Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Under Armour is hoping its first female CEO will get it out of its slump, rural hospitals are closing maternity units, and Bozoma Saint John’s new book describes the tragedies that accompanied her success as a marketing executive. Have a terrific Tuesday!
– The Urgent Life. In 2014, Bozoma Saint John walked into a conference room at Beats Music packed with people eager to meet her, the company’s new head of global marketing. She felt a flurry of emotions as she prepared to address the crowd, but mostly, she was anxious. Somewhere in her, a voice said: “be fucking honest.”
“I’m new here. It’s my first day. So glad to be here,” she told the room. “But I want you to know that I’m carrying a lot. I’m a new widow. My husband died four months ago from cancer. I have a 4-year-old daughter.”
In her new memoir The Urgent Life, Saint John chronicles how she got to that point of vulnerability after enduring a series of personal tragedies.
Saint John, the former CMO at Netflix and Endeavor, could have written a career advice book, but doing so would have perpetuated the myth that our personal and professional lives are separate, she says.
“I’m not just a business person, I’m a human being who’s had so many different types of experiences,” she says. “And the loss I’ve suffered has made me who I am. You don’t get the urgency of me—like running around this friggin’ corporate ladder—without understanding [my husband] Peter dying.”
Saint John wasn’t always so open about her grief. She was marketing manager of brand at Pepsi when she lost the pregnancy of her daughter Eve. Preeclampsia caused her to go into labor at six months pregnant, and Peter was forced to decide between saving his wife or his unborn child.
Saint John returned to work three weeks later. She had followed the well-meaning advice of a female executive and hadn’t talked much about her pregnancy at work, lest people think she wasn’t dedicated to her job. That made it harder to bring up what had gone wrong.
Now Saint John considers “carrying your heart, crying, being frustrated, all the emotions that sometimes women have a hard time expressing because it makes us seem weak” to be a “real power move.” She says acknowledging her grief to her Beats colleagues created a bond between her and her team; it inspired them to bring their whole selves to work and to have her back.
Her spur-of-the-moment decision to be radically honest with her new coworkers marked the beginning of her new, more open approach at work.
“I’d always been impulsive, moved to action by my restlessness. But urgency is not reckless. It is intentional. It is listening to my gut, listening to God, then being fully present as I embrace each step of my journey,” she writes in the last chapter of the book.
Saint John admits that part of living urgently is that she often has no plan. She stepped down as CMO of Netflix in March 2022. After her departure, there were reports about friction with CEO Ted Sarandos and criticism of the attention she dedicated to side projects, like a career workshop and a program at Harvard Business School. Saint John says she had a great relationship with Sarandos and stepped away to focus on her creative pursuits, like writing this book.
When I ask her what’s next, she punts and says she will be trusting her intuition when the time comes. “Here’s the complexity of like, me and my urgency, right? Which is that I don’t have a plan. I really don’t. I think people think I have a plan. I don’t have a plan,” she says.
At this point, she isn’t sure if she will ever head back to corporate America.
“I am more interested in my growth than I am in any accolades or any big names or big titles,” she says. “I think those have come as a result of my fierce loyalty to myself.”
Kinsey Crowley
[email protected]
@kinseycrowley
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ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Laid off. Elon Musk's latest round of layoffs at Twitter ensnared Esther Crawford, head of the platform's subscription product, Twitter Blue. Crawford had embodied Musk's "extreme hard-core" Twitter 2.0, once sharing a photo of herself sleeping on the office floor. She defended Musk-era Twitter on her way out, posting that she was "deeply proud of the team for building through so much noise and chaos." Coins2Day
- Suit up. Stephanie Linnartz is stepping into a new role as Under Armour's first female CEO. The Marriott vet, who oversaw the hotel chain's digital push and its industry-leading Bonvoy rewards program, is tasked with reviving the once-hot athletic apparel company. Bloomberg
- Farming families. Land O'Lakes CEO Beth Ford has a unique perspective on rising grocery costs. At the helm of a Coins2Day 500 company that runs as a farmer-owned cooperative, Ford says rising consumer prices could be solved by immigration reform. American farms, of which 98% are run by families, are up against a 2.5 million worker shortage among other forces pushing down supply and allowing prices to balloon. Time
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Citigroup is losing one of its top dealmakers, Alison Harding-Jones, the head of the bank's EMEA M&A business; it's unclear where she'll go next. Former GE exec Zara Mirza has been named chief brand officer at TIAA. Marriott has named Yibing Mao president of Greater China. Laura Abril will be EVP of scripted and global business development at Buendía Estudios. Katherine Baicker has been appointed as the next provost of the University of Chicago. Baby gear rental company Loop has hired Franchesca Hashim as the head of marketing.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- Growth Oil. For entrepreneurs Monique and Melvin Rodriguez, partnering with P&G to bring hair care brand Mielle Organics to a bigger market was a dream, but critics accused the husband and wife team of selling out. The Rodriguezes, who will stay in their roles as CEO and COO respectively, have defended the deal, arguing the partnership will open more doors and allow them to invest more in their community. Essence
- Rural childbirth. Rural hospitals across the U.S. Are closing their maternity units. By 2020, half of the rural community hospitals no longer provided obstetric services, and the rate of closures continues to accelerate. A study in Louisiana showed that mothers living in "maternity care deserts" are three times as likely to die during pregnancy and the year after than those closer to care. New York Times
- Surprisingly radical. Italy's center-left party has elected its first woman leader Elly Schlein. The 37-year-old Italian-American who's been compared to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is far more radical than the party's previous leaders and spent her early years in politics volunteering for Barack Obama's two presidential campaigns. Politico
ON MY RADAR
Life after food? The Cut
Lori Lightfoot makes her case to Chicago The New Yorker
Leading with compassion has research-backed benefits Harvard Business Review
Judy Blume goes all the way The Atlantic
PARTING WORDS
"They realized that this summarized the whole problem, that these powerful men could do whatever they want, no matter how egregious it was, and the women had to pick up the pieces and do more work."
—Nancy Hopkins, on the report that started a gender revolution at MIT
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