Month: October 2026

Breaking Glass

“A very convenient way to always be a victim in the rain.”

That was the quote that a director at McKinsey wrote to a female academic referencing her work on the glass cliff. The glass cliff is the idea that women are more likely to get the top job at companies once the company is in trouble.

This director lost his job quickly, but this is not a one-time mistake by one man. This is a symptom of a much larger problem.

That a smart man, and let’s be honest, a total idiot is not ascending to partner at McKinsey, feels comfortable putting something like that in writing is a sign that we have taken our foot off the gas pedal.

Just as we achieve some progress, we risk regressing because we lull ourselves into the belief that the problem is no longer a problem.

As a woman in the workforce, I can say with confidence: we have not solved the problem.

Women earn more than half of all college degrees, yet they make up roughly 10% of the top jobs at Fortune 500 companies. That is a problem. And it is not an accident.

Women are not behind because they are less capable or less ambitious. It is much more complicated.

Almost a decade ago, I found myself having a lively conversation with an older woman at a wedding. Her peak career years had been in the 80s and 90s, and she started talking about how hard it was to be a professional woman back in the day.

The conversation started with familiar details about always being asked to fetch the coffee, take meeting notes, or make copies, even after she was promoted to senior roles.

Then the conversation turned dark.

She shared how during a business trip, a male co-worker tried to assault her. She managed to escape before anything happened, locked herself in her hotel room, barricaded the door, and spent the rest of the night alert, terrified that he might come back and try to force his way in.

The next morning, the co-worker acted like nothing had happened. She reported his behavior to HR. Nothing came of it.

She concluded her story by saying that even though it had been awful, she was happy because it had paved the way for women today to have equality in the workforce.

I debated whether to nod in agreement, but I had to say it.

“Actually, we have not achieved equality just yet.”

I then shared my own story as a professional woman. My experience was nothing like hers. I have always felt physically safe at work, even in rooms full of men. But inequality has many forms.

I had been working at a company for a few years, waiting for a transfer. Year after year I was told to wait. Wait for the new budget to arrive. Wait for an open headcount. Wait until the new team is fully trained. Wait to complete the newest implementation.

I waited. And finally, years in, there was an actual opening at the department I wanted to transfer to. Someone had given his two-week notice. Within hours, the position was filled with an outside candidate.

I couldn’t even understand how this could happen. This was a company that took months to hire for even the most junior of roles.

The person who received my role was the accounting intern from the previous summer. While I had years of experience inside and outside this company, this kid was signing up for his first job out of college. I also had a master’s degree and a couple of certifications on him.

I was not going to take this without a fight. I marched to the department manager and asked him straight: how could he give away MY role.

Without hesitation, he simply said that the intern was a “really fun guy.” He even had a pilot’s license and had promised to take the whole team to Las Vegas and show them a really good time.

That’s it.

That’s why after years of hard work, patience, and loyalty, I was passed over for my dream job.

I related this story at the wedding. The woman sitting across from me said something like: “This happened to you? But you are so young.”

She couldn’t understand how this was still happening to women.

She excused herself to go to the bathroom, and I never talked to her again during the rest of the wedding.

She probably had enough of me challenging her worldview.

But it has to be said. Even though women have accomplished great things and won many battles when it comes to professional opportunity, we have not won the war.

I am the first person to admit that my professional journey has been much better than my mother’s. And if I had a daughter, I would like to believe that she would experience an even brighter future.

But we can’t fool ourselves into compliance.

The McKinsey director was punished, and there was universal condemnation of his comments. However, the real goal is to get to a point where we don’t have to.

Green Flag

“Let me know if you are interested.”

That was the subject line. The email came from a recruiter I have been working with. I read the job description and burst out laughing.

We all know the universal red flags by now. The company that calls itself a “family,” the job that promises you’ll “work hard and play hard.” Those have been discussed to death.

The job description in question was for a Controller role. I received the email on Thursday. According to the recruiter’s email, the Controller had given notice the previous Friday, and her last day was going to be the following Tuesday.

Red flag number one.

The two weeks’ notice is standard. This person was just three days shy of that mark. This was the equivalent of holding your middle finger on your way out.

Someone who is happy with their current job but simply moving for better opportunities doesn’t do this.

Also, even though two weeks is considered standard, as you go up the ladder the expectation grows.

A President of an international division would probably be expected to give more than two weeks’ notice. Some transitions may last months. It is understood and an expected courtesy.

A Controller is not an executive, but it is the position in charge of the entire accounting function. In this case, the person was also guiding the company through an audit.

Someone in this position would be expected to give at least two weeks’ notice and maybe even offer to consult to help with the changeover.

Neither of these things happened.

The other, more important, red flag was that someone wrote it didn’t matter that there was not going to be any handover of responsibilities because the work was “easy.”

