Know a woman trying to get ahead at work? Send her a link to “9 Non-Threatening Leadership Strategies for Women,” an online guide from a Web site called the Cooper Review. Easy to digest, with handy illustrations, it offers tips on how to share an idea with a male colleague: “Overconfidence is a killer . . . downplay your ideas as just ‘thinking out loud,’ ‘throwing something out there,’ or sharing something ‘dumb,’ ‘random,’ or ‘crazy.’ ” And: “When setting a deadline, ask your coworker what he thinks of doing something, instead of just asking him to get it done.”
It’s satirical. “A lot of people think it’s part of the MeToo movement, but, really, it was what I’d been experiencing for a long time in the corporate world,” Sarah Cooper, the Web site’s creator, said the other day, in a coffee shop in Brooklyn Heights.
Cooper, who was wearing an arabesque-patterned blouse and typing on a MacBook, is a comedian. Her sendup of Sheryl Sandbergian tactics draws in part on her first days at Google, where she spent four years as a user-experience designer, working on spreadsheet and document software. “The default color when you created a shape was this awful, disgusting periwinkle blue that went with nothing, so I walked up to the engineer and said, ‘We need to change it, it’s ugly,’ ” she recalled. “He wouldn’t even look at me. In my performance review that quarter, I was told, ‘You need to be more sensitive to people’s feelings.’ ”
Cooper quit Google in 2014, a few months after starting the Cooper Review, which was inspired by something she’d found in an old notebook. On one page, she’d written, “How to look smart in a meeting: draw a Venn diagram and translate percentages to fractions.” She added more tips (“nod continuously while pretending to take notes,” “pace around the room”), drew some crude illustrations, and posted the list to her blog, with the title “10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings.” “It blew up,” she said. The post’s success led to a three-book deal, including an ironic advice tome (“How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings”) and “a business coloring book.” She explained, “You color the low-hanging fruit and the co-worker you threw under the bus.”
Born in Jamaica, Cooper moved to Rockville, Maryland, with her family in 1980, when she was three. Her mother worked in human resources at a consulting company. “My first job was spending the summer helping her with paperwork,” Cooper recalled. “I loved paperwork. I just wanted to fill out everything, because I knew the answers: your name, your address, your date of birth.” She wanted to act, but her parents pushed her to study something more practical, and she ended up with a master’s degree in digital media. “We were trying to make addictive online experiences,” she said. “And now it’s, like, ‘Oh, maybe it’s not a good thing for people to be stuck on their phones.’ ”
The meeting that inspired those notebook scribbles occurred while she was working at Yahoo, in San Francisco. Eventually, her blog’s success made her feel as if she were living a double life. “I didn’t want people to think I was making fun of them,” she said. “I mean, I was making fun of them.” She and her husband, a software engineer, moved to New York last summer. “One of the reasons I moved to San Francisco was the weather,” she said. “And then I realized that I really don’t like being outside.”
Now Cooper attends almost no meetings. By night, she frequents open mikes, doing standup comedy. (She and the comedian Nikki MacCallum recently started a show called “You’re So Brave”—because, Cooper said, “it’s the thing that a lot of people say when you tell them that you do standup.”) By day, she writes in coffee shops and co-working spaces.
After an hour, Cooper set off for a nearby WeWork, where she shares an office with five randomly assigned “roommates.” Two of them, Craig Saper, a founder of Vinu, a wine menu for iPads, and Katie Lecusay, a lawyer, were there when Cooper arrived.
Lecusay mentioned another “roommate,” an older man who has been teaching himself Hebrew. “The books that he has are library books,” she said.
“Wow,” Cooper said.
Lecusay continued, “I don’t know what he does, but that’s what I want to do with my life. He’ll just sit here and read.”
“He does sleep while he reads, though,” Cooper said.
“Does he really?” Saper asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Cooper said. “I’ll see him and think he’s reading, but he’s actually napping.” She scooted a rolling chair to her desk, which had a laptop stand and an elevated monitor. “It’s all about ergonomics!” she said. “The tech companies very much care about that stuff. I have a joke: you can protect your body while your soul is dying inside!” She laughed, non-threateningly. ♦
