The 7 Rewrites
A New Story of Work.
Work is governed by unspoken, deeply embedded assumptions about power, ambition, and success. Most people are contorting themselves to fit frameworks that have remained largely unchanged even as work and life have evolved.
The 7 Rewrites brings into view leaders already operating beyond those constraints, making visible new ways of exercising authority and impact and expanding what feels possible at work.
Problem Statement.
Too often, women leaving work are treated as the problem. They’re not. They are the signal. Their exits expose a deeper design failure: systems that no longer support how work actually functions today.
That’s because what gets valued, rewarded, and recognized at work is shaped by a set of assumptions passed down generation to generation without question. These assumptions influence how we work, how we lead, and who gets positioned to influence.
The shift is already happening.
But it is happening in isolation.
Leaders are adapting quietly, without shared language or real support. As a result, new ways of working remain largely unseen, unsupported, and difficult to scale.
What is not recognized cannot become the norm.
That is the gap The 7 Rewrites addresses.
Think of a Leader.
Think of a CEO, a manager, a professor.
Picture them. How do they sit and speak? How do they move through a room? What do they value? How do they treat others? How do they lead?
Most of us still carry a specific image of leadership. We’ve rehearsed it for generations.
And yet, many of the leaders people trust most today don’t fit that image. They lead through steadiness, not dominance. Through care, not control. Through judgment shaped by context, not rigidity.
What’s changing isn’t just who gets a chance to lead. It’s what leadership is made of.
The 7 Rewrites begins here. Not by prescribing a new model, but by naming the patterns already present in the leaders authoring a new story of work.
These rewrites are descriptions of shifts already in motion.
The work now is to make these patterns visible and shared, so more people, especially women, see that there is space to work differently beyond the old rules.
The 7 Rewrites.
Rewrite
1 / The Lone Hero
2 / The Domination Myth
3 / The Zero-Sum Game
4 / The Ambition Trap
5 / The Martyr Mandate
6 / The Perfection Paradox
7 / The Prescribed Path
Old Story
Real leaders succeed by doing it alone.
Authority is earned through toughness, aggression, and emotional armor.
Leadership is a zero-sum contest where someone must lose for others to win.
Ambition is measured by speed, status, and constant upward motion.
Reaching the top requires prioritizing work over health, family, rest, and personal limits.
Credibility depends on flawless performance, composure, and conformity.
There is a single, linear route to leadership success.
Emerging Story
Modern leaders build power through shared responsibility, not by carrying authority alone.
Trust follows leaders who combine clarity with care.
Zero-sum leadership is fragile; future leaders create shared value.
Ambition is choosing what matters most as priorities change, and defining success on your own terms.
Martyrdom is not the path to success; leaders who set boundaries last.
Credibility grows through judgment, accountability, and course-correction.
Leadership emerges through the lived experience institutions fail to recognize.
The 7 Rewrites name the shifts already underway.
Type of Change: Narrative Shift.
The 7 Rewrites is a narrative intervention.
Narratives are not slogans or messaging. They are the shared stories that quietly set the rules for what is normal, credible, and worth rewarding at work. Over time, they harden into expectations, incentives, and systems.
A narrative intervention works by interrupting those inherited frames and surfacing new patterns giving them language, and making them harder to dismiss as exceptions or anomalies.
When stories shift, systems follow. What once felt risky becomes defensible. What was invisible becomes discussable. What was isolated becomes possible to repeat.
The 7 Rewrites is designed to accelerate that shift.
The 7 Rewrites updates the operating model of work itself.
Who this Reaches.
The 7 Rewrites is designed as a big-tent narrative, not a single-sector intervention. It circulates across corporate, academic, civic, and cultural spaces where the story of work is shaped and lived.
Through research, convenings, media, and public conversation, it creates shared reference points that travel across roles and institutions.
This is how narrative change scales: through broad recognition, not uniform adoption.
Workstreams.
How the narrative moves into the world
Think Tank &
Narrative Authority
Where the rewrites are pressure-tested, refined, and locked.
A sensemaking engine, to interrogate the inherited myths shaping leadership today.
Convenes academics, workplace
leaders, senior operators, researchers, and thought leaders.Insights are translated into playbooks, narrative briefs, whitepapers, op-eds, and early framework language that establish authority and shared
reference points.
