Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life by Emma Grede - 14

It’s never too late to become what you might have been.

—George Eliot

I was finally in my own office, and it was beautiful. I had started ITB in a corner of the Saturday Group office. Once we outgrew that, we occupied part of the parent company’s office, Independent Talent, but we had finally outgrown that as well, and I now had my own space on Gresse Street in Fitzrovia. We were in an amazing area, with floor-to-ceiling windows, long desks, and campaign photographs on the wall. I had designed the whole thing myself. I had even carefully hand-applied the ITB vinyl to the reception desk. The whole thing was mine, and I was feeling myself—until my first board meeting on the premises. I had dressed up for the occasion, and I was sweating profusely. I was always sweating profusely before a board meeting. They would twist me into knots. I was a mess before, during, and after.

I’ll never forget this particular one because it involves probably the most impactful piece of feedback I’ve ever received. I also remember it because I was furious. While I normally love being married to a Swede, sometimes I wish he could be a tiny bit softer and less direct with his feedback—or at least time it better. This moment was no different.

“Why are you so nervous?” Jens was legitimately confused.

I didn’t know. While I’m great at chat and an excellent presenter who can sell anything to anyone, when it came time for these meetings, I was full of self-doubt, always on the precipice of falling apart.

“I know why you’re suffering, Emma.” He turned to me. “You have an employee mentality.”

An employee what???

I couldn’t think about anything else during the meeting, letting the words sink in. Intuitively I knew he was right. After we wrapped up, when I had a chance to regroup and pull myself together, I thought about why. I was twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, and up until that point, I’d only ever been an employee. I hadn’t shifted my mindset when I opened my own agency. Instead of being there as the CEO to guide the board to a decision, I was looking for everyone else to tell me what to do. I was seeking their approval rather than coming into the room and stating the direction, convincing everyone to come with me: This is the direction we’re going in, and here’s what will be waiting for us when we arrive. Jens offered me an excellent insight, and with time, I was able to integrate what he said and change the way I came into a board meeting—and how I thought about myself as a leader.

At that point in my career, I felt so fragile in my role, I probably could have only heard that feedback from someone close to me, but I’m offering it to you here because I see it plague so many of us—including women who haven’t been in charge for a long time. These are women who work for themselves as consultants or creatives, as well as women who run their own businesses, both big and small.

For me, it has been a natural urge to look to other people to be my boss. Part of this happens because we feel like we should feel so grateful just to be there. I know that I felt that way at those ITB meetings. I had no idea what I was doing and mostly operated on gut instinct—who was I to boss these people around, all of them older and more seasoned than me? I felt totally intimidated. But as I thought about it more, I realized I knew what I was doing. Not only that, I was holding the vision because it was my idea. I just needed Jens to point out something obvious, and yet hard to see: “You do understand that no one is your boss in that room? You are the boss, and they are waiting for your guidance. They’re waiting for you to say, ‘I see it. Are you in?’ ” So obvious, and yet so scary and hard.

It takes a lot of effort to rewire yourself out of an employee mentality when it’s your turn to lead, but it’s essential: You need to trust that you’re holding the mission and the vision. I cannot stress this enough. It is your job to hold this vision, reinforce this vision, and create the container in which fantastic people do their best work to help you realize this vision. You must manage your team with the ethos of your company at the heart of all your decision-making.

In Good to Great , Jim Collins outlines five stages of leaders—Highly Capable Individual, Contributing Team Member, Competent Manager, Effective Leader, and Executive—as well as the key traits of a Level 5 Leader. I love the key traits he articulates because they are simple and true: He argues that you need to blend personal humility and professional ambition. What this means functionally is that you want your company to win, and you will set up your organization to do exactly that. That is your job. Everything you do is not in service to your own ego; it’s to serve the larger business as an energetic organism. You must have an enterprise mentality. If something goes sideways, you don’t blame yourself; you correct the problem. And if something goes right, you don’t assume it was all you.

This sounds simple, but it’s not easy. In many ways there’s relief in having a boss—it gives you someone to blame if it doesn’t work out as planned, and it sure is nice to pass all the hard decisions to someone else to make, but I promise, leading doesn’t need to be so lonely. In fact, I’m going to offer that building an incredible team is the most important—and joyful—part of creating a successful business. This is one of the things I excel at: attracting world-class talent and highly competent people. But in order to do that, you need to find your footing as a leader first.

People often ask me about my leadership philosophy, and I used to have a reflexive response: I must have missed that day in business school. But over the years, I’ve come to take the question seriously, specifically because I believe the cultures I’ve helped to build are responsible for the growth and success of the businesses I lead. I recognize that my behavior determines the behavior of my teams. I am a model for them, both in how I function and lead at work, but also in what might just be possible for them in their careers as well. Like many of them, I built my life from the bottom up. I’ve been in the same shoes as everyone on my teams. I’ve packed up the samples, I’ve stayed late to prep shoots, I’ve written the email copy, I’ve toiled over packaging design. Teams love this, not only because it means that I appreciate their effort and know what it takes, but because I’m a model of possibility. Because we share core experiences, it stands that what I’ve achieved is within their grasp as well.

At its core, my success in building cultures and leaders revolves around some core tenets that create an environment where I trust my team and they trust me. I’ve established this trust in part because I tell the truth, and I expect the same in response. There’s a concept in America called an exit interview where people who are transitioning out of the company can tell you to go fuck yourself (basically!). I don’t do them because they’re symptoms of a business culture where people feel like they can’t speak up. You’re going to get the opportunity to tell me to go fuck myself at the end? Why didn’t you tell me six months ago? I want people to tell me the truth in the moment, so I bake this into the culture: I give direct feedback, and I receive direct feedback. It’s an expectation. My teams also trust me because I take responsibility and accountability for when and where I mess up, which means that when mistakes are made, they feel safe to own them, too. I admit when I’m wrong, and I apologize, and the standards I hold for the team are the same ones I hold for myself. This means that if I come to someone with a harsh critique, they’ve likely seen me do it to myself.

I also make people feel seen, heard, and represented. It’s perhaps not a surprise that this is the strapline of Good American because customers feel this way about the brand. The same is true of the team. Even if inclusivity might not be everyone on the team’s passion, specifically, they feel like they are part of a larger mission and that the work means something in the world—and that their part, specifically, is important. I really go out of my way to recognize and acknowledge good work. I often say that culture is who you hire, who you fire, and who you promote. I fundamentally believe that not only is this true, but it’s the clearest way to express to your team that their dedication will be rewarded. My team also knows that I will always, always back them, and that I never shift to blaming and shaming, only ever accountability and personal responsibility. I start with myself, and I expect them to do the same. Because of this, I will always, always, always go to bat for them if the shit ever hits the fan. I interpret their actions generously and prize effort and speed over perfection.

So, in a nutshell, my leadership philosophy boils down to the following:

1. Old Thought: If you’re going to lead, you need to know how to do it all.

The simple truth is if you play small, you stay small.

—Anonymous

At the inception of Good American, at my very first investment review where we were planning out the season and taking bets on the product, I failed to do my job. I got lost in an overly complicated Excel spreadsheet that was packed with numbers and acronyms I didn’t recognize or understand. I felt embarrassed and humiliated. I felt like I couldn’t contribute to the financial conversation and had no place even being there. At the time, I didn’t understand that it wasn’t my job to do the math; it was my job to tell the team what the biggest SKU would be and how the product story would link up together to connect with what the consumer would want in twelve months’ time. When I got over my shame, when I started asking the planners and the merchants in the room to translate the acronyms and paint me a picture in layman’s terms, when I stopped being intimidated and waded into the complexity with them, I realized that obsessing about the financial details wasn’t actually my job. I needed to know what I needed to know so I could make decisions, but my job was to see the forest for the trees and call the plays. In that moment, I realized I was the only person with the vision to pull the trigger on these big decisions that would determine the trajectory of the company’s business along with our product and brand vision.

In short, one of my biggest breakthroughs in business came when I finally admitted that I didn’t know everything. The next breakthrough came when I stopped pretending that I did to everyone else. Like so many other women, I was caught in a perfectionist trap: I felt like I needed to be great at everything and have all the answers. This is a very real fear for all of us, this fear of not being good enough or falling short of expectations. It can be a crippling and overwhelming anxiety. The instinct toward perfectionism makes complete sense, too, as we believe that doing everything perfectly means we get to avoid criticism and rejection. I feel this acutely, I really do. It’s never louder in our minds than when we’re about to start something new or step out of our comfort zones. But to step out of your comfort zone and start something new, you need to get past it.

