To begin with, a quiz. Who wrote the following sentences: Lee Iacocca, Jack Welch, or Sheryl Sandberg?

(a) When communicating hard truths, less is often more.

(b) It takes self-confidence, courage and a willingness to take the heat when you make the tough calls.

(c) Opportunities are rarely offered; they’re seized.

(d) Get your priorities straight and keep a hot list of what you’re trying to do.

(e) Seeking out diverse experiences is useful preparation for leadership.

(f) People used to ask me, “How could somebody as busy as you go to all those swim meets and recitals?” I just put them down on my calendar as if I were seeing a supplier or a dealer that day.

Sheryl Sandberg
Sheryl Sandberg; drawing by James Ferguson

Before looking at the answers—at the bottom of this page1 —look closely at the prose. These are the words of successful people. More to the point, these are the words of successful people who are trying to sell the secrets of their success to others. In order to do so, they have tailored their language to appeal to the widest possible audience. Hence the blandness of the vocabulary, the interchangeability of the thoughts, the imperative and declarative nature of the sentences.

The similarity of the language may also reflect some parallels between the lives of the writers, all of which have been outstanding. Welch ran General Electric before writing Winning (2005), a best seller that made him into a business guru. Iacocca ran Chrysler before writing Iacocca: An Autobiography (1984), a best seller that made him into a business guru too. Both men then wrote more books, gave lucrative, inspirational speeches, and consciously made themselves into role models for others.

Sandberg hasn’t quite reached CEO heights—she is chief operating officer of Facebook, not the top boss—but then she has some qualities the top boss of that organization doesn’t. Certainly she’s more charismatic, more eloquent, more approachable. Her gender has also contributed to her book’s style and to its reception. There aren’t that many telegenic, superstar female business executives out there, but there are probably a lot of people who would like to become one—especially one who earned $845 million in share options last year. Like its predecessors, Lean In has now become a best seller, and it’s safe to guess that it will make Sandberg into a business guru as well.

Ultimately, Sandberg’s goals are familiar ones too. Lean In, she explains at the end of the book, is not “the end of the conversation, but the beginning”:

I invite you to continue the discussion with me by joining the Lean In Community at www.facebook.com/leaninorg. Let’s keep talking about these issues and supporting one another…. I also encourage you to visit www.leanin.org for practical education and personal experiences that can help you reach your goals. Here you can explore topics critical to your success—from negotiating effectively to understanding your strengths. You also can create and join Lean In Circles, small peer groups that meet in person for ongoing encouragement and development.

Although these suggestions have been hailed as a novelty, they too are familiar tactics. Welch also has a website: www.welchway.com offers an online management training program that “delivers battle-tested business techniques you can put into action immediately.” Meanwhile, those who visit www.leeiacocca.com can download a Leadership Scorecard that “is most effective when shared with colleagues, family, and friends.” Readers are invited to “share your thoughts” with Iacocca, and with one another. Thus can the discussion be continued with these older male gurus too, perhaps in small peer groups that meet in person.

By writing that all three of these books share many qualities, I don’t intend to diminish Sandberg’s achievement. She has indeed done something new: She has written the first truly successful, best-selling “how to succeed in business” motivational book to be explicitly designed and marketed for women. She has done so cleverly, using language intended to appeal to women—“ongoing encouragement and development” as opposed to “battle-tested business techniques.” As part of her pitch to women, she also claims to be telling a larger story about gender and society, about which more in a moment. But this is not a book that belongs on the shelf alongside Gloria Steinem and Susan Faludi. It belongs in the business section.

Despite her gender, the similarities between Sandberg and Welch or Iacocca, for example, are more profound than the differences. Lean In, like Winning or Talking Straight, is neither a proper autobiography nor a work of journalism. Sandberg has conducted no original research. Instead she deploys autobiographical anecdotes, backed up by social science studies and material from other people’s books. Some of the social science studies are dubious. Sandberg claims, for example, that studies show that “couples who share domestic responsibilities have more sex.” Alas, other studies show precisely the opposite.2 But that isn’t the point: this is a motivational tract, not a scientific paper.

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Like Welch or Iacocca’s books, Lean In also offers not specific advice but more universal words of wisdom. Sandberg isn’t telling you to buy stocks instead of bonds this year, she is offering inspiring but generic suggestions that could have equally come from a fortune cookie: Set your priorities. Leap at opportunities. Take risks. Communicate clearly. Find ways to balance work and family.