Narrative Collection
& Archive
Where lived experience becomes collective insight.
Gathers real stories from the public capturing how the old rules show up in practice and how people are pushing back.
Surfaces patterns and becomes a
public resource that supports shared language and shifts over time.
Social &
Audio Narrative
Where the rewrites become familiar.
Once the 7 Rewrites are validated, social storytelling and audio conversations carry them into public discourse.
Short-form content, story excerpts,
and a limited podcast series normalize the language of the rewrites.
Documentary &
Movement Activation
Where the narrative anchors culturally.
A feature documentary, grounded in validated insights and real stories.
Paired with city-based screenings, facilitated conversations, and partnerships that invite participation.
Movement activation happens through dialogue and story sharing embedding new narratives of work.
How this Works Together.
The four workstreams advance in parallel and sequence over time, each reinforcing the others. Together, they move the story of work from isolated insight to collective recognition.
A three-year narrative arc.
Together, the 7 Rewrites Playbook, living archive, and cultural assets embed new leadership narratives beyond the life of the project.
Timeline.
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Think Tank & Narrative Authority: The 7 Rewrites are authored, pressure-tested, and locked through expert convenings.
Narrative Collection & Archive: Narrative collection begins, capturing early signals and validating shared patterns.
Social & Audio Narrative: Selective social and audio storytelling introduces the language of the rewrites.
Documentary & Movement Activation: Documentary development begins.
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Think Tank & Narrative Authority: Research outputs, whitepapers, and op-eds circulate publicly and shape broader conversation.
Narrative Collection & Archive: The archive expands into a visible public resource.
Social & Audio Narrative: Social and audio storytelling scales, making the rewrites recognizable and repeatable.
Documentary & Movement Activation: The documentary is completed, with distribution and rollout pathways in place.
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Think Tank & Narrative Authority: The 7 Rewrites Playbook functions as a shared framework referenced across institutions and sectors.
Narrative Collection & Archive: The archive consolidates into a durable record supporting ongoing recognition and use.
Social & Audio Narrative: Storytelling supports screenings, partnerships, and continued cultural circulation.
Documentary & Movement Activation: The film anchors national engagement through screenings, conversations, and partnerships.
Why this Team.
The core team behind The 7 Rewrites has worked together for over five years, examining how women experience power, ambition, and opportunity inside modern workplaces. Our work does not focus on fixing women; it interrogates the systems and narratives that govern work itself.
In practice, this means treating women’s exits, disengagement, and resistance not as failures of ambition, but as rational responses to systems optimized for endurance, conformity, and silence.
Across research, convenings, writing, and advisory work, and in partnership with influential leaders and institutions shaping work today, this team has traced why the old rules persist and how new patterns take shape at the edges.
That continuity matters. It means the ideas surfaced here are not speculative. They are grounded in years of observation, pattern recognition, and trust-based collaboration.
The project is supported by advisors and partners across academia, media, culture, and organizational leadership. Their role is not endorsement, but rigor: pressure-testing ideas, strengthening narrative clarity, and ensuring the work travels credibly across sectors.
Our fiscal sponsor, the Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF), is an active documentary and narrative partner. EIF brings deep expertise in narrative-driven social impact, documentary development, and large-scale cultural campaigns at the intersection of storytelling, philanthropy, and public engagement. Their partnership strengthens documentary execution and cultural rollout in ways few organizations can match.
What Changes When This Works.
When this work is effective, the shift appears quietly before it becomes structural.
Leaders gain language for ways of working they previously felt but could not name. What once seemed like personal preference becomes recognizable and repeatable.
As these examples accumulate, women see credible alternatives to assimilation or exit, and institutions begin to recognize and reward what they previously overlooked.
This is how narrative change takes hold: through recognition, repetition, and permission.
Why Now / What’s Possible.
We are in a supermoment for the story of work.
Women are exiting at rates that defy old explanations. Research points not only to burnout, but to a deeper shift in how women experience ambition, authority, and belonging at work.
At the same time, organizations face persistent gaps in retention, representation, and trust.
If we want a world where work works for more people, where leadership expands rather than constrains what’s possible, we need projects that make new ways of working visible.