I’ve been the person who sat in meetings and masked what I didn’t know. It’s excruciating, the hope that someone isn’t going to ask you what you think. My reaction to feeling this way initially was to try to counter it, to convince myself that I needed to learn how to do it all before I deserved to start a business, much less lead one. I honestly believed that being in charge meant I needed to have every answer. I micromanaged every decision and every person. I thought if I didn’t control every detail, it wouldn’t get done right and we’d be exposed as incompetent—what I didn’t realize is that this was not a competent way to lead.

I wasn’t alone in this leadership style. So many of us believe we’re supposed to be able to do everything—we believe if we don’t have an innate understanding of every part of every person’s job, then we’re failing, or we can’t mentor or enable that person’s work. I felt this way for an awfully long time and went way over my skis trying to manage every part of the business. I don’t do this anymore. These days, I can’t even tell you the ERP I system we run our businesses on, much less how it works, or how to use it—I’ve never been in it, and I don’t want to be in it. Trying to understand this would not be a good use of my time.

It took me a long time to get comfortable with this—and I’m still not perfect at it. In fact, it’s probably safe to assume that I’m only comfortable foregoing an intimate understanding of the ERP because I’ve had business success. On one hand, you would be right; on the other, foregoing an intimate understanding of the ERP is precisely what happened to make me successful.

Early on in my career, I micromanaged the shit out of everyone. What this was: my own version of impostor syndrome, which was a desire to control and perfect. What this wasn’t: fun for anyone. The moment I stepped back and trusted the people I hired, my business exploded. It completely exploded. I let them manage the business I’d won. I didn’t insist on seeing all clients myself. I then translated this into durable leadership success by being honest with myself and crystal clear about what I wasn’t good at, and what skills I needed to look for outside myself. I came to understand that I needed to hire to buttress my primary gift, which is about being able to put the whole puzzle together rather than trying to be the whole puzzle. It took me a long time to get there, but being willing to hire the best people and get out of their way was a breakthrough for me. It was also part of an epiphany: My gift is not in any one part of the business; it’s in finding the best talent and then enabling them to do their best work in all parts of the business. I have the vision and consistently bring all departments back to why we do what we do and am able to connect everyone to doing the best work.

I now love nothing more than gathering the best people around me from all over the world. I love working with those people, in part because it means that I get to learn from the best. I am endlessly curious about their talent, especially now that I’ve let go of the belief that I need to have their talent. I never despair that they might be more knowledgeable or have more expertise, or that they might have more experience, or that they might be more articulate or better at something than me—I’m counting on it actually. That’s precisely why I’ve hired them. I’ve come to understand that surrounding myself with the best people makes me look good, and when I have the best people on my team, I no longer need to go around pretending to be the best person at everything. I can double down on what I do uniquely well. If you are weak at something, find the person who isn’t, and then get out of their way and let them do their thing.

Here are some good questions to ask yourself: Do you really know what you don’t know? What are things you might be “good” at but don’t enjoy? What are you not great at? What skills do you lack, and what are the areas where you need help? Are you being honest with yourself about your weaknesses? We all have them. As mentioned, I’m dyslexic and I find it really, really difficult to read spreadsheets, particularly when they’re full of numbers. I need context, and I need things translated so that I can make decisions. While I used to beat myself up about this, I now acknowledge that I’m not an expert in finance; I know enough to converse with my CFO, and they know how to create dashboards for me that align with how I understand information. II In that vein, I don’t imagine that I need to be a master of logistics and supply chain; I hire extraordinary operators and production experts. When I try to do something I’m not good at, it not only makes me miserable, it works against me. It doesn’t make me sharper or better; it blunts my tools.

This doesn’t mean that you get to completely bypass your weaknesses and make your job perfectly align with your preferences. You have to learn a baseline understanding of every part of your business. T-shaped leaders are the best leaders. These are leaders with deep vertical expertise, but who understand enough about everyone else’s vertical to be effective collaborators. You have to be willing to stretch outside your own preferences to work well with others. For example, I have a really short attention span, and I hate long meetings, particularly when they’re big. I thrive when there are fewer than five of us in a room. I believe the room gets less effective with every person you add. And yet, every single day I’m in a room with forty to fifty people where teams present upcoming collections to me. This is the only way it works. I may not like it, but it’s the most efficient path. Because I’m aware of my weaknesses, I’ve found a way to work in these forums.

I have a lot of respect for experts who spend their lives going deep on a single subject. This is not me, but it brings great value to all businesses. My “expertise” is in putting it all together. This is true for most great leaders. Yes, you need to innately understand your subject matter, but you also need to understand people—how they work together and how they don’t—and how to realize a vision. I sit with powerhouse people who have fifteen years more experience than I do, people who have run much bigger brands and teams. And through hard work, I no longer assume they know more than I do. They have more experience in their specific area of expertise, but how clever am I for putting them all together? If you find yourself micromanaging your finance team or driving your teams crazy, you either don’t have the right team, or you are not leading effectively.

What inadvertently happens when you’re convinced you’re the one who can do it all, and that you should do it all, is that all the incredible talent underneath you sees no path for growth—they’re frustrated, they feel controlled and micromanaged, they feel untrusted and stunted, and they leave. It is not a good use of talent, or the way to cultivate good talent. It can create a type of competition within a business, even if that’s not the intent—nobody wants to feel like their boss thinks they could do a better job. They want to feel like they have an important and singular role to play in the functioning of the business. Give them that space and that respect. I know it’s hard. There’s a lot of cultural pressure on us to be perfect, to have all bases covered, to not be an impostor—I promise you it’s to our detriment.

We labor under the belief that if we’re going to sit on top of an organization, we should be the best at everything. Men, on the other hand, like to surround themselves with a team of rivals III —they seem to have no issue keeping other men close to them who likely want to take their job. You can see this throughout corporate America in leadership teams that are largely male: Take Disney, for example, where there’s incessant infighting because they are all rivals and all ultimately want the top job. Apparently, it works really well for them. They’re all specialists, so Bob Iger runs it as a generalist, recognizing that he doesn’t also need to be the CFO, or the head of parks, or the CMO. You don’t need to understand the financials at the level of the CFO; you don’t need to be a comparable marketer to your CMO. If that’s where you’re focusing your energy, you won’t have time to hold the vision for the company and lead.

In my humble opinion, a lot of creative founders—yes, particularly women—feel like they’re being negligent if they don’t take the CEO role. I sometimes hear from them that they feel external pressure or are pressuring themselves to do the “top job” because giving that mantle to someone else will somehow mean they don’t make the biggest decisions. Sometimes I hear that because there aren’t that many women up in the ranks, to not hold complete control feels like a disservice to the entire gender. Here’s the thing about the CEO role though. It’s kind of the pits. It’s highly operational, very lonely, and not necessarily creative. Even when I hold the CEO title, I always put someone in the number two role as president who is strong and fills in for my blind spots, as being CEO is not where my greatest strengths are.

I don’t think women with the title always want the top job per se, but they often believe that if you’re the person in charge, you need the title. I’m here to tell you, you can still be the person running the company and calling the shots as the owner and bring in a skilled CEO to execute. It’s worth looking at men for inspiration here because Mark Zuckerberg is a nerdy engineer; he didn’t create the culture at Facebook that made them so successful in those early days—he hired Sheryl Sandberg to do that for him. In creative-led companies, you often see the opposite: A lot of underqualified creative directors try to run the business; it’s not always the best idea.

We know that we don’t get far alone, and yet many of us don’t truly believe it, thinking instead that we need to do everything ourselves. Acknowledging limitations is difficult, and yet it’s an essential superpower—if we can get over the anxiety of not being in complete control, we will get much further working together. There’s a rub that happens where we want to give women as many chances as we can, and we really want to see other women succeed, and yet we’re not always putting other women in positions of power in our own organizations because it feels too threatening. This is something all female leaders need to be really cognizant of, because it can sneak up on us—we’re not conscious of what we’re doing. This hiring piece is massive: You must park your ego because you need people who are better than you.

Every time I start something new, I’m honest with myself: Am I the best person to run this? For example, with Off Season, I realized I wasn’t the best person to run a business that had that level of complexity in a business category that I know very little about: sports. So I hired an exceptional president, Vicky Picca, to contend with the endless licenses and the relationships with players, agents, and teams that go with it. It took radical honesty to accept this and to not decide that it would be the best use of my time to learn the intricacies of every global sports league. I understand the pull of that type of intellectual curiosity, but I know to restrain myself and find someone who will do it much better because they’ve done it before.

