Adam Torres and Joanne Lipman discuss Joanne’s new book.
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Show Notes:
New book alert! In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Joanne Lipman, Bestselling Author, Former Editor in Chief at USA Today. Explore Joanne’s new book, Next!: The Power of Reinvention in Life and Work, and her participation in the State of the Woman Conference in Nashville, Tennessee.
About Joanne Lipman
Joanne Lipman is a bestselling author and news executive positioned at the nexus of media and technology. She has served as Editor-in-Chief of USA Today, USA Today Network, Conde Nast Portfolio, and The Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Journal, leading those organizations to six Pulitzer Prizes. She is the bestselling author of the new book “NEXT! The Power of Reinvention in Life and Work,” as well as “That’s What She Said,” about closing the gender gap. A thought leader on diversity and inclusion, she has worked with numerous Fortune 500 firms, and counseled senior leadership teams and individual CEO’s. She is also an on-air contributor at CNBC and a Yale University lecturer on The Media and Democracy.
Described as “innovator in chief” by The New York Times, Lipman created multiple new content initiatives at the publications she led. As Chief Content Officer of Gannett, she was Editor in Chief of its USA TODAY and USA TODAY Network, encompassing more than 3,000 journalists at 110 newspapers including the flagship title as well as the Detroit Free Press, the Arizona Republic, the Des Moines Register and the Cincinnati Enquirer. Under her leadership, the Network was awarded three Pulitzer Prizes and had an additional three Pulitzer finalists.
She began her career at The Wall Street Journal, ultimately rising to Deputy Managing Editor — the first woman to attain that post– and supervising coverage that won three Pulitzer Prizes. She subsequently was founding Editor-in-Chief of Condé Nast Portfolio magazine and portfolio.com, which won Loeb and National Magazine Awards. Ms. Lipman is co-author of the New York Times Education bestseller “Strings Attached,” which has also been published across Europe and Asia.
In addition to CNBC, Lipman has appeared as a television commentator on ABC, CNN, CBS, NBC, PBS, and MSNBC, among others. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Time, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, and Newsweek, among others, and her journalism has been collected in multiple anthologies. A winner of the Matrix Award for women in communications, she serves on the advisory boards of data.world, Breastcancer.org, the Wire China and the Yale School of Music, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She has served on the. boards of numerous non-profits and was a Commissioner on the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy. She has been a judge for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Magazine Awards and the Loeb Awards.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today I have Joanne Lipman on the line and she is best selling author.
And she also released a book recently. Next is the power of reinvention in life and work. And she’s also a veteran journalist. Former editor chief and chief, excuse me, for USA Today, USA Today network, the wall street journal, and the wall street journal weekend Condé Nast portfolio magazine. I mean, we definitely have a veteran journalist on our, on our line.
And Joanne first, I just want to say welcome to the show. Great to have you here. Thank you, Adam. I’m so happy to be here with you. All right, so for my long time, my hardcore listeners, they know I love promoting authors, and I love promoting books so I’m excited to get into your book why you wrote it, and also get into some of the content in the book as well.
But I also want to talk about before we get into that you were referred over to us from Gail Letts over at the State of the Women 2024 conference in Nashville. I’m excited. They have a rock star lineup of speakers, yourself included. So tell me a little bit more about the conference.
Yeah, I’m very excited to do the conference So so we’re talking today about my book next the power of reinvention in life and work This comes on the heels of and sort of grew out of my previous book, which is called That’s what she said, which is about how do we close the gender gap at work? Both of the books and a lot of the work that I have been doing in the past few years really focuses on Transitions on the gender gap, how do we close it, how do we bring men in to join that conversation with us.
So I’m very excited about the conference because we’re going to be hitting on all of those kinds of issues, we’re going to be talking with women. Who are both at the peak of their careers, but a lot of women who are coming up who are, you know, mid career people who are starting people who are, who are really eager to get to that next level.
And there’s such great energy when you speak at a conference like this and you meet so many fascinating people. So I’m really looking forward to it. As a, as a veteran journalist and you know, former editor in chief, I’m just curious, have you, have you always kind of, did you start out with this type of content and being inspired to create books and things that uplift people, whether it’s women or otherwise, or did this kind of like, as, as, as you being in the seat or in the role at such a high level positions, did you kind of veer into creating this type of content over time?
I’m just curious how the, how the progression took place. Adam, I love this question so much because I very rarely am asked this question and you’re right. I did not start out this way. I spent 22 years at the Wall Street Journal. I actually spent 23 years because I started as an intern when I was in college, joined the paper as a reporter.
Was not focused at all on, on this kind of content. I covered real estate, I covered advertising, I was an editor on page one. But what I found is as I started climbing the ranks in leadership, That I started then, you know, seeing that there weren’t a lot of women around. I was very often the only one in the room.
