Emma Grede Part 3: What She Got Wrong and (Mostly) Right
Issue 2885— May 19, 2026
Say it, Emma Grede 🔥.
I love your book, Start With Yourself. Love the title, the concepts in it for the most part, your brash and decisive way.
[Catch up on my thoughts about Emma and the book if you have a mind to, before you plunge into this conversation with myself. The two prequels to this post are here and here.]
Or feel free to start here, with yourself, as Emma would advise and as I am doing.
I distinguish between ambition and intention. Ambition is “I wish, I hope, I want.” Intention is “I will, I am, heck yes I see myself doing it already.”
Ambition is the fuel. Intention takes the fuel and drives to your goal. I created the word “intentioning” to signify this distinction by turning intention into an active verb.
Emma epitomizes Intentioning, and the intentional women I wrote about in my book by that name. That’s why I’m so captivated by her persona and her book.
I have so many points of agreement with her. I’ll list the main ones. No fluff, no examples, just the basics.
o Nobody has it all, all the time. It’s about making choices and owning them.
o Like me, she doesn’t like the term “empowering” women. Because we all have some power, more than we realize. Assess it, own it, use it.
o You can’t wait till you have all the answers to make decisions or the moment will whiz by you. We never have all the information or all the resources we need to make decisions as leaders. But leadership requires decision making, so get over it. What’s the worst that can happen? You make a different decision and move forward. Plus you learn more from failure than success
o There are no scarce resources. This mindset is super important. Sometimes it’s challenging to see those resources but what you need is usually there.
o She would never sign up for a marriage not built on equity. Excellent advice.
o Say what’s on your mind to people asking for feedback or advice. You don’t do them a service by trying to save their feelings.
o When I work with executive women, I share things I had to learn on the job. Such as: It’s not a good use of time to know everything in operations. Find people who know more than you do about a topic and let them do it. Especially find a great CFO who can translate the numbers in language you understand. “It’s not your job to be likable. It’s your job to lead.“
o The hardest thing is to learn to say “no.” She struggles, as I always do, with the tension between empathy and making the decisions that are best for the business. “The wrong people will never get you to the right place,“ she says re having to make hard decisions about personnel.
o And I love this: “I don’t think people wake up thinking about me. I think about me and don’t care much about what others think about me.” That’s the essence of being in integrity with oneself.
She exemplifies her belief that you should use your difference as an advantage, that smart companies are inclusive, and that it feels good to align your business with your values.
“I want a world populated by wealthy women,” Emma says.
Wouldn’t that be a game changer?
Starting with yourself may sound selfish on its face. But dig a little deeper and you’ll realize that it’s actually radical self-responsibility.
Can starting with yourself turn into self-aggrandizing? Possibly. Can it turn into unearned arrogance? Yes. Can it turn into sociopathic Elon Musk-like ruthless disregard for the welfare of others? Of course. Like any other philosophy. If you take it to extremes, it can become an ugly flip side of itself.
But listen closely to Emma and you will hear a healthy self-respect which is essential to success. It’s clarity of core values that you have to respect whether you agree with her or not, and an unmitigated willingness to do the hard work of both personal and professional growth.
Now, there are things I don’t agree with or have cognitive dissonance about.
For example, “Don’t assume because I’m a woman that I will help you,” without some transactional value to herself. That feels too cold to me. Though it’s probably why she has built companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars and I have not.
Regarding her stated hands off management style, I understand that you shouldn’t micromanage or try to know everything about everything in an organization. Still, the buck stops with you. I sincerely doubt that her “hands off of the operations” policy is as rigid in real life as she says. In fact, in several places, she describes how she pays attention to every minute detail of her products.
More likely she’s acquired the judgment one needs to be a successful CEO through learning from her failures as well as her successes.
Her radical self-responsibility expands into radical responsibility for her businesses’ performance. That combination is what I came to recognize in myself looking back at my first CEO position. I call it “the CEO brain,” a willingness to take on any level of responsibility to have the opportunity to make a big vision happen, even if doing that is a substantial risk.
In my fantasy, Start With Yourself could be the sequel to my book No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, updated with Emma’s contemporary voice that exemplifies the woman I wrote that book and later, Intentioning, to create.
And that’s exactly why I would love for Emma to grace the stage of Take The Lead’s Power Up Conference August 26 in Washington DC.
I’m intentioning it. But whether Emma is there or not, you are the most important person and I can’t wait to see you that room so we can talk about all this and much more. Register here.
GLORIA FELDT is the Co-founder and President of Take The Lead, a motivational speaker, and a global expert in women’s leadership development and DEI for individuals and companies that want to build gender balance. She is a bestselling author of five books, most recently Intentioning: Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women Will Take The Lead for (Everyone’s) Good. Honored as Forbes 50 Over 50, and Former President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, she is a frequent media commentator. Learn more at www.gloriafeldt.com and www.taketheleadwomen.com. Find her @GloriaFeldt on all social media.