How Sheryl Sandberg got to ride the Google 'rocket ship'

New York: Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, who has people talking with her new book _Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead,_has said that the best career advice she received was from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Sandberg, who has two Harvard degrees, was handpicked by her economics professor Larry Summers to follow him to the World Bank and then to become his chief of staff when he was Treasury Secretary. Not surprisingly, by 2001 Sandberg had several job offers.

Being MBA-trained, she resorted to a spreadsheet and listed her jobs in the columns and her criteria in the rows, and compared the companies and the missions and the roles. One of the jobs on that sheet was to become Google’s first business unit general manager, which sounds good now, but at the time no one thought consumer Internet companies could make money.

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When Google offered her a job, it was in start-up mode with not too many employees.

“Google had no business units, so what was there to generally manage?” Sandberg told an ABC News/Yahoo! Newsmakers interview. “I was just like, ‘Eric, I- I love Google. I want to take this job. But I don’t know what this job is.’”

[caption id=“attachment_319478” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Reach for the stars, Sheryl. AFP[/caption]

“But the next thing he said was, ‘If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, get on, don’t ask what seat.’ I tell people in their careers, ’look for growth.’ Look for the teams that are growing quickly. Look for the companies that are doing well.”

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Sandberg said that when companies are growing quickly and are having a lot of impact, careers take care of themselves.

As Google’s first business unit general manager Sandberg played a key role in building Google into the $250 billion business it is today. Nothing succeeds like success and Sandberg was snapped up by Facebook’s CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2008 to become the social networking giant’s COO. Sandberg’s track record indicates that she has a talent for finding “rocket ships.” After all, both Google and Facebook are blasting away.

Sandberg said Zuckerberg gave her another great piece of career advice during her first performance review.

“He said, ‘Sheryl, your biggest problem is - you’re trying to please everyone all the time. You’re trying not to say anything that anyone objects to. You don’t make change in the world; you don’t have impact in the world unless you’re willing to say things that not everyone will like.’ Really important advice for me,” Sandberg said. “I don’t think I would have written this book if Mark hadn’t said that to me.”

Sandberg’s Lean In which is part feminist manifesto, part how-to career guide, offers stories about what is holding women back in their careers, and ways to address it.

The book points out men apply to jobs when they meet merely 60 percent of the listed requirements, while women wait until they meet 100 percent. Men also negotiate for higher salaries far more often than women. For example, of a graduating class of Carnegie Mellon students, 57 percent of the men initiated negotiations, compared to 7 percent of women.

“I want to be clear: I am not saying that men are too self-confident. That’s not the problem. The problem is that women aren’t self-confident enough,” says Sandberg.

Sandberg doesn’t shy away from describing her own struggles to take risks at work, to ask for what she wants, and to negotiate.

Sandberg tells women to look for supportive spouses; “Everyone knows marriage is the biggest personal decision you make. But it’s the biggest career decision you make.”

Sandberg is married to successful tech entrepreneur Dave Goldberg who launched his first company Launch Media at the age of 26, took it public, and then sold it to Yahoo! The couple says they split their parenting responsibilities equally, trying to make sure at least one of them is home in time for dinner with their two young children.