I started being invited to these women’s leadership conferences like Gail’s. And I realized that you know, women, there’s so many, we need to help each other, first of all, but also I realized that. Women talking to each other is essentially half a conversation, which only gets us to half a solution. And we really need men to be part of that conversation.
And I, I had a unique platform coming out of business journalism. I went from the Wall Street Journal to Condé Nast, where I created and ran Condé Nast portfolio, a business magazine. So I’ve had primarily male audiences for most of my journalism career. And it, and I felt really well positioned to be able to kind of bridge the gap, right, to help with the gender issues, but also in a unique position to kind of look across the landscape, use my reporting skills to help highlight issues and use the, the opportunity I’ve had in the various platforms I’ve been.
fortunate enough to be part of to use those platforms to help elevate and shine a light on some of these issues and hopefully pay it forward, which, by the way, in in next in the book we’re talking about, this is one of the huge takeaways is I have an entire chapter actually on on women’s and their career journeys and how often women’s career journeys end up taking them to a place where And They’re giving back.
They reinvent themselves to give back and, and help other women, which is really cool. I didn’t realize this was widespread, but, but it really is. And so I’m happy to be part of that. Did you find the transition smooth or was it a little bit, a little bit tricky in the beginning, whether it was with your audience or whether it was just, just you mentally, like, re engaging your brain in a different way as a creator?
So I, I think all transitions almost all transitions are difficult, right? Because you’re in one mindset and you have to go to another one. This is one of the things that I learned. That’s hard to go through. You were hard. I mean, you were in the business sphere like day to day. So like, if you think I, when I look at the publications of what you’re doing, so to switch and it’s, it couldn’t have been that easy, not at first.
Well, you know, what’s interesting is my career Path it looks like I switched from one thing to the next but in fact In my my self identity is journalist. And so i’ve always been very consistent so i’ve never had that sort of crisis of identity because Whether I was running a news organization with thousands of people or working on my own writing a book.
They’re both journalists for journalistic experience But I do think that every transition is difficult. And most people when they go through one of these transitions, they feel very lonely. It feels like you’re the only person who is struggling. That’s one of the big takeaways, which we can talk about which has actually been well documented now by social scientists and psychologists and even neuroscientists.
There is this period, this Where it feels like you’re standing still. And, and it’s, it’s very frustrating and, and we don’t like to talk about it. And so everybody goes through it and everybody feels like they’re the only person going through it, but everybody goes through it. And it’s healthy and it’s normal, so if you’re, if anybody listening is in that period right now, you’re not alone, and there’s nothing wrong with you.
I love to say that, and I, one of the things I like to talk about, just, just as friends and otherwise, who are the creatives and writers and things like that is, you know, the idea of finding your voice, and I’m like, well. I don’t really know what that means. Maybe we all, we all, I mean, it depends on the day, right?
I mean, the theme, okay, higher level, a body of work, a catalog. I mean, you can think about and have intention when you’re creating something, but a lot of times, like for me, at least, I, I didn’t know that what the catalog of our body of work was until you look back, but after it’s done for me. Yeah, yeah, that’s a really great point.
Yeah. Yeah. So let’s let’s get further into the book. So it’s a follow up to a previous book that you wrote and so why this book? Why now? Yeah, so next, the power of reinvention in life and work. Actually, I started it during the pandemic, during the shutdown. And the reason was, I realized if we can all take ourselves mentally back that far, if you recall, at the beginning of the pandemic, everybody thought, you know, those first few weeks, it was going to be like a short term thing, and then everything would go back to normal.
And then, you know, About a month in, in about April of 2020, we all realized, oh my gosh, we don’t know when this is going to end, what the world’s going to look like, what’s going to happen to my life. And a lot of people began during that period of time, sort of re thinking, reprioritizing, like what are my real values?
And it was a really pivotal. moment. And what I realized as a journalist and as a human, because I was like everybody else. I was, I had, you know, I was sent home. So was my husband, who’s a lawyer and my children who are, who are now out of college and have their own jobs. And, and so the, the whole world has sort of, you know, was in this position where we’re, where we’re stopped in our tracks and you realize, There’s going to be a new normal.
We don’t know when, and we don’t know what it’s going to look like. And that’s what really got me thinking about this idea of transition, because I wanted to understand. How do you figure out what comes next if you’re if life throws you and it doesn’t have to be a pandemic life throws you a loop and it could be something that you don’t ask for it could be a sudden illness or you get fired, or something happy like you get married or have a kid or move to a new city.
But whatever it is, you’re suddenly your life changes and you have to figure out how to how do I move on how do I. Reorient myself and figure out what is next and how do I get there? And and because I was in that mindset, I began reporting. I thought, okay, what I want to do is understand. The journeys, people who have done this successfully, I want to understand their journeys, and I want to understand also like the science behind it.