This one connects to a hard lesson I learned early on. No job is easy. Every job requires know-how and care. Especially if you want to achieve excellence.

What the hiring manager is really saying when calling a job “easy” is that the job is not respected or valued. Even if you outperform and deliver great results, those won’t count in your favor because, as an early employer told me, this is a job that “any monkey off the street can do.”

“Easy” is a toxic way to describe any job. Just run.

The red flags don’t stop at the job description.

A friend of mine was rushing to get a job ahead of a planned layoff. She finally got a verbal offer. As a professional, she did what she was supposed to do: negotiate the initial offer. The HR representative responded with a firm “no.”

The negotiation ended before it even started. The company pretty much told my friend: take it or leave it.

This was especially surprising after several rounds of interviews. The company used hours of my friend’s time.  And the time of dozens of people already working in the organization. Yet they were willing to risk all of that on the bet that my friend needed the job too badly to walk away.

My friend took the job. I understand why, but this doesn’t show great promise.

My advice to her? It is okay to continue to look while you settle into the new role.

The hiring process is the ultimate red flag to never ignore. It provides a window into how working with the company is going to be. I’ve yet to meet a company where a chaotic, disrespectful hiring process opens the door to a disciplined and generous company.

Still, red flags are not an automatic rejection. I once interviewed at a company where a colleague described working until nearly 11 PM on New Year’s Eve the previous year. I still took that job. I made the calculation, and the long hours were outweighed by other aspects of the job and the company.

But always pay attention to red flags. And learn from them. Which ones are a dealbreaker for you?

For me, this role had too many unforgivable flags, and I’m in a position to wait, so I chose to wait for a possible green flag.

Of Love and Acquisitions

“It wasn’t meant to be. We were so different.”

That’s what a friend said to me at lunch the other day. She was talking about her marriage. She has been divorced for a few years, but she sometimes likes to go back in time and rethink what went wrong.

I’ve known my friend and her now ex-husband since they were dating. They always fought about even the smallest things. They thought it was passionate and raw, but as years ticked on it became exhausting and abusive.

This conversation got me thinking about Mergers and Acquisitions. I know, a weird train of thought, but stay with me on this one.

Last year I took a class on M&A. One of the main facts that the professor kept hammering in every class was that most M&A deals fail. Interesting point to bring up in a class teaching you how to structure and negotiate said deals.

In an M&A deal there are two parties: a buyer and a target. The buyer always pays more than the company is worth.

Why would anyone do that?

Because the buyer believes they can create more value with the target’s assets than the target is creating on its own. That belief is called synergies.

Maybe the combined company can negotiate better vendor deals because of its size, or eliminate redundant operations. The premium the buyer pays is a bet that those synergies will materialize.

Most of the time, they don’t. The belief that two things together will be greater than they were apart is a powerful one. It drives deals and relationships. And it is wrong more often than we like to admit.

The framework from The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen helped me understand why. According to the book, a company’s performance is based on three factors: resources, processes, and values.

An acquisition based on resources can be straightforward. You want a presence in the Southwest; you buy a company that’s already there.

But processes and values are more complicated.

The acquirer already has its own, and even if the target’s are superior, no one may understand how they came about or what invisible structures support them.

This is true of companies and of people.

You can buy a company, but you can’t buy its heart.

I once worked at a company well versed in M&A. For years, they would acquire smaller competitors, strip them for parts, keep their physical assets, client lists, and certain key employees, and get rid of the rest.

That plan worked for a while until they decided to acquire a massive competitor. After the deal, the company almost doubled.

I remember that everyone in the company received T-shirts that read: us vs them, with our logo and the target’s logo.

Someone pointed out that the “versus” made it seem more like a boxing match and less like a friendly merger.

Still, the CEO boasted that the new company would be so much greater because it would only include the best parts and processes of both companies.

I didn’t know that much about M&A at the time, but I remember questioning even then: how was he going to make sure that only the best parts stayed?

He didn’t. And he lost his job within two years of that deal.

Like with any human institution, the best is often supported by the less. You can’t have one without the other. Pick one and the whole structure unravels.

I’m not bullish on M&A. You would think that something with a failure rate of almost 90% wouldn’t be commonplace, but we confuse size and scale with success.

Still, some deals work. Some marriages work too. Not because the differences disappear, but because both sides stop trying to eliminate them.

My friend’s marriage didn’t fail because they were different. It failed because they spent years trying to fix each other instead of understanding each other. The CEO didn’t fail because the two companies were different. He failed because he thought he could keep the parts he liked and throw away the rest.

The mergers that work, at the conference table and at the dinner table, are the ones where both sides walk in knowing they are joining with something whole.

The 10% that survive, in business and in life, are the ones that fall in love with what’s actually there.