Deb Liu: preference

Transcript context

…This is maybe a good time to chat about your book, which is coming out later this year, Take Back Your Power, which touches on a lot of these things. Can you just share what this book's about and who might find it most valuable? Then I'll ask you a couple more questions about it. Yeah, so I started the book actually almost four years ago now at this point. I wrote it because I always had an open door policy, and for many years at Facebook I had an open door policy where anybody could reach out to me, and I would just spend 15 minutes coaching them, venturing them, whatever they wanted. I think for me, I always needed an ally. There were just times when I felt like I needed to talk to someone who wasn't my manager, or wasn't someone who was really close to me, and I felt like I didn't have that. I ended up having these amazing coaching circles, but not everyone has that either. And so I said, "You know what? If you need a friend, call me." And I did new hire training for many, many years and every time a new hire training, I'm like, "Call me. It could be tomorrow, it could be five years from now." And by the way, there were people years later that I'm using your open door policy you mentioned years ago, and sometimes people are just in a tough situation. I got a lot of, "Am I crazy, but this happened, my manager said this, what should I do?" Or other people saying, "I'm really not resonating with a product," or something like that. I realized something though is that a lot of people were asking me questions that I realized I was repeating the answer, which was, "Hey." People said, "I feel really stuck." They said, "I want to get promoted." Have you asked? You'd be surprised at how many people said no, or how many people said yes, and when I asked them how they asked, they didn't really ask. I realized that some of these lessons were really repeatable. My manager Boz said, "Write down what you repeat." I started compiling these things and I pulled together the stories of over a couple dozen women also and their lessons of how they succeeded in the workplace. And these were not all up into the right shiny, happy stories because there were a lot of people who faced a lot of circumstances. And the question about how they got there was that these are the ones who had the resilience to overcome and the lessons that they learned along the way. And so I wanted to share those stories and the lessons I learned as well. And so this book weaves that together. But I want to be able to hand people this book and say, "You know what? What you don't need is necessarily me asking you the hard questions. You should just read this," because I've coached over a thousand people, but I only have so much time. I talked to someone last night because my kids and husband were in bed and someone texted me and I said, "Sure, happy to do it." She reached out to me via LinkedIn. It was a simple thing, but I hope then I can increase the reach. Reach of a thousand people is incredible, but it's never going to reach 10,000, a hundred thousand people. I just don't have that kind of time or ability. And so really in tech it's all about scalability. h of a thousand people is incredible, but it's never going to reach 10,000, a hundred thousand people. I just don't have that kind of time or ability. And so really in tech it's all about scalability. You can write a beautiful email and one person reads it, but you can post a post and on your Substack and 150,000 people read it. It could go viral and even millions of people could read it. And that's the point is scalability. And so I wrote this book with all those lessons because I just think in some ways they're really obvious, and in some ways it's really important to remind ourselves. It's like eating right and taking care of your health. People said you should exercise and eat right. It's not like we don't know that, so they should sell notebooks about that, but instead this is a reminder that these are the things we need to do and here's a guide. So it's 10 New Rules for Women at Work and it's just really focused on specific rules, what other women have done to implement those rules, and how it really changed their career.…

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