I was fascinated in research that has been done. So, so what I did is I looked at all kinds of different transitions in Next. I looked at people who reinvented careers. I looked at people who had experienced great trauma, great trauma. And had to kind of rebuild their lives. I looked at people who had failure.
We’ve all had failure. Like, what’s the best way to come back when you’ve kind of fell fallen on your face? How do you come back from that? You know, so I looked at all this across the board. I looked at people who had sort of life changing aha moments. And how do you know when you should listen to your aha moments?
How do you know when they’re right? And, and, and so I have stories of people in, in every one of these. Kinds of different kinds of major life transitions. And then I talked to the scientists and the neuroscientists behind it and it was fascinating ’cause what I wanted to do is say, okay, in all these very different kinds of transitions, I wanted to see is there a common theme?
Are there common strategies common that any one of us can take? To help us ease into whatever our next transition is, and it turned out, yes, there were common steps that you go through in a transition, and there were also, I learned from all the people I interviewed, and I interviewed several hundred people, I learned from them some really, really effective strategies if you find yourself in transition to help you move on to find the next thing.
Now, when I think of a book that talks about reinvention I mean, normally I’ll talk about my, my last book for like a second. So when I went, when I was writing that book and when I was creating that, I was going through my own, that’s kind of how I work myself through the process. That theme of whatever that book is, is what I’m going through myself as well.
So my last book, the book before that, all of them, you can see what I was thinking or going through. Were you going through a process of reinvention yourself during this time? Or did that, any of that, did it kind of play into it? Yes. Yes. You know, there’s a, there’s a saying among authors that you write the book you need and I absolutely exhibit a, I mean, this, like I said, it was.
I’m somebody who’d always either been in a newsroom or as an author was always like on the road, out with people, talking to people, traveling around, and suddenly like I’m sent home. And not only that, right? Right? But not only that, this was the first time in my life, in my adult life, that there was a major news event that I was not covering.
Oh, wow. That’s interesting. Since in 30 years, I was there, 9 11, I was there, like, you know, and it was a, it was a very discombobulating feeling to Not being part of the news coverage it was very difficult. And so that was one of the things for me that was like, okay, how do I manage through this? And how can I help, not just myself, but I obviously, what I was going through was just on a small scale.
What the whole world was going through. For sure. But, and so that’s why I realized it wasn’t, this is not just about me. This is like something that is very common to. All of us at that particular moment, even now that we’re thankfully past the, you know, the massive pandemic state, all of us go through these, these pretty significant disruptions in our lives for good and for bad.
And we will go through them multiple times. And I felt like we could all use that sort of help. Like this is, this is not a book that’s about the pandemic. It’s about any of the life transitions that you’re going through. And I get that. And was the, was the, was it fun creating this? I mean, you, you went, you did hundreds of interviews during that time period to, to create this light.
Like talk to me a little bit about the process. Sure. Sure. So first of all, I love reporting. That’s why I’m a journalist. I love talking to people and hearing their stories. And and I also, so it gives you a report. One of the beauties of reporting is, you know, just like finding all these different people who you might in your normal life, never had to have been like a scavenger hunt, almost like to me when I think about it.
Actually, one of the people who I started with, one of the first people I interviewed. Is James Patterson who is, I’m sure most listeners know James Patterson, the famous author. He’s written, he’s actually the most, the best selling author of all time. He, you know, Alex Cross and all those detective novels.
And he writes, he’s, he’s written over a hundred number one, best selling books, he’s, he’s got the Guinness world record for the most best selling books. And then most of them are like detective books. And, I had first met him when I was a very young reporter. I covered advertising and he was an advertising copywriter.
I met him because I was writing about I was writing about the Burger King advertising campaign at back in 80 something or other. And I had to go interview the guy who at J. Walter Thompson ad agency who wrote the advertising copy for Burger King and it was James Patterson. And I went to go visit him back then.
And I remember so vividly because. I went to go interview him. I didn’t know he did that. I did not know that. That’s an interesting little nugget or Easter egg in this one. Go ahead, please. That’s so interesting. So when I went to go, when I went to go interview him, Who would have thought? He’s like, he’s like, well, you know, I wrote the ad copy, but what I really want to be is a novelist.
No way. To myself. I’m thinking to myself. Yeah, sure. Sure you do. Right? No way. And no, I’m not kidding. So he gives me, he says, no, I got a book published. And he literally, he gives me this book that he got published. And I read it a few weeks later. I don’t remember the details, but I, I actually dug up the review.
