The Token Tiger

On the new CEO of Twitter

As you’ve no doubt heard, Elon Musk has hired Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter. She’s smart and successful and has run ad sales at NBCUniversal. She’s sixty years old.

I’ve run ad sales on a much smaller stage. I have lots of Italianate vowels in my last name. I am sixty years old. She has two kids. I had two kids. I feel an affinity for her. I understand why she would want to be CEO of a tech company. Not many women get to play on that stage.

The stories I’ve read keep citing her “tough” exchanges with Musk on a stage during a marketing event. Not that tough. When I first read it, I wondered if they had choreographed those exchanges like professional wrestlers before a bout. Then I thought, no, she’ll know exactly how far to push him. She and I know that dance, we learned it young, how to push just far enough. It is choreographed, but in a universal way – this is how to be a sassy woman.

I’ve gotten work before because I tell the truth.

And I’ve lost work because I tell the truth.

Sometimes the person who hired me to tell the truth was the same person who fired me for telling the truth.

And yes, it’s always been a man.

There’s a kind of man who likes to think of himself as a leader who can hire bold women to work for him. Not only is he supporting women, he’s showing that he can handle women who are bold and direct.

When I’ve been hired by that kind of guy, to be my bold and badass self, I felt like a pet tiger. Too big for the room, wary. Like, hey, dude, you know all this lithe power isn’t massed together for me to be a housepet, right? You’ve got some big animals that need slaughter, let me at them. But don’t try to put a leash on me and parade me around the conference room.

Pat me on the head again and I’ll take your hand off at the wrist.

Musk is a man who likes to perform that kind of openness to critique. He’ll run a poll on Twitter to get feedback. Look at me getting feedback. He’ll hire a fierce woman like Yaccarino. Look at me with the pet tiger on a leash.

The Glass Cliff is a term coined in 2005 that posits that women are often put into leadership in situations where they are set up to fail. The ship is already headed towards the iceberg when they get the gold braid and are told to take the wheel. In industry and in politics, women are brought into perilous situations then blamed when they don’t succeed.

Media pundits are saying Yaccarino is headed towards the Glass Cliff. Which may well be true – I wouldn’t want a job where I needed to win back advertisers but all the engineers and product people who could fix the product to make it work for advertisers were fired. And the CEO is unable to stop tweeting crazy shit even though he is under a federal injunction to have all his tweets reviewed by a lawyer before he posts them.

She knows those things. But if Yaccarino were my cousin, I’d sit her down and talk to her. I wouldn’t talk about the multiple issues with Musk as a leader or as a businessman. She knows those. I’d tell her that as a tiger, she’s going to have two choices. One, stay on the leash, be cooped up and under the control of someone who doesn’t understand your nature, power or well-being. Two, break free. In the first scenario she will end up weaker, smaller, confused by the attempt at domestication. Her teeth will fall out from too much soft meat. In the second, she can keep her strength, her teeth, her sanity. She can go back to the smaller range of a non-CEO position or she can keep looking for the room to run as a real leader.

I’d ask her if she was coming from a place of scarcity. Was she, like me, worried that she’s on borrowed time as a 60-year-old woman? That she won’t get a shot at a CEO position unless she gets it right now? Does she feel like she can’t wait until 63 or 65 like her white male contemporaries? I wouldn’t dismiss that fear, I don’t think she’s wrong.

I’d tell her what it felt like for me to be about to really make a change at a company, to be poised to spring, muscled coiled, only to be jerked back by the leash, to watch the quarry run away.

Why risk domestication? It can’t be about the money, I’m sure she has more than enough. Does she think she can fix Twitter? Does she think that this is going to be a stepping stone to another CEO position? The longer she spends on Musk’s leash, the weaker she will become.

I’ll be watching what happens, and rooting for Yaccarino. Maybe she’ll be able to stay off the leash. Or maybe she’ll turn around and take off Musk’s hand at the wrist. Either way, good luck, cousin.

In bocca al lupo, cugina