I always, always want women to have the healthy pride to believe that they can figure something out—that’s a huge part of what will make you successful, particularly early in your career. But when you get to a certain level of success, sometimes the “figuring it out” is figuring out who can unlock that part of the business for you. The business can’t afford for you to learn on the job in that way—and you will drive yourself and your team crazy.

Creating leverage is critical for any start-up or business—and leadership is ultimately a leverage game. Everyone wants to feel the synergy of adding their unique part to the whole, to the collective success of the business, so you don’t want to deprive them of the opportunity. Nor do you likely have the money or the time to spare by not fully using everyone on your team to your advantage. You hired them and you’re paying them—enable them to do their best possible work.

I believe that the red thread throughout my career is that I really understand leverage. After all, I went from working behind-the-scenes at fashion shows and seeing a white space for designers who needed partnerships to eventually becoming the queen of collaborations. From there, I expanded the umbrella from designers to include artists and celebrities, tying it all together through my skills as a negotiator. I know how to bring two unlikely partners, people who see the world very differently, together to create something larger than either of them. Next, I made the massive leap of starting my own business by taking the core of what I understood about talent and the ability of talent to accelerate brands and businesses through campaigns. My intrinsic understanding of partnerships was the nugget that built Good American. Then I realized I needed to expand my understanding of partnership and find the best people to execute the vision—and not just any people, but the best people, since that is the synergy that’s possible when you put the right factors together in a business. I’d rather have a team of three than a team of thirty if it means I can get the best. These are the people who cannot only teach you everything but also help you realize your vision. Nobody is self-made; nobody does that alone.

New Thought: Leverage only comes after you recognize your strengths and your limitations and then hire and empower people whose talents surpass your own.

2. Old Thought: Take advantage of every opportunity that presents itself.

You’ve got to get up every morning with determination if you’re going to go to bed with satisfaction.

—George Lorimer

When you have a start-up, you get the gift of a million problems that invariably come with it. And you’re also going to receive not only a lot of competing priorities but a shit-ton of ideas for ways you can play it. It is very, very easy to become distracted by possibility and not wanting to cut off anything that might be the next big thing for your business—and at the same time, if you don’t focus, you will run out of time, resources, energy, and money. It’s one of the big business paradoxes.

Finding this balance is really hard, truly. Saying no is as important, if not more important, than saying yes. Very often, you need to ignore something that’s on fire and calling out for your attention to double down on the most important thing, which might not be that thing that’s on fire. One of the jobs of an effective leader is to continually retrain people’s attention on the most important things—and typically, you can’t really have more than three things on that list. (It always makes me laugh when people tell me their ten priorities, as priority literally means THE FIRST THING.) A significant and often overlooked part of focus is developing good daily routines—both for yourself and within the company—because good routines mean more things become automatic processes and you need to make fewer decisions, which frees up space and energy that everyone needs when you’re running at full speed. Ultimately, this type of discipline becomes habit, which evolves into culture—this works on both the personal and professional fronts.

As a leader, you need your team to align not only on the three most important things but also on how everyone’s work will ladder up to those three things. This is an essential step. It’s not enough to proclaim the three things and then leave departments to their own devices. It’s human nature, but we often pay lip service to alignment and then continue to prioritize our own preferences. Teams will want to do what they want to do. But when you’re in charge, not only do you need to be incredibly disciplined about your priorities, but you must require discipline throughout the organization if you have any hope of pulling collective focus off. Every time an exciting opportunity pops up that could be a side alley or an acceleration point, you need to repeatedly ask the question, Does this align with one of our three priorities? I’m going to stress this again and again, because if you can figure out company-wide cohesion and alignment, nothing else matters.

While it’s mission critical in start-up land, it’s relatively easy to stay in touch across the organization—likely there aren’t that many of you. But what invariably happens in any growing business, particularly if you’re moving quickly and team leaders feel a lot of autonomy (a good thing), is that you can get a bunch of fiefdoms. The e-commerce team has its focus, product is doing their own thing over there, while marketing and distribution are tuned in to their own passion projects. In addition to people being pulled toward what they want to do, what they are good at, or what they perceive to be the most important, everyone has their own distracting fires to put out as well. You can end up with organizational chaos if you’re not extremely disciplined. Good leadership is about constantly galvanizing everybody and having clarity of focus in the business and pushing everyone in the direction of your priorities and vision. Compulsively. Repetitively. You want to figure out what you can be the best at and double down on that. You want to resist the urge to overcomplicate things. You want to understand the problem you are uniquely solving and what your unique way of solving it is. You want to know what you can be the best at in the world. Then you ask how you can make money doing all of those things.

Sometimes, actually often , you won’t get to focus on the three things that you think are the most important or the most fun. This is the rub, but it’s true. This will be true in your career, in your leadership, and in your personal life. But you need to be clear about what you can and cannot do with your precious and scarce time, particularly as it relates to your goals. There are a lot of things I miss doing in the business—I hate having to skip meetings about print and color, for example, because these meetings are so fun, and I’m obsessed with print design. But unfortunately, I don’t get to spend my time at that level of the business anymore. We have a great team who are perfectly competent to oversee this function. I’ve had to let it go. My priorities have needed to shift. I have to give up the things I want to do all the time in service to the larger goals we’ve agreed upon. As much as I want to cheat, I can’t. The entire business requires discipline, particularly from its leaders.

Mark Cuban and I had a long conversation about this on my podcast and how successful entrepreneurs must learn to delegate to build efficiency. This is hard for women—speaking for myself, I had to learn how to delegate because I thought micromanaging was synonymous with “good managing.” But when you hire right, not only is this a disservice to the talent on your team, it creates resentment and makes it a challenge to retain talent. Great people want the wide lane and opportunity to be great, not to be controlled. As Mark explained, “You have to learn how to trust. Because when you’re really, really, really good at something, and it takes more time to convey it to someone and explain what you want, you just want to do it yourself. Let’s just get it done, right? We’ve got other shit to do!… But you have to be able to find your mini-mes and trust them so hard.” 1

At this point in my life, I’m very clear at what I’m good at and where I am most uniquely positioned to make things happen. And I recognize, through my processing of visioning and compulsively writing things down, that focus is a force multiplier. You must be able to drown out the noise around you and double down on the most important things. This is what will propel you forward. When you’re someone like me, a complete generalist, it’s easy to be in everything. But I can’t make a difference in everything. Being able to pull back and hold the bigger picture has given me so many unlocks—unlocks that wouldn’t have come if I’d been too deep into the minutiae. For example, back in the early days at Good American, I pulled myself out of the process of sampling all the denim fabrics, as it wasn’t a good use of time. When the team felt they’d found the one, someone presented a fabric and said, “We should call this one hundred percent stretchability.” In that moment, with my fresh eyes, I could say, “No, we’ll call it Always Fits. It’s one-size-fits-all. Instead of creating seventeen sizes, I’m going to create five that fit the full size range, and it’s going to be called Always Fits. If you’re on your period, or your weight is fluctuating up or down, your jeans don’t have to.” IV

That’s where I’m at my best: Pulling it all together into a cohesive identity—correlating it to what a customer wants and how she feels—and then baton tossing it to an exceptional team to make it happen. I’m excellent at getting things started, and I’m really good at seeing things through the eyes of the customer. If you are in a consumer business, the consumer’s experience had better be one of your priorities. I often find that companies get very internal and self-referential and obsessed with themselves, and they lose track of the way customers think. Everything these companies do becomes about their culture and their internal process… but your customer needs to be at the center of all your decision-making.

It is critical for me to stay as objective as possible about what we’re doing at the company, which is a practice in and of itself. It is so easy to get sucked into your own self-referential universe where you assume it will make sense to the customer (and matter to her) because it does to you. I avoid this quicksand by getting out of the office. It’s one of the best ways for me to create the conditions to be really thoughtful. I take a snapshot of what’s happening with my competition. I go on websites, I go in stores, asking the whole time: What is the customer seeing? What are they experiencing from this brand? What’s new and what’s happening more broadly? Then I go back and look as objectively as possible, doing my best not to believe my own bullshit. I’ve managed to retain this ability throughout the years, and it’s a superpower, one that you can also cultivate.

One way to do this is to sit down with your new employees. They will have fresh eyes for the business for the first few weeks, maybe the first few months, at most. At this point, they start telling themselves the same stories that we tell at the company internally. When there are new people in the business, I like to go to them and ask questions: What are you seeing? Where were you before? How does what you have seen compare to what we have told you about this company? Where is there disconnect? You can get excellent information about where you’re falling short and failing to live up to your own brand, and your own priorities, if you’re willing to listen to this type of feedback.

