I Am Debra Lee by Debra Lee

Author:Debra Lee [LEE, DEBRA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2023-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

9 a.m.: coffee

9:30 a.m.: attack the growing pile of contracts taking over my desk

11:30 a.m.: listen to Jeff complain I wasn’t approving a new deal fast enough

12:30 p.m.: tell Bob there’s was no way we could pull off XYZ task in time

12:45 p.m.: go back to my desk and figure out how to make the impossible possible

“It’s only 68 pages with a couple of staples,” Bob told me when I tried to get him to walk back the six-month deadline. “What does he mean ‘impossible’? It’s simple.” I rolled my eyes. “It’s simple” was another Bob proverb. It applied to anything and everything he could dream up. Nothing was too hard a task for the people Bob put his trust in—and that right there was the kicker. Even when he was asking for the moon, the man made you believe you could wrap it in a bow by close of business. He wasn’t being an unreasonable tyrant—though he could take on that role when the mood hit him—but instead he simply had confidence in you. “It’s simple.”

We tore our hair out trying to make that deadline. And I was already running on fumes. Because while YSB was gearing up in 1991, I was also heading up the intense preparation for what would eventually become BET’s incredibly successful initial public offering. But at the time all I knew was that I was staring down more work after almost every meeting. This is how my year was going: I gave birth to Quinn via C-section in May, got back to work by August, and was named publisher of a magazine, a dream job. A month after that, the IPO project was also on my plate. The following January I had an editorial leadership team in place for the magazine. We planned to print our first magazine that August, and opening day on the New York Stock Exchange would be in October.

I don’t believe there is a word in the English dictionary to describe how overworked I was. Mentally I was always in three different places at once—with the baby, with the SEC, or with YSB. And physically I was all over the place. As a publishing neophyte I thought it would be smart to take a two-week publishing course at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Bob had confidence in me, but I wanted to have that same confidence in myself. I wanted to feel more prepared for the leadership role I was taking on.

That’s a thing we do as women. We don’t just dive in blindly; we prepare, prepare, prepare. Whether this more thoughtful approach is right or wrong I think depends on the outcome—and your timetable. Preparation can never be a bad thing. Who wouldn’t want to know all there is to know about the industry they’re in? I loved theorizing with my peers, studying consumer metrics, and absorbing information from proven experts. But you can’t bury your head in the books for too long; the business is waiting. It’s

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