Shane Parrish

There was no mandatory quotas.

There was no manager demanding you attend meetings at specific times.

You could scale your effort up and down as your life evolved.

If your child was sick, you stayed home.

If your daughter had to resettle, you went.

If you need to take the summer off, you could.

This was decades before anyone else ever used the phrase work-life balance.

And Mary Kay built it into her structure because she knew from personal experience what happened when women didn't have it.

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Problem four, her ideas had been dismissed because male bosses said she was thinking like a woman.

What they meant was she was emotional and not strategic, relationship-focused and not numbers-focused.

So her solution to this was she made thinking like a woman basically a job requirement.

The very qualities corporations devalued became her competitive advantage.

Empathy, intuition, and relationship skills.

The ability to make someone feel heard and valued was more important than making a hard sell.

In traditional corporations, these were soft skills.

They were kind of nice to have, but not essential.

And at Mary Kay, they were the essential skills.

Everything else was secondary.

Problem five, despite exceptional performance, she'd never received real recognition.