New Thought: You will struggle to get scale or succeed if you can’t limit your focus and align your team on a few shared goals.

3. Old Thought: If you’re a good leader, everyone should like you. You’ll never get to the top unless people love you, because nobody likes women who are too overtly ambitious.

Why any women give a shit what people think is a mystery to me.

—Alice Walker

“You think you’re so nice, you think you’re the shit, you think you’re so great.” So said a horrible girl I grew up around in Plaistow, who would always talk shit about me and to me.

I remember saying to myself at the time, I’m not going to be able to get through my whole life listening to this shit , particularly because I agreed with some of it. I did think I was nice, and I did think I was great—I didn’t have amazing hair, but I did have beautiful skin. (By “nice,” she meant “hot,” in American parlance.) In that moment, I resolved to get comfortable with other people being made uncomfortable by me. Intuitively, I knew it would be part of my journey. I don’t know if it was a thickening of the skin, but it was an awareness that some people weren’t going to like me, and I couldn’t make that my problem. Catering myself to the preferences of an eleven-year-old girl in Plaistow wasn’t my goal. In some ways, it was the beginning of having the opposite of impostor syndrome, which is a concept I think about a lot in the ways that it impinges on women. So many of us feel we suffer from impostor syndrome because we’re conditioned to be consumed by worrying about what other people are going to think and say about us. We become trained to be so conscious of other people’s opinions and feelings that we stop focusing on ourselves. When we’re managing the preferences of other people, we’re not thinking about how we want to show up. I couldn’t change what this girl thought or said about me—not only was it out of my control, but it wasn’t relevant. Who cares? As a young girl, I realized I wouldn’t please everyone, nor did I particularly want to. Likability could not be my guiding light.

We all need to get comfortable with this reality: If you’re going to be a good, effective leader, you will piss people off. In fact, you can’t be a people pleaser and a good leader; the two are mutually exclusive. It is not your job to be likable; it’s your job to lead. Respect is more important than popularity. Being authentic, trustworthy, and consistent are what teams require from their leaders and what you must be… but likable? Forget that.

While I mostly love building and leading teams, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t also come with really difficult components as well. One of the most important skills you’ll need to develop, for one, is the ability to say no. I say no all the time, especially if it doesn’t align with my goals or the goals of the business. And saying no to people you care about is hard. And secondly, I tell people the truth and I expect their honesty in return. It’s that simple. I tell the truth as it pertains to business, which means it’s never personal, but people don’t always like it, particularly when it threatens their ego or their livelihood. And needing to let someone go threatens both. This part of the business is deeply uncomfortable, but you must build resilience for it because it will happen. I’ve never heard of a business journey that doesn’t have its ups and downs—there will be mis-hires, and there will also be heartbreaking moments when you need to significantly cut back your team. It’s really, really hard. I don’t want to minimize that. I care deeply about people, and I’m a woman—I struggle with the two sides of the empathy coin, just like almost all the other women I know. Empathy makes us phenomenally good leaders and fantastic at mentoring staff and looking after the needs of the team, but it sure has an underbelly when it comes to downsizing the team or dealing with people’s feelings when they’re not getting the pay raises they believe they deserve. I’ve had to build a lot of durability for displeasing people. It’s important to know and accept that people will be disgruntled. And people will come for you. I have come to expect this as part of the cost of doing business. You can’t let fear of upsetting people hold you hostage and keep you from doing what is best for your company. You have to lead, and many parts of doing this well will make people mad.

I operate under what I call an “enterprise mentality”: To be an effective leader, you need to separate what is good for the business from what is good for individuals. Sometimes what is good for the business is good for individuals, and sometimes it’s not. And that is a balance that I try to seek. But everyone who works for me understands that it’s not about them, it’s about the business. So you have to say no to protect the culture, you have to say no to ideas that don’t align with the vision, and you have to say no to protect your people. That’s the collective cause we’ve been brought together to do: business. We don’t work for the pleasure of coming to the office every day to hang out (which is, admittedly, often fun); we work for the pleasure of the business. We are there to serve the needs of the customer, meet our mission, and create a profit.

I went on the podcast The Diary of a CEO , and the host, Steven Bartlett, brought up how many founders tell him they’re scared of social media reprisals, particularly if they start to grow their profile. This conversation is one I’ve had many times, and it’s worth sharing it here.

“If you do something wrong, there’s a really interesting incentive where the employee can pop back,” he said. “If you fire me from your company, Emma, and I didn’t feel so good when I was there, I now have you by the balls a little bit, if you know what I’m saying.”

“Yes, you do,” I replied.

“Because I can post on my TikTok and say, ‘Emma is not who you think she is.’ Because you’re living under that threat from some kind of activist employee. How do you stop that from changing the way you live with that ‘enterprise mentality’ and do what’s right for the business?”

“I don’t think you do,” I responded.

“I’ve had so many founders say this to me in my portfolio: ‘Oh man, I’m scared of being canceled.’ ”

“Well, don’t do anything to be canceled ,” I responded. “It’s a fine line. Look, if you’re a leader, you’re never going to please everybody, and this is where leadership style and who you are as a person really comes out. I’m somebody who leads with no ambiguity. Nobody is like, ‘Hmm, I wonder what Emma is thinking.’ I’m very clear in what I’m thinking. I’m very clear in what the goals are. And the reason we’ve been able to do what we’ve been able to do is because of those things. I have a very straightforward management style, and I bring everybody along with me. Now listen, there’s always going to be someone, or a fraction of people, who will feel disgruntled. I’ve gone through various things in different companies where I’ve had to downsize, or let people go, and those things are really unfortunate, and that’s just the course of the business. Are you doing those things in a way that’s congruent with who you are as a leader? Again, I never have an individualistic idea about that. If I have to look at a company and downsize, I’m not thinking about the fifty people I have to let go. I’m thinking about the four hundred jobs that need to be saved. And sadly, sometimes there is collateral damage. That’s part of being in business. I’m certainly not sweating what somebody might do on TikTok, because I know who I am, and I feel good about the decisions that I make because of where they come from. They come from me, they come from my heart, and I know I’m a good person.” 2

There were a few interesting parts of Steven’s question: First, he led by saying, “If you do something wrong,” and then he brought up fear of being canceled. Listen, I agree that we’ve taken the public tribunal and canceling too far in recent years in some cases, and it’s not that hard to be a decent person. If you’re legitimately worried about being canceled, there might be legitimate issues with your behavior. Having an “enterprise mentality” is not an excuse to be an asshole. Yes, you might need to be colder than people would like—again, you will displease people—but there’s nothing cancelable about doing your job and leading a company with its best fiduciary interests in mind.

You need to have a social contract with your staff: I want you to work really hard; I want you to be disciplined, courageous, and consistent; and I’m going to reward you really well. V We’re also going to have these moments that are not so easy, and everyone needs to buy into that part as well. I’m going to give this opportunity to you, and you’re going to get a level of honesty and openness in return. I believe it’s part of my colleagues’ jobs to tell their managers the truth—and vice versa—specifically when it pertains to the business. To that end, I try to be as transparent as I can and bring my leadership team along on the journey. I learned this lesson the hard way.

Early on in my career, when I was running ITB and was an unseasoned CEO, the business was in financial straits—rather than letting my direct reports know and sharing accountability with them, I internalized the pressure and then shocked everyone when we suddenly needed to cut fifteen people from our sixty-person team. Not only did I feel like I was going to die of shame—you entice all these people to give up what they have at other companies and join you on a journey, and then you fail them; it’s excruciating—but my senior management team didn’t think I was a hero for not bringing them in and saving them from reality. They felt betrayed. This was a big lesson for me. I hadn’t shared how bad things were with them because I thought, I’m the CEO, that’s my problem; they should be able to just come in and out of the office— but it created a lack of trust for everyone, and they didn’t appreciate it. While I don’t think you always need to spread anxiety across every level of the business, I believe you owe it to your employees to give them an honest picture of where things are at—partly so they can help you correct the trajectory of the business.

Downsizing ITB felt like the end of the world, but I did create a better company because of it. I created more discipline in the business because it allowed me to see the mistakes I had made—not only in overstaffing, but in running a less-healthy engine at the center of the business. I didn’t have the right people for that phase of the journey. I realized, too, that my primary job at the top of the organization wasn’t to carry all the anxiety and pressure, but to stand on the sidelines and direct the plays with a full view of the field. I’m not great at sports—getting better!—but the team needs to know their roles, the playbook they’re following, and the goal. As a leader, you need to bring your team on the journey and get them involved in the problems so they can own the solutions.