Not all of this advice is consistent. On the contrary, as Amanda Hess of Slate has perceptively written, Sandberg frequently contradicts herself.3 At one point, she encourages women to pretend to be confident even when they aren’t, indulging in “an hour of forced smiling” if necessary: “feeling confident—or pretending that you feel confident—is necessary to reach for opportunities.” Four chapters later, she proffers precisely the opposite advice: “Instead of putting on some kind of fake ‘all-work persona,’ I think we benefit from expressing our truth.” At another point, she explains that she wants women to speak up—one of her strongest anecdotes describes a business meeting at which the men all spoke and the women stayed silent—but also admits that she herself has been coached in order to learn how to speak less.

Startlingly, she even contradicts the piece of advice most central to the book. From the beginning to the end of Lean In, Sandberg argues again and again that women must overcome internal and external barriers, welcome challenges, not back away, not assume they won’t be able to do something because they are pregnant or might be pregnant or won’t be able to cope. This is what she means, after all, by the expression “lean in.” “This book makes the case for leaning in, for being ambitious in any pursuit,” she writes, and the subtitle is “Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.”

And yet, in the summer of 2006, Sandberg herself was offered a top job, not as the chief operating officer but as the CEO of LinkedIn:

But the timing was tricky. I was thirty-seven years old and wanted to have a second child…. I had to pass because I didn’t think I could handle both a pregnancy and a new job.

In other words, she leaned out.

These contradictions reflect a deeper problem: motivational slogans, whether they come from Sandberg or Welch, are almost always useless in real-life situations. In practice, a successful woman—like a successful man—must learn, early on, how much emotion to show and how much to conceal, depending on the circumstances. She must learn how much to speak and how much to keep silent, for that depends on the circumstances too. Above all, she must understand herself well enough to know which challenges are worth accepting and which—given her personal situation, her husband, her finances, her interests, her age—must be sensibly refused.

Sometimes it makes sense, in the lives of both men and women, to leap at opportunities. Sometimes it’s foolish. Some risks are worth taking and others are not. But this book steers well away from such subtleties. Once again, however, that isn’t the point: Sandberg is not offering a life plan, she is offering words of inspiration.

For similar reasons, the book offers no real insights into how Sandberg actually does it. How is her life organized? How is her balance achieved? What does it really cost? How does she cope with travel? With weekends? With vacations? Only twice in the book does she—very briefly—mention her household help, which I have to assume is quite substantial. After the birth of her first child, she and her husband hired a nanny, “but she couldn’t solve all our problems.” She has a helpful husband, but he too has a full-time job. She has a nice sister, but she is a working physician. Faced with a similar dilemma, a Californian businesswoman of my acquaintance hired a second nanny as a supplement, and eventually a third. Is that what Sandberg did? She never tells us.

Only once does she give us a glimpse of a specific work-life-balance strategy she successfully deployed while still working at Google. When returning to the office after her child was born, she “went to great lengths to hide my new schedule from most people”:

Camille, my ingenious executive assistant, came up with the idea of holding my first and last meetings of the day in other buildings to make it less transparent when I was actually arriving or departing. When I did leave directly from my office, I would pause in the lobby and find a colleague-free moment to bolt to my car.

Sandberg now writes that this obsessive desire to conceal how much time she spent at home “stemmed from my own insecurity.” But there’s nothing new here. When going to his daughter’s swim meets, Iacocca would write “country club” in his diary (as quoted previously), “as if I were seeing a supplier or dealer,” pop out of the office, go to the meet, and come back, without necessarily being all that clear about where he was going.

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And perhaps this was extremely clever: when you have a new baby and a big job, maybe it’s a good idea not to be entirely clear about your whereabouts. Perhaps a gift for subterfuge and a talent for scheming even help explain Sandberg’s (and Iacocca’s) success. In fact Sandberg has a number of other unusual qualities that she doesn’t advertise—qualities that would not fit so easily into a fortune cookie—but that may also explain how she got to be a multimillionaire COO. Obsessive workaholism, for example: after her baby was born,

I started checking e-mails around 5:00 AM. Yup, I was awake before my newborn. Then once he was down at night, I would jump back on my computer and continue my workday.

Again she seems embarrassed by this behavior. But why? It is perfectly possible that zealous addiction to work and careful attention to detail, especially at five in the morning, are precisely what helped get her to where she is today.

Other factors, even harder to imitate, must also explain Sandberg’s rise. For example, she surely has an astonishing and unusual capacity to cope with difficult, socially awkward, borderline-Asperger’s men: Sergey Brin, Larry Summers, Mark Zuckerberg. This is not a talent that many women, or indeed many men, are lucky enough to possess. But then she has been very lucky in other ways as well. At Harvard, for example, Sandberg happened to take a class with Summers, who happened to hire her as a research assistant before he happened to become treasury secretary. Upon arriving in the government, he made her his chief of staff.

