Get ready: Shellye Archambeau is "Unapologetically Ambitious" for us all

Dear everyone who ever underestimated you: Shellye Archambeau has organized her life experience as a strategic battle plan to help you set and realize your goals. This memoir, intimate and candid, transforms her life into tactics, sharing the continual risks she took to break barriers and to create a gorgeous legacy of success--intellectual and romantic. It's a helluva read.

Traveling with this CEO-to-be, from her mother's sewing room to excruciating meetings with colleagues and managers (whom she shows us how to out-maneuver), while falling in love, experiencing racism, sexism and birthing both technologies and babies, "Unapologetically Ambitious" is designed to empower the rest of us to go get our lives.

Happily, Shellye doesn't assume the reader wants to become a CEO--although, if you do, she does indeed know how to do that. Shellye Archambeau, an IBM and Blockbuster expat, led a Silicon Valley technology company--one of the very few African-American women to do so--and now is a board director for Verizon, Nordstrom, Roper Technologies and Okta.

Instead, Shellye wants to help readers to get muscular about going after what they want, because, as she wrote in her most recent email to followers, "Ambition is not enough." She's transformed 35 years of marriage and career expertise into an exquisitely detailed--and very personal--playbook of approaches, strategies, and tactics. If you have experienced institutionalized bias or even some of the self-doubt and personal agony reported by some women about any industry where women, especially women of color, are decisively in the minority, and you've wondered how to navigate these situations, Shellye's book is a rich resource.

You'll need an entire pocket protector filled with highlighters for different situations. I did. Plus Kleenex.

It's ironic that when I first read the chapter titles, my heart sank. "Let It Go," and "Beware of Imposter Syndrome" sounded like every business book for women ever. Wrong, wrong, I was so wrong. Instead, the book is typical Shellye, I can say having been a guest at her home, office and events: Encyclopedic rigor in preparation that doesn't get in the way of the great time, with eye-popping anecdotes about at-work conflicts and her love affair with her husband, Scotty.

Through it all, she overcomes an endless stream of "no" at work, emerging as a huge leadership talent who capitalizes on her life experience as a Black woman. One jaw-dropping example is from her tenure at IBM. Realizing nearly all of the line executives who worked for IBM's CEO had been stationed in Japan, she angled for and won a position there. And created an historic first for an American IBM exec in Japan (bolded text is mine):

"Now, I worked with many wonderful people who gave their all and did their best work at IBM, but I noticed a particular blind spot among the more ambitious set, IBM's high-potential "type." When they took a new assignment, they assumed that everything they'd done–their accomplishments and accolades, the reputations they'd developed–all came with them. In other words, they presumed they were going to be treated with respect. Not so for me. As a young, African American woman, I was accustomed to earning respect. Whenever I got a promotion or a new job, I walked into it understanding that people likely would assume I was not quite qualified, or not quite ready. I presumed I needed to establish relationships and credibility, to develop a reputation, to prove myself. In other words, I may not have had age and maleness working for me, but because I had spent so much of my life outside my comfort zone, I had developed team-building skills and the ability to make alliances quickly. These skills came into play when I gave my first presentation to my Japanese team."

Can you guess what Shellye was the first American executive to do at IBM Japan? I'm not giving it away but you can ask her before the book is released October 6. The story made me do a victory dance in my living room.

What I love most about this book is how Shellye's gracious human interface and personal warmth melds with her 100 percent unapologetic ambitions--for us, too. Get ready for bracing doses of GSD, reader. As an experienced leader and manager, she knows we need that if we are ever going to go get what we want.

She even helps you start tackling your own demons:

"I'm not the only person who has custom-built a happy, successful life. You can do it, too. This doesn't mean you won't face challenges, disappointments, and tragedies along the way. (Most of us do.) It means that you can make life—and everything that comes with it—work for you. 

Wait—are you wondering if this applies to you? If you can find success and happiness? Why is this a question so many of us ask ourselves—not "How can I get what I want?" but "Is this even possible for someone like me?" 

Let me say, unequivocally, yes. Yes, it is. 

Let me explain. 

If you haven't figured this out already, I'm an ambitious woman. Unapologetically so." 

If you are unapologetically ambitious, too, I hope you'll join me in pre-ordering Unapologetically Ambitious here: https://amzn.to/2HNFsal.

The foreword was written by her former Loudcloud CEO and colleague, Ben Horowitz.

#UnapologeticallyAmbitious, #UnapologeticallyShellye, #Entrepreneur, #Leadership, #C200