The Kirkus does reviews any book that comes out. I dug up the Kirkus review of that book. And the first two words of that review were abysmally dumb. And the last few words in that review were deserves drowning. Ouch. And look, for everybody listening, hold on, we got to take a pause on that one, I don’t want to glance over.
For everybody listening, and look what happened, he kept on going, I got to get my motivational hat on for two seconds, Joanne. Like, and look what happened, he didn’t listen to that review, so if you get a bad review, keep going. Okay, continue. I had to throw that out there. Thank you. And that was the point is that I went back and got in touch with him.
To say, you know, okay, what happened between then when we first met and today, like tell me about your transition. How did you get from here to there? So here’s the really cool thing, Adam is when, when he walked me through kind of the steps that he took and then I interviewed other people at like, for example, another guy who I absolutely love who I found is a guy who was a telephone repair man and he was a telephone repair man.
For 30 years. And he had this kind of secret hobby, just the hobby that he would sketch these fantastical designs of women’s shoes, like fantastical designs. And of course he was a telephone repairman. So this is not anything he was sharing with anyone else. And after 30 years, he. He actually today at the age of 60, he became a women’s shoe designer.
He’s a couture women’s shoe designer today. And so here’s the thing. When he walked me through his story and talked about the milestones that helped him in that transition, it was the same path as Jim Patterson. Turning into a better mother. That was the cool thing. When I talked to different people in different walks of life, they went through a very similar process.
And I kind of distilled it in Next into what I call the reinvention roadmap. Because there’s basically four steps that pretty much everybody goes through. That were very, very common across multiple people who I interviewed. It was fascinating. Wow, when you started seeing this common theme or, and, and developing this roadmap, you, your brain, your synopsis must’ve just been on fire, huh?
Oh, no kidding. The way I did it, honestly, is I, I actually started mapping it out by hand on paper. Where, you know, this one told me this, this, this, and that, this one told me this, this, this, and that, and then I, then I, when I talked to the neuroscientists and psychologists who study things like aha moments in fact, there’s a neuroscience of aha moments, and they talk about the steps you go through to have an aha moment, and it’s very similar, like it’s the steps of creativity, basically, is what we’re talking about, is how do you create something new?
And it, it was fascinating to me how it kind of revealed itself to me. It was very exciting to kind of see it come together that way. Who do you think is the, is the, let’s say the avatar or I know obviously anybody can read it, but who do you think this, who needs this book right now? Like who’s the, who’s the target reader?
Yeah. I mean, the target reader is anybody who is going through. Any kind of transition. I’ve heard a lot. I see a lot of people talking about it like on LinkedIn, people who are going through career transitions. And I’ve heard from a lot of like, you know, career coaches and life coaches, people who are really helping to, you know, basically to go through any transition, but, you know, I’ve also heard from People who have been through like real trauma, who have had to, you know, rebuild after, after an illness or an accident but, but it’s basically if you’re going through any kind of transition and the other, the one other group certainly a lot of women this and and you know, that is one of the main audiences.
But what I found is when I do book signings, I get a lot of people who, who are getting the book actually for recent grads or kids even in high school or college grads or, you know, kids who are, who are, who are trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives or in their first job and trying to figure out a career path.
Like it’s, yeah. There’s a lot there’s a lot in there for young people who are trying to navigate what their career and their life are going to look like. I think a huge part of this is that we are in this, the world’s in flux right now in so many different dimensions. And there’s a lot of uncertainty and, and that’s not just in with your career.
It’s things like, I mean, the whole world, right? We have economic uncertainty, political chaos. We have the future of work is like a huge issue, right? Like is, are we going to be remote? Are we going to be hybrid? Are we going back to the office? How many hours should be working? How do people really have definitely reprioritized how they think about.
What do I care about in my life? And, you know, is this the job I really want to do? You know, is there meaning in this job? Do I want something that has, that is more meaningful to me? I mean, there really has been, I think, this is a, when historians look back, we are in a moment in flux right now. And so that’s, that’s really why I feel like the book has really hit a chord with so many people.
And I think that’s a great way to end it, Joanne. We are in flux right now. But, but to all everybody that’s listening to this, if you want to help with some of that flux or turmoil, guess what hit that subscribe button. You know, it was coming from my long term listeners. I snuck it in the subscribe button.
And also I want you to go and pick up a copy of Joanne’s book. So you can, you can pick one up. Of course, that Joanne.
Also you can you you can follow Joanne on social media at Joanne Lipman. Joanne, Hey, I just want to say really appreciate you coming on the show today and, and giving us some of your time and insight and wishing you and the best. I know you’re going to, you’re going to knock, you’re going to do very well at the state of the woman 2024.
For conference in Nashville with Gail and then the whole, and the whole conference they have going on. So excited about that too. So again, Joanne, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, Adam.