Coincidences like this have a part in the life of any successful person. Bill Gates, for example, has acknowledged how much he benefited from several unlikely pieces of good fortune: unusually early access to computers, teenage proximity to computer labs, the chance to learn programming before anyone else did. “I was very lucky,” he told Malcolm Gladwell at the beginning of an interview about the sources of his success. Gates easily acknowledges the role of chance and fortune—but then he isn’t seeking to package his life story as a source of motivation for others.4

By contrast, Sandberg is disinclined to talk about luck, and this makes sense: If that’s all it was, then what lessons can she sell to women in Lean In? What will women talk about at Lean In circles? What will they write on the Lean In Facebook page? Her lack of interest in the mechanics of her own career is equally understandable. One can quite see that “Be dishonest about your working hours” or “Be at the right place at the right time” doesn’t have the same ring as “Opportunities are rarely offered; they’re seized.” That sort of advice wouldn’t have made this book into a best seller.

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MGM/Photofest

Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, and Reginald Owen in Woman of the Year, 1942

Of course there is one element that distinguishes Lean In from the motivational books that have preceded it. Aside from the fact that Sandberg is female, aside from the fact that her book is written and marketed for women, and aside from the fact that it has already sold well, it also makes some much larger claims about gender and society. This is not unusual: very rich people quite frequently conclude that their business experiences (and their money) qualify them to pronounce with great confidence on politics, economics, morality, and much else.

But Sandberg has chosen to make a more specific argument. Lean In, she explains, is designed to address a serious, important social problem: the lack of powerful women at the very top of corporate America. This, she believes, is no minor crisis:

We can’t avoid this conversation. This issue transcends all of us. The time is long overdue to encourage more women to dream the possible dream and encourage more men to support women in the workforce and in the home.

We can reignite the revolution by internalizing the revolution. The shift to a more equal world will happen person by person. We move closer to the larger goal of true equality with each woman who leans in.

A cynic might look at this language as yet another marketing technique: perhaps women are more likely to buy a motivational business book if it’s disguised as a quasi-feminist tract.

But that seems unfair. Sandberg has repeated this argument in other places, after all, and she does really seem to care about the dearth of top women bosses. I’m therefore inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt, and to accept that she really means it. But in that case, the question needs to be thrown back at her. For yes, it’s absolutely true, only twenty-one Fortune 500 CEOs are females. But is this really a major social problem? Is this an issue that “transcends all of us”? Does the solution require “reigniting the revolution,” and does it mean men and women alike must rethink their lives and priorities? To put it differently, would the world be very different for women—or for men—if two hundred and fifty Fortune 500 CEOs were female?

To the last question, the answer—purely on the evidence of Sandberg’s book—is no. I am not the first person to notice that Lean In does not propose any concrete changes to corporate or public policy in order to accommodate women in top jobs, with a single exception. When she was at Google, Sandberg had trouble finding a parking place at the company headquarters one day. Heavily pregnant, nauseous, she barely made it to her meeting. The next day “I marched in—or more like waddled in—to see Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in their office.” Finding Sergey “in a yoga position in the corner,” she announced that the company needed pregnancy parking, “preferably sooner rather than later.” He agreed immediately.

Other than that, this book provides no evidence that Sandberg’s presence at the top of the company has directly altered the corporate culture of either Google or Facebook. She does speak vaguely of more tolerance for parental duties, family-friendly working hours, and sharing tasks with husbands (as noted, she does not mention nannies, after-school programs, or day care). But she gives no examples of where or how this has been successfully transformed into a company policy. At the same time, all of her personal anecdotes show her working harder, longer hours than anyone else and accepting bigger, tougher challenges. Generally, she advocates adjusting one’s life to the punishing routine of corporate success rather than vice versa. That’s what she did, and that’s what successful men do too.

One presumes that Sandberg is more inclined than a man in her position to hire a woman or to recommend one, that the very existence of top women encourages others.5 But if she ever did anything specifically for her female colleagues, by example or by design, she doesn’t say so. Nor is she unique. Recently Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo—another female business superstar—banned her employees from working from home. That much-discussed decision seemed, to many, to reflect a lack of female solidarity, since working from home is particularly good for mothers. More recently, Mayer seemed to atone for that decision by declaring that Yahoo would begin offering eight weeks maternity or paternity leave to both men and women at the company. Yet this too sends a confusing message. Mayer herself famously took only two weeks maternity leave, and worked all the way through them. Shouldn’t women who want to run companies follow her example, not her public pronouncements?