When you’re working in start-up land, you’re going to experience a turnover in staff—in both directions. Turnover is part of any company’s growing pains; you won’t be able to avoid it. Often the people who can get you to $10 million are not the same ones who will get you to $100 million, and these are not the same people who will get you to $1 billion. The people who operate companies at scale are an entirely different breed (and frequently do not have the temerity or grit for start-up life). It really does come down to personality type as well as skill set. At the beginning, you need people who can plug holes, do whatever it takes, and wear many hats. As the company grows, you typically need functional specialists. I love the early days; it’s why I’ve started so many businesses. While it’s benefited me having an ecosystem of businesses that people can move around in according to their specialty and company-stage preferences and skills, most of us don’t have that luxury. You will need to change your team at various points according to the needs of the business. There are some people who can grow with an organization, but that is very, very rare. This is really difficult, and yet it doesn’t need to be a bad thing, particularly if everyone is honest and clear about when they thrive—and when they don’t. It is not “bad,” or disloyal, to need different people at different points of the journey. Just be honest about it. The wrong people will never get you to the right place.

There is a lot of power in a business to unleash when you surround yourself with the best people for that phase of the business and then use their expertise to further your goals. A lot of effective leaders change their team every three to five years. Karl Lagerfeld stayed on top for fifty years, but he brought on fresh blood every five. I don’t really like this—in fact, I chafe at this level of mercilessness, and I’m very loyal to people, particularly people who are great. But I also understand that Lagerfeld stayed relevant in part because he kept his team moving at the pace of culture. It’s safe to assume that when people signed on for that gig, they understood that they’d be participating in a short run—but the experience would be well worth it and lead them to their next job in a few years. I’m guessing he was entirely transparent about it. This, of course, is honest—I don’t think he was sugarcoating anything for anyone. We don’t do anyone any favors when we avoid hard conversations and pretend reality is something other than what it is. Nobody is getting duped here.

While I mostly let my kids’ school manage the schooling, as that’s what I pay them to do, years ago I did have an email back-and-forth with them about their discomfort with the truth, which they perceive as being protective of the kids’ feelings. I don’t like this, as it creates fragile egos. At their school, they don’t talk about “losing,” to the extent that one of my kids didn’t understand that she’d lost a race. Their teacher wanted to have a whole conversation with me about it, and I said, “The problem with not being honest here is how will she know that she’s not good? How will she know that she needs to work harder if you don’t tell her the truth? I’m not telling her that she did shit (though she kind of did do shit). I don’t need to be mean about it, but factually, she lost—and if she wants to get better, she’s going to need to train and practice.” We’re creating major dissonance when we lie to our kids and teach them that the truth is bad and should be avoided. The truth is the truth, it’s neutral, even if it might hurt or be uncomfortable. But I refuse to teach my kids that they can play with reality by telling themselves a story instead. It will not work out for them in the future. I don’t want them to be comfortable lying to themselves, or comfortable letting other people lie to them.

I’m straightforward, but I’m not an asshole. I’ve employed hundreds and hundreds of people over the years. If you polled them all, certainly some of them would say, She’s an absolute bitch. She’s awful. But I believe that an overwhelming majority of them would say, Emma is super fair. She’s really honest, she’s very consistent, and she wasn’t a bitch. She’s hard and hardworking, and honest, and has high expectations for herself, for the company, and for the team. A fair number of them would say, I got better because of her. If you are an ambitious person and you come to work for me, you will go places. I’m going to pick you up and take you with me. As you’ll notice, I didn’t throw “nice” on that list above, which I know is a quality or identity factor that a lot of us feel pressured to cling to—I don’t do that because you cannot control the way other people perceive you. Nice is a feeling; honesty and consistency are hard to argue with because they show up in actions. I could sit here and tell you what a nice, amazing boss I am, but even my best people—the people who have been with me the longest—have said to me, “There have been times when you were so tough. Remember when you said, ‘God, what the fuck were you thinking? What are you doing?’ That was so mean. You made me feel like shit.” I take responsibility for that. I’m human. I don’t ever want to make someone feel like shit, but I’m not going to lie to myself and say it doesn’t happen. This is why I don’t cling to words like “nice,” as I can’t possibly live up to that expectation all the time—nor do I want to, as sometimes the truth ain’t “nice.” I’d much rather be a great leader. For me, this revolves around basic integrity. I’m consistent and predictable, meaning my team can rely on me and my judgment, and I’m consistent with my values and principles, which guide my decision-making and how I show up every day. Focusing on consistency is also essential because as a good entrepreneurial leader, you must show up every day and do the right things, even when you don’t feel the motivation to do so. Adhering to these qualities is far more important to me than being liked.

New Thought: You cannot optimize for likability or your own popularity. You need to operate under an enterprise mentality: You can care deeply about the welfare of your team, but you have all signed on to serve the good of the business, not individual needs.

4. Old Thought: Your colleagues are like your family.

It takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.

—Warren Buffett

After my terrible experience at the fashion production company, I made a promise to myself to be good to everyone who came through my company. Eighty-five percent of the people who leave my companies will get an email from me. I thank them for their time and service and for doing an amazing job. I will highlight something specific that they did that was really excellent and that I appreciated. And I tell them they can call me if they ever need something. I really mean this. I can tell you hundreds of stories of former employees where I’ve gotten them a job or another big opportunity. Seeing my former colleagues be successful makes me feel like a successful leader. I share in their glory. Being good to the people who have worked for me is a big point of pride. This isn’t just because I try to be a good person, but it’s also good business. You just never know. I had an intern who turned into a fashion director at Teen Vogue ; another colleague went on to become the CEO of Harvey Nichols in London. Jamie Girdler, who started with me at ITB before joining Good American as our CMO, is now a best-in-class marketer with his own agency, which is crushing it. There are so many people in my business orbit who have worked for me at some point who have gone on to do incredible things. Why would I ever treat them poorly for leaving me? It’s so much better to have emissaries and well-wishers around the globe whom you can continue to do business with. Nothing is more pleasing to me than seeing them do great things. I want people to not only be ambitious for my companies but be ambitious for themselves. Plus, my greatest hope is that employees leave and get great experience and a wider perspective somewhere else and then come back to teach me what they’ve learned—that has happened quite a few times as well.

In what I’ve observed in my own experience and among other female founders and even women on my team, it seems like female leaders have a very, very hard time seeing their team members leave and go elsewhere and succeed. There seems to be something in this dynamic that they tend to take very personally. From where I stand, it seems like they believe they created this moment in time and the conditions for the team member who has left to be successful—they take all the credit, and then they can’t stand seeing this magic and sparkle go elsewhere. It hits them in a place where they can’t be generous about it. Recently, someone on my team was complaining that a woman on her team had left for an opportunity at another company.

“She’s going to fucking die there,” she said.

“Why do you think she’ll die there?” I had to ask. “What did you do wrong that she would die there? I don’t understand. She should be really set up for success. She was amazing here. Why can’t she be amazing there?”

It seemed to me that this woman on my team didn’t want her to do well—that if she did well elsewhere, it would somehow indict this woman’s own leadership skills. When you think about this, it makes no sense, and yet, I also understand. As leaders, many of us take complete over-responsibility, and with this comes a false sense of what’s directly under our control. We can feel like we’ve been left, that something must be wrong with our leadership style if anyone would want to go elsewhere. It’s a type of codependency, and it seems to strike some of us particularly hard. It’s also hard to accept that people are in fact autonomous and self-reliant—it can be a hard pill to take when you think it’s all on you. But you are not their parent, you are the facilitator of talent.

A business is not a family and should not operate like a family. We may love each other, but we’re not a family. I’m not collecting children; I’m running an organization. Loyalty has to be to the vision and to the company. We are there because we’ve gathered together to do something specific in business. You have an at-will relationship: People will go, both at your behest and also at their own. This is the function of a healthy business. Things change, people change, the needs of the business shift and evolve, and it stops being the right fit on both sides. I’m so grateful to people for their time and energy and for coming to work for me every day. I require a lot, but it is always an evenly weighted exchange. If they give me a lot, I will give a lot in return. I will pay the best. I will bonus the best. You’re going to have an amazing work experience, and I’m going to invest in your development. I’m going to give you snacks and out-of-control benefits and an amazing office to come to. I’ll give you great experience. You can take credit internally and externally, and when you leave, we’ll be your best reference. But you are expected to bring it in return. Sometimes that stops being reciprocal, and that’s okay. We’re not married, and these are not my children; we’re a team, not a family.

In a nutshell, I think very carefully about how I bring people into my companies and how I take them out. I’m slow to hire and quick to fire, yes, but it’s much deeper than that:

New Thought: You need to care deeply about your team, but you cannot tolerate poor performance or misalignment. You need to let people leave with respect and dignity to seek new experiences.

