she wants, and doesn't want, to spend her time doing. "When I first started, I didn't say no to anything, because I wanted to prove I could do it," says Brown. Now, five years into turning her expertise into a real business, she says this will be the year of "saying no to a lot of things, and getting really clear on who I want to be."

 
Another thing I found very relatable, as the above expletive indicates, was the dichotomy between Brown’s professional ambition and her personal discomfort with the trappings of celebrity:
 

"I don't mourn anything," Brown says, "because--" and here she stops, for 11 silent seconds--"I am unapologetically ambitious, and I'm not any more ambitious now than I was then."

However--and here she pauses again--"I don't like being a public person."

Brown’s also part of Inc.’s Female Founders 100, a new annual list of some of the most impressive entrepreneurs currently working; that list is just online this morning, and next week I’ll highlight some of my favorite parts.
 

Lady Bits

 
--“What can I say to this? It’s fair. He’s just spent four years with seemingly total control over a product. Every word, every image, every shirt, every song, every typeface for the credits, all signed off by him. I spoke with his co-stars and associates, they all used very glowing words to describe his assiduous attention to detail, his commitment to authenticity and all the other words we have that mean “control freak.” Now he’s going to relinquish that control to me?” The tensions of profiling celebrities who are most comfortable telling their own stories, as explained by Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s New York Times interview of Bradley Cooper.
 
--"Oh, we're doing a new show. About poverty, drug lords, gun running, weird-ass restaurants, skateboarding ... oh, and also genocide. It's called 'Society is F'd.'" The season premiere of The Good Place came hard for the absurdities of online video, between this driveby takedown of Vice (sorry, “Squalor News”) and the Vogue-inspired “582 Questions with” parody interview.
 
Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com