But even if women at the top don’t necessarily make things easier for other women in the corporate world, could their absence still be a huge obstacle—the most important obstacle, the central obstacle—facing women more generally? Alas that too is hard to prove, particularly if one takes into account the arguments of another recent book, one that is very different in both substance and style. Unlike Lean In, Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men is very well documented, meticulously researched, and based on the author’s extensive reporting, not her personal life story. It also draws almost exactly the opposite conclusion. In The End of Men, Rosin argues that the real crisis facing America today is not the dearth of women bosses, but the dearth of men at all levels except at the very top.

Provocatively, Rosin argues that the evolution of the service economy and the decline of blue-collar jobs have created a world that increasingly favors classically “female” talents, starting with a greater ability to sit still and listen in school, and continuing with better “people skills” of the kind needed to get ahead in the modern world. Rosin’s work is backed up not by social science studies on housework and sex but by hard facts. In the Great Recession, three quarters of the 7.5 million jobs lost belonged to men. For every two men who will receive a BA this year, three women will do the same. Of the fifteen job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the US, all but two are occupied primarily by women. Not only that, Rosin finds similar patterns elsewhere in the world: “We are starting to see how quickly an order we once considered ‘natural’ can be overturned.”

Rosin is inclined to see the positive side of this story—she thinks it’s a good thing that women now occupy more positions of power—but she faithfully documents the downside as well. Middle-class, lower-middle-class, and poor men are dropping out of the workforce on a previously unimaginable scale. And this phenomenon, Rosin capably demonstrates, is extremely bad for women. Male underachievement, male unemployment, and male failure are undermining marriage, harming children, and destroying families.

The impact on the poor is already visible: the number of children who live in families headed by single mothers is at an all-time high, despite the evidence that children in such families have worse educational, financial, and psychological outcomes. Though it may be unavoidable, single motherhood generally isn’t good for the mothers either: raising children alone can be stressful and exhausting, maybe even more stressful and exhausting than running a large company. Sandberg has said many times that successful women must be sure to marry the right sort of man: helpful, respectful of her career, willing to split household tasks 50–50. But it will be difficult, if not impossible, for women to “dream the possible dream” if there are not merely few helpful men to marry, but few marriageable men at all.6

In addition to the ever more limited prospects for men in America and their detrimental effect on women, there is another gender crisis upon which Sandberg might have focused her considerable energy and talent. Unfortunately, this particular gender crisis doesn’t affect the American book-buying public at all. She alludes to it in the introduction to Lean In:

There are still countries that deny women basic civil rights. Worldwide, about 4.4 million women and girls are trapped in the sex trade. In places like Afghanistan and Sudan, girls receive little or no education, wives are treated as the property of their husbands, and women who are raped are routinely cast out of their homes for disgracing their families. Some rape victims are even sent to jail for committing a “moral crime.” We are centuries ahead of the unacceptable treatment of women in these countries.

But instead of calling on the Silicon Valley sisterhood to gather together its considerable resources on behalf of women around the world who not only suffer from real discrimination but whose lives are at risk because of it, Sandberg urges American women, in effect, not to be distracted by the plight of the women of Afghanistan and Sudan: “Knowing that things could be worse should not stop us from trying to make them better.” With that single sentence, she abandons the “4.4 million women” in the sex trade (rather a low-sounding number), the even more millions of girls with no education, and the rape victims who are sent to jail for committing a moral crime. She does not return to them in the rest of the book.

Once again: would two hundred and fifty female Fortune 500 CEOs make a big difference to American women? Maybe a little bit, with things like pregnancy parking. Would they work doggedly to change American legislation in order to provide better access to child care, early education, and other programs that would make working life easier for women and men alike? Not necessarily. Would they help American men find employment in the changing economy, so they can help support their wives and families? Not very likely. Would they help the women around the world who suffer real hardship solely because they are women? On the evidence of this book, not at all.

This isn’t an objection to the two hundred and fifty female Fortune 500 CEOs who will probably emerge, someday, if current trends are anything to go by. More power to them! I am merely asking whether their absence, at the moment, is an issue that “transcends all of us.”

This isn’t really an objection to Sandberg’s book, either, just an argument for being clear about what it is. I repeat: this is a motivational, inspirational, self-help business book, part of a long tradition of such books in American publishing. Because it’s the first really successful such book to be written by a woman, it’s a landmark of sorts. So do read Lean In if you’re looking for some positive uplift, some stirring stories, and some advice about your job or your marriage. But don’t read it if you want to learn how to change the world.