5. Old Thought: Everyone is watching you.

The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.

—Coco Chanel

After I started the “A Seat at the Table” dinner series, I received an outpouring of messages from women wondering why they had been excluded: I really need to understand why I wasn’t invited. My response: outrage. What I want to write back: “Why do you think everything is about you? Do you think I woke up this morning thinking about you, with an intent to exclude you? I had forty spaces at the table. A lot of people are not going to be invited.” (The email I don’t mind receiving? “Hey, next one, I’d love to be in!”) If you spend your life assuming you’re being intentionally excluded, you’re not only wasting your emotional energy but you’re somewhat deluded about where you rank in importance in other people’s minds. I am legitimately surprised when other people think of me, if only because I know it’s natural to mostly think about yourself! I really don’t rate what other people think of me, or assume I cross their minds all that much. This is helpful, I promise.

I might be hardwired in a way that’s different from other people, specifically in that I’m not hardwired to give a lot of fucks about what other people think. I have so much self-assurance, and so much conviction, that it’s not that I don’t care what other people think, I just don’t put a high value on it. I don’t believe that people wake up thinking about me, for one, in the way that I wake up thinking about me; I’m thinking about myself far more than anyone else. So as long as I’m good with me, as long as I feel integrity with myself, that’s the most important thing. I cannot spend my time monitoring how other people feel about me. Not only is it not that interesting, but I don’t think they’ve thought super deeply about it—because none of us spend a lot of time thinking deeply about each other .

But we sure operate as though we must be top of mind with everyone else. This is a grave misunderstanding. Because we’re at the center of our universe doesn’t mean we occupy prime position in everyone else’s universe as well. Nobody’s watching you. This might sound shocking and bad, but there is great relief in this. We need to relax. Go and do your thing, whether you get attention for it or not. And even if you do get attention for it—positive or negative—recognize that it’s transitory and nothing to stake your identity on. People move on really quickly.

This can be hard for us, particularly when we’ve tasted a little bit of success. A friend of mine had a terrible ending at her company—she sold it, but she never really sold it in her heart. And then the transaction went sideways, and she got screwed over financially. Because her identity was so wrapped up in the business, because she was so emotionally invested in the company, when it was over, she couldn’t let it go and move on—she felt like her identity had been stolen from her, and she was obsessed with looking into the past and getting it back. People came to her with incredible offers, but she convinced herself that everyone was watching her in the context of her first company, and she couldn’t just “do anything.” This is a woman who is brimming with amazing ideas, but she couldn’t act because she was convinced that everyone was watching. Her self-consciousness meant she lost the momentum of all her previous success—if you’re not using it, your network and your currency grow weaker as time ticks on. Meanwhile, people really stopped caring, if they really even cared that much to begin with. Point being, you cannot operate for an audience or even assume that anyone is watching; chances are they are not.

There’s a lot of pressure on women in business, maybe because there are so few of us to stand for that business in public—even to be in its creative and in its marketing. With all of the businesses I’m involved with, my “identity” has very little to do with how they show up in the world—and even less to do with how they show up in consumers’ minds. I’m an operator, not a spokesperson, even if I now do a fair amount of business press. I’m very careful not to get my identity all wrapped up in the business—I don’t believe that I am the companies. As it were, the moment you take investment, the moment you start working with other people to realize the goals of the company, it’s not even 100 percent yours—it’s a collective concern.

I know, with a fair amount of certainty, that in ten years, I’ll be in a mall somewhere and I’ll walk past a Good American store and I won’t recognize the fixtures or any of the product. I know this for certain. I’ll probably get really pissed that they’ve gotten rid of all the digital screens that I fought for in the store, or that the fits have changed, or whatever it is, but that’s what’s going to happen—it will be someone else’s product vision. I’m not going to cry about it! I’m a custodian of these brands for a moment, but they are not about me. It won’t be a verdict on me that these businesses will change; it’s not personal. If you want to build something that’s all about you, then you need to make a little, beautiful, 100-percent-you thing—I feel this way about my podcast, for now, but if it expands and grows, it will be informed by other people and a moving culture as well.

Listen, I understand why we’re so acutely self-conscious. I get why we’re self-aware to the point of being self-obsessed. I know about the way you’re wired for belonging and primed to fear exclusion—that if we get kicked out of the tribe, we’ll die. I know all of this. But I do my best not to let it run my life. After all, the research suggests that if you fixate on yourself in this way—if you’re constantly thinking, I’m a woman, I’m Black, I’m old, I’m too big, My wrinkles are showing —you’ll perform worse in the world. They’ve studied this over and over again with things like the Stroop Test, where you need to process two conflicting sets of information, e.g., the names of colors that are the wrong color, like “orange” written out in blue. When people self-monitor, they do much worse on these types of cognitive tests. Women do best when we focus on what we want to do, not when we’re worried about others looking at us while we do what we want to do. It’s not a good use of our energy.

Because I’m a Black woman, a lot of people want to talk to me about DEI, but if I’m telling you the truth, I don’t know how practically helpful it is to obsess about whether people are appraising you in a prejudiced way from a career point of view. I don’t think that monitoring for stereotypes is a productive way to engage in any business conversation. Focus on what you’re saying and how you’re presenting. Now, before everyone protests, I get it. I don’t want to suggest that it’s not a significant issue. It is. Big time. But when it comes to work, it’s a company’s problem and not an individual’s problem to solve. Organizations need to be doing their level best to ensure that their hiring practices, and their business culture in general, are on point and not biased. They need to be trying to not only attract but retain diverse talent. This isn’t just because it’s the socially correct or “nice” thing to do; it’s because you won’t have a thriving business in the future if you don’t focus on it. Companies need to worry about that—organizations need to patrol their own behavior and their policies; employees can’t be the ones policing encounters and wondering if Joe over in IT is biased. It’s not productive for anyone. I don’t want any of my employees to obsess over what other people think of them; I want them to do fantastic work, with joy, on behalf of the business. And if you think you can’t do that where you’re at, leave, and don’t waste one bit of energy at a company that doesn’t care about its culture.

My sisters think I’m not normal in my ability to not care what other people think. (They particularly hate it when I apply this philosophy to them and post pictures of them that they do not like. For the record, I have stopped this because I really do care what they think!) But I refuse to operate with too much self-consciousness, as I know it will stop me before I start. It’s a safe bet that every single person on a panel with me is better educated; they’re probably more articulate and nuanced in their thinking than I am, too. If I got all up in my head about this, I wouldn’t open my mouth, and I know my voice is desperately needed. Back at my first job, when I was the Black girl with the curly hair and the sad lunch, I knew everyone was looking at me—I stood out sorely, and I was incredibly self-conscious. I’ll never forget one of the account directors referring to me as sounding like a “cockney barrow boy,” which is not a term of endearment. Rather than take huge offense, something inside of me said, It’s okay, Emma, you’re being noticed. Be happy you’re being chosen. You’re here to do this work. Let it slide. This was big for me because at the time I didn’t have as much of a handle on my anger.

Once I digested his shitty comment, I realized I had an opportunity to stand out. Rather than letting it make me self-conscious, in that moment, I learned to be unapologetically myself. I’ve always had differentiating factors—I’m Black, I’ve always been the young one because I got a head start thanks to no college, and I don’t have a posh accent. But I realized all those factors were unique to me, that we all bring something unique to the table. Once I got really good at embracing the idea of who I was, of being myself, and understanding myself, it not only became freeing but it was also a type of magic. Because I worked in an all-white office, everyone constantly asked me for my opinion—I took this opportunity to give it to them, whether I knew what I was talking about or not. My difference is my thing. It shows up in the way I act and how I move in the world. I might put an outsize value on my difference, but I see it as a positive. Leaning into being myself—not self-conscious about myself but being and acting like myself—has gotten me to where I am today, and it’s far less exhausting than the alternative: obsessing over how people perceive me. I choose to be exactly myself every damn day.

Mellody Hobson is one of my business heroes, and accordingly, she was one of the first guests on my podcast. I’ve known and admired Mellody for a long time, and I relate to her deeply, as she’s also the product of a single mum and a lot of scarcity. Today she’s the co-CEO of Ariel Investments and oversees about $15 billion for clients—she’s also ushered through major transactions, like the sale of DreamWorks, and she’s been on many corporate boards. She was telling me the story of going to her first conference immediately after school. As she stood awkwardly at the bar, people began to approach: “Oh, you’re Mellody.” She realized in that moment that she was the only woman there. And one of the only Black people.

