Lady Business: COO glass ceilings vs. CEO promotions; Veronica Mars and storytelling dichotomies

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 seventy-sixth issue, published July 25, 2019. 
 

Repetition, Not Rocket Science

When I was approached for Climb's top role, the biggest question was, "Do I want to be a CEO?" I talked to a lot of people, but being a CEO is kind of like childbirth. People can explain it a million times, but you won't know it until you go through it. You consistently deal with scenarios you've never seen before. Maybe at some point that stops. It hasn't for me, yet.

I have another interview I really enjoyed doing in the July issue of Inc.: Angela Ceresnie, who’s running New York lending startup Climb Credit after a career of, as she initially put it to me, being “a really good number two” to other leaders.
 
Ceresnie, who I first covered when she was running operations and finance for now-acquired startup Orchard Financial, had taken some time off before joining Climb. She started there in another chief operating officer role, and “having been Orchard's COO, there were many challenges at [in the same job at] Climb where I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. I've done this,’” she recalled. “Different company, same thing. It's not rocket science.”
 
Which, to return to last week’s newsletter, is a great way to think of gaining experience! Things become easier with repetition … until they become too easy, of course, and you’re itching for the next professional challenge.
 
That’s one of the reasons I found Ceresnie’s story unusual. A lot of startups and tech companies tend to hire women as COOs, whether because we as a gender are seen as good “problem solvers” (as Ceresnie describes herself) or because it’s an easy way to signal that your tech-bro company is, like, totally cool with giving a woman power. (Just not too much power, okay? Not ultimate CEO power.) As this 2018 Fortune feature asked, “Does the COO role risk becoming a glass ceiling in itself—a position from which accomplished women leaders stoke the industry’s growth, in a perpetual supporting role, without breaking into the CEO boys’ club?”
 
Ceresnie didn’t hit that glass ceiling; Climb’s board eventually did offer her the CEO promotion, and she told me how it’s changed her professional life and career trajectory – with investors, with employees, and even with her own self-confidence:
 

I've also tried to develop that muscle of not needing external validation. I have a sense of where I will struggle and where I will be naturally strong. It's been fun to take these more amorphous problems and figure out how I can solve them the way I solve problems. So far, when I've challenged myself to do things, I've been able to do them.

Serving the Story

I haven’t watched the new Hulu season of Veronica Mars, and after reading the spoilers, I may never get around to it. (I’m on record as not loving the fan service of the crowdfunded movie, but I’m also not big on gratuitous trauma!)
 
But I was fascinated by this Alan Sepinwall interview with series creator Rob Thomas, because it explains so much about what I often find frustrating about television writing -- especially for series that try to stay alive indefinitely, instead of planning for a good ending. As Thomas told Sepinwall:
 

If I had given [the story] a nice bow, we never would have seen more Veronica Mars. At the time that I wrote the Season Three finale, the CW was telling us, “Hey, you might want to tie this up. There’s a good chance you may not be coming back.” And that was one where I fought it: “We’re going to go down swinging, if that’s the case.” But I think that feeling of there not being a conclusion, of leaving Veronica midstream, was why we got to do more.

 
It’s a good illustration of TV (and movie franchise) storytelling as an art vs. commerce dichotomy: Writing unresolved angst makes sense, if your goal is “do more of this thing! Tell more stories about these characters.” Cynically, “make more money out of the same idea.” 
 
But it rarely makes for satisfying stories. I’m on record, too, as thinking that Veronica Mars was a perfect one-season show; and I can’t help but compare this most recent revival to Kristen Bell’s other current TV series, eternal fave The Good Place. That show recently announced plans to end after its fourth season, mostly because that will yield the story conclusion the writers always had in mind:
 
“At times over the past few years we’ve been tempted to go beyond four seasons, but mostly because making this show is a rare, creatively fulfilling joy,” series creator Mike Schur said at the time. “And at the end of the day, we don’t want to tread water just because the water is so warm and pleasant.”
 

Lady Bits

--Lady Business will be on deadline next week. We’ll be back on August 8!
 
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