As she explained to me, she had an epiphany: “What if I use this in my favor? I’m going to be like Cher or Beyoncé. I’m not even going to have a last name. I’m that Mellody with two Ls—I’m going to use this difference to my advantage. If you can stand out, then have something to say.” 3 In that moment, Mellody determined she’d cultivate the skill to back it up—and be remembered in every room she walks into, in every way.

New Thought: You are not the center of anyone else’s universe—lose the self-consciousness and get to work in the world.

6. Old Thought: Business and altruism need to go hand in hand because DEI is a social good.

Do what you have to do until you can do what you want to do.

—Oprah Winfrey

I was in New York, at a dinner that I didn’t want to go to, sitting next to a man I’d never met before. As I pulled out my chair, I looked longingly at the other end, where the people I did know were congregated and laughing, including Jens. Oh well , I thought. I’ll get through this. Maybe this guy can teach me something interesting.

I was still at ITB, but I’d been cooking the idea for Good American in the back of my brain for a minute—I knew I wanted to do denim, only because I’d had a lot of experience in the industry working on collaborations for brands, which made me think I knew something. I didn’t realize that I knew how to do denim marketing , but I had absolutely no idea how to make a denim product. This ended up being a good thing, as I don’t think I would have had the temerity to start if I knew what I was in for. Anyway, I got into a chat with the guy next to me who told me that he was an investor in a huge plus-size business in America.

“Emma,” he said, “this industry is blowing up.” As he told me all about it, I pulled the various e-commerce sites he mentioned up on my phone and then had to swallow my dismay: It all looked gross. There was not a single piece of clothing on Torrid, or Lane Bryant, or NYDJ that I would have been happy to wear.

“Nobody wants to dress in these clothes,” I told him. “This is such a complete bummer. I don’t think I would wear this if my house were on fire.”

“Well,” he offered. “You’re wrong, because these businesses are huge.”

“My guess is that there are no better options.”

Sitting at that dinner, it all came together in my head: I’m going to create a denim company, and I’m going to make all the sizes, all the time. And I’m going to make everyone look hot. Ding, ding, ding! I knew I could figure it out. I knew how to book talent and bring them into a brand to create acceleration points, and from a marketing standpoint, I knew what connected with customers—looking at these massive retailers, I knew I could do much better for women than that. That dinner I didn’t want to go to ended up being one of the best dinners I’ve ever had.

From day dot, Good American has been about inclusivity: That’s the mission of the brand and its purpose. But it’s also the foundation of what I knew would be a very good business. When people talk about DEI as a social good, I like to remind them that usually what’s good for customers and serves a real need will actually be a good business. It may not feel that way, but most consumer power is in the hands of people who are not white men. At Good American, we intrinsically understood that a significant subset of customers are left out of the conversation: Designers and retailers had determined that if you were north of a size US 12, there’d be nothing cute or actually on trend in the store or on the site for you to wear. People who are straight sizes, meanwhile, get a plethora of options. It was almost like a pact. You’d find petites and plus-size on its own floor in department stores, and the selection looked nothing like the rest of the shop. One of the things that was important to me from the beginning was to create no separation. I didn’t decide what a size 16 woman could or could not wear; she decided. When we made a product, whether it was a bodycon dress with a split all the way up the thigh or a teeny fluorescent pink bikini, we would make it in every size—the woman can decide, we don’t need to moderate her options or police her taste. We were 100 percent right with this instinct that larger women wanted these things, too—the reason there was no “market” for it previously is that this customer had never been given the choice.

One of the most thrilling parts of Good American’s early success is that we changed the industry. Not only did Nordstrom take us on, but they took our story and went to every other brand to say, “You need to go five sizes up and two sizes lower than everything you’ve ever done and emulate Good American’s size and scale. Everyone needs to do this now.” Even some luxury brands eventually expanded their sizing—attributing something like 10 to 15 percent of their profits from the three new sizes they added, sizes they hadn’t done before. Good American had a massive ripple effect on the culture. The point I wanted to make at the beginning of Good American was the opposite of performative marketing: We weren’t doing a full range of sizes because we wanted to get snaps for being inclusive—we were doing a full range of sizes because being inclusive is good business . Inclusivity is not a reason to buy; nobody is buying for the community. People buy for themselves; they buy because we make their butts look good.

I’ve never understood why companies position DEI as social responsibility and not business responsibility. If you are trying to build something successful, and you need to find its audience, doesn’t it make sense that the people making the decisions are reflective of the audience you’re selling to? This feels so incredibly obvious to me as a basic principle. My job is to make commercially sound decisions all day, and those decisions are based on having a really good grip on what’s happening in the world and culture more broadly. To do that effectively, I need a group of different people from different backgrounds with different viewpoints. I would stop myself if I had only white women or Black women in the room. We live in an incredibly diverse culture—smart businesses understand this and play to it.

I remember several years ago when H&M got into a big PR blowup because they put a Black kid in a sweater with a monkey on it. There was a huge outcry, as people thought they were coding racism into their ad campaign. First of all, there is no such thing as a racist company. There are racist cultures and racist practices that can take hold. But in this specific instance, it was operators who had massive blind spots—and we all have them. H&M is a publicly traded Swedish company that’s mostly run by Swedish people—they all have the same background for the most part. When something like this happens, it’s clear to me that they just didn’t have anyone in the room who would have flagged that as offensive. Instead, they said, Look at this cute kid in this cheeky little monkey sweater. Now, do I think it would have been helpful if they had some Black people in the room? Yes, I do. If this were at one of my companies, someone would have checked the monitor and said, “Adorable sweater, but put it on the white kid.” But do I think one needs to change everything about an organization because mistakes like that happen? I actually don’t. You need to throw your hands up and say, “Fuck, we made a big mistake. There’s a lack of diversity in our organization, and we need to figure it out.” And then you need to act and put process and policy in place so that it doesn’t happen again. Meanwhile, as a culture, we need to forgive and move on. What’s happening that’s more concerning than mistakes is that people are scared to have conversations because they don’t want to say the wrong thing or offend—so important conversations are not happening, and people aren’t engaging. People are becoming neurotic around each other, and that is not a good thing for any of us. Nobody learns, and you get pushed further into little groups where you feel like you have to whisper to each other.

I promise it’s way more fun to build companies with cultures where people can speak honestly and transparently—and ask each other questions. Curiosity is one of the foundational qualities I look for when I hire, as well as temerity. Business requires quick, honest, and direct feedback and the freedom to make mistakes—so long as you behave respectfully, learn from your mistakes, and recover quickly. Business can also be fun. It has been so fun to build a company that stands for something in the world and to structure it around the customer and the women who make up the team.

As a company, we didn’t just stop with size inclusivity. Several years ago, it was important to the team to become B Corp certified because denim is a very pollutive business. VI B Corp certification means that you abide by a triple bottom line: a devotion to profits, yes, but also people and the planet—and to achieve this you need to institute and maintain best-in-class environmental and HR practices. It is a very rigorous accreditation to receive and keep. Because our team is made up of mums and we serve a lot of mums, Good American has gotten behind Baby2Baby in a significant way (I’m also on the board). There are a lot of young people at the company, and it’s important to them to work at a place that cares about the world they live in—they want us to be sure that we acknowledge that we could always do better, and so we always try to do better. I love building businesses that chime with my own values, too. If you can take a problem that you really want to solve for the world and put it in the center of your business, that is a magical formula—and far more effective than trying to sanitize your company’s image by giving some money away. It’s also worth noting that when your team loves what you stand for in the world, it’s much easier to attract and retain incredible talent. It feels good to align your career with your beliefs.

I speak to a lot of founders who, before they’re even profitable, have figured out a mechanic to give back and donate a certain amount of proceeds. I always tell them that doing something like this is for really successful businesses—it’s the preserve of the few and not a given. What is helping you grow and move your business forward, versus what is performative marketing? What are you doing as a mea culpa—one hand that feels dirty washing the other—and what are you doing because it’s legitimately formative to your brand? If you want to launch a B Corp and fundamentally run the business differently, that’s a beautiful thing, but you better have a very high-margin product, because being a B Corp costs money—you can’t do it for marketing, you have to do it because it’s foundational to your company’s mission and values. We want to believe that consumers are checking the B Corp site to figure out where they’re going to spend their dollars, but very, very, very few people use things like this as a filter for their purchasing behavior. We like companies to do the right thing, it’s true, but not because they’re manipulating us to think they’re good actors—we want them to do the right thing because they have integrity and a moral compass. We like brands that build problem-solving into the baseline of the business, to know that whatever they’re doing is creating a better product or solution for consumers and the world. But inserting sustainability or not-for-profit elements into your business because you expect customers to gravitate to you because of it will be a costly mistake.

Another misstep I see a lot of founders take is to assume that people shop their values—they make the presumption that because they’ve got a good story, or their product is better for the environment, that consumers will get in line to support them. This isn’t how consumers think. They might buy something once, to be supportive, but they are generally not looking up the backstory of the founders of the company when they’re in the grocery aisle or at Sephora. They’re just not. If people simply wanted to do good for the sake of doing good, wouldn’t our world be a better place? People aren’t bad, not at all, you just can’t guilt them or shame them into purchasing your product as an acquisition strategy. It won’t work. Instead, make a superior product. Solve a real customer problem. And do it in a way that’s better for the world or a specific customer. That’s a winning strategy.

I meet a lot of Black founders who pitch me on why their hair-care product will be different for textured hair. I always push them to go in a different direction, to expand beyond this idea of textured hair as the only viable avenue for a Black founder. Create a brand and sell to everyone. “Everyone” as a quantity is much bigger than an identity group. I’ve said it five hundred times already, but it bears repeating: Black-owned brands aren’t just for Black people, so we need Black founders to create more businesses with a wide customer base in mind. Products that Black people use don’t just come from the Black community, and you can create a business that is for everyone. I understand the compulsion to do something for your community, and yes, historically the Black community has been underserved, but there’s no good reason why you can’t make a lotion for anyone who suffers from dry skin. You have a much higher chance of building a successful brand if it’s not gated at its start.

Plus, I hate to say it, but a compelling founder is not enough of a reason for someone to buy something or change their purchasing behavior, particularly on commodity products—particularly if those products are priced at a premium. This goes back again to the obsession people have for being the face of their business—whether it’s an external or internally applied pressure to be the spokesperson and representative of the company—it’s a new thing, and we need to question whether it’s a good one. Ten years ago, we didn’t know or care who made our toothpaste or our face mask. They were just brands, being distributed and marketed to us through retail channels. I don’t think we need to cement ourselves into the center of brands and create them literally in our image for them to be worthwhile ventures.

So many female entrepreneurs have a real sense of purpose and a broader vision for doing good and having a positive impact on the world—it’s really stunning to behold. And many of us can struggle to put a price on it. But as I try to remind founders, Wasn’t the reason you set out to do this to change the world? If that’s the case and if you’re going to continue to do it, you have to figure out how to charge for it.

I started getting heavily involved in nonprofit work when I was at ITB, first at Women for Women International, where I sat on the board for seven years. And it’s interesting, because I didn’t think of it as penance for creating too much for myself; I thought of it as penance for creating too much money for influencers and celebrities and brands. I wanted to share some of my experience and expertise with charities, as they’re always trying to get a paltry share at the end of a celebrity collaboration. I wanted to get brands to actually work with a nonprofit. And this guides my nonprofit work today, whether it’s for the Fifteen Percent Pledge, Baby2Baby, or the Obama Foundation. While we try to do a lot of good things at the companies I build, and they all have very robust corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies, which I think of as table stakes and an essential social tax, I think of my own nonprofit work as an entirely different sphere—one I treat separately. I like to think of them as a different form of business, businesses that might benefit from my acumen for marketing, connecting with both donors and end consumers, and selling a vision for good.

New Thought: Create a business that solves problems and is good for the world. Now that’s a powerful CSR strategy.

7. Old Thought: If you’re too successful, people will want to destroy you.

In the name of elitism, we do a crabs-in-a-barrel number and pull down any of our number who get public attention or a small success. As long as we’re into piranha-ism and horizontal hostility, honey, we ain’t going to get nowhere.

—Florynce Kennedy

When Veronica Garza and her family, the owners of Siete Foods, a tortilla and chip company based in Austin, Texas, sold the brand to PepsiCo for $1.2 billion dollars, people went nuts, accusing the Garzas of selling out. Something similar happened to my friend Monique Rodriguez when she sold her brand, Mielle Organics, to P&G. The response was outrage: How dare you? They’re going to change the ingredients. You stood for Black women and now you sold us the fuck out!

Whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa. My friend Aurora James, the designer of Brother Vellies who started the Fifteen Percent Pledge in 2020, which asks retailers to sign an agreement to give at least 15 percent of their annual buys to Black and Brown founders (I’m the chair of its board), jumped into the comments to not only defend Rodriguez but set the record straight. “This is what we want. She sold her company for a billion dollars. That is precisely the point. You build a great company, and you get to sell it. The best way to infiltrate massive organizations and foment change is from the inside out. Now she’s there. Now she’s going to teach them how to care about Black hair care and how to look after this customer. She’s going to teach them about the culture. She’ll probably be on the board one day. This is a good thing. ” It is a good thing. For one, people stop being marginalized when they move into the center of culture, especially a corporate culture like PepsiCo or P&G, which are two of the biggest global consumer conglomerates. And two, the purpose of business is to build a company, generate a profit, and get a fantastic result for you and your team. When you do this, you create wealth for a lot of people—and when you inject wealth into communities, it has a knock-on effect. Everyone who touches a successful business—employees, vendors, customers, retailers—is improved by it. I want a world populated with wealthy women. It’s so interesting though because when these female founders do the thing and get a fantastic exit, they get nailed . I can’t think of a time when this has happened to a man for the same reasons.

Some of this is “horizontal hostility,” a term coined by civil rights attorney Florynce Kennedy in the seventies to describe the way that groups of people who have less political power—women, people of color, the LGBTQIA+ community, and so on—punch across and down because they can’t send their rage to the people on top of the hierarchy (white men). Well, power and money are tightly connected, and because of this, building a successful business can transform many lives and shift power structures. As someone who grew up in poverty and around a lot of lack, I can attest to this reality. I have a lot of power. I don’t take it lightly. Insisting that we all stay small is no way to ensure that more people who weren’t born on the top of the heap can’t also get there.

Business can do a lot of things—and because of our debased politics, and the loss of faith in our institutions, consumers are looking to businesses to solve social issues and both represent and stand up for their values in this world. This is a beautiful thing, but ultimately, a business is for… business. Hopefully, you get to look after a bunch of employees and make a great place for them to work with excellent pay and benefits, and maybe you get acquired by a larger conglomerate where you can make even bigger change. But a hair-care brand isn’t going to transform the Black community unless it’s pushing more money and power into the Black community—and that won’t happen if we insist that Black-owned businesses stay solely in Black communities. There is great, essential stuff that can be done on a larger stage. If you’re making products outside of the system because those products don’t exist in the system, then your goal is to ensure that the problem you’re trying to solve is no longer a niche concern. When it becomes big, I promise that’s good for everyone. More investment follows, more optionality, and more opportunity—for everyone. When we look at these founders, they’re still doing something that’s better than the way that it was—are we really going to hang them out to dry for making some money off of it? Do you know how hard it is to build and scale a $1.2 billion food brand? Hats off. Where does the American dream stop? Where do you say, Okay, my idea of pursuing this American dream has a cap on it somehow because I can’t upset my community—if I’m too successful, I’m going to get torn down.

And these are the women who actually make it. Have you seen what we collectively do to the women who fail, in a big and obvious way? We hold these women up as cautionary tales for why you shouldn’t have a dream for yourself, why you should keep yourself small, and why you shouldn’t even attempt to do something big. Meanwhile, 98 percent of venture money goes to men (yep, not a typo). Seventy-five percent of venture-backed companies fail to return any money to their investors. 4 You do the math. That’s a lot of men eating shit. And yet, that’s not the prevailing narrative. VII

There’s a fair amount of risk that comes to any woman who is visible. You don’t need me to tell you that. We see takedowns every day; some seem to be based on sound reasoning (Elizabeth Holmes comes to mind), others much less so. I get asked about this a lot, in part because there’s an expectation that I must be holding my breath, waiting for the guillotine to come for my head. I’m not. Not because I don’t think it won’t happen, but because if it does, so be it. I don’t really care. As we’ve established, I not only have thick skin, I have a preternatural ability to turn down the volume on what other people think of me. I wish I could transpose that on all of you. But I do know that the more of us who endure takedowns without being dissuaded from moving forward, the more models there are for the women rising up in ranks behind us, the less dangerous it becomes to be celebrated and seen. I believe that’s how we move and shift the culture, I really do.

Meanwhile, we can make it a little easier for ourselves and for each other if we watch the way we’re policing other women.

New Thought: People may want to destroy you, but you can’t let that stop you. If more and more of us push through it without being deterred, the culture will change.