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.
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.
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.
The 7 Rewrites.
Emerging Story
Rewrite
Old Story
Leadership builds power through shared responsibility.
1 / The Lone Hero
Real leaders succeed by doing it alone.
Trust follows leaders who combine clarity with care.
2 / The Domination Myth
Authority is earned from toughness, aggression, and emotional distance.
Power grows when leadership expands value for many.
3 / The Zero-Sum Game
Leadership is a zero-sum contest where someone must lose for others to win.
Ambition is defined by personal and professional alignment.
4 / The Ambition Trap
Ambition is measured by speed, status, and constant upward motion.
Sustainable leadership is built with boundaries.
5 / The Martyr Mandate
Reaching the top requires prioritizing work over health, family, rest, and personal limits.
Success is built through judgment, accountability, and course-correction.
6 / The Perfection Paradox
Success depends on flawless performance, composure, and conformity.
Leadership is strengthened through the breadth of lived experience.
7 / The Prescribed Path
There is a single, linear route to leadership success.
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 inherited frames, surfacing new patterns, giving them shared language, and making them harder to dismiss as isolated exceptions.
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
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.
Through dialogue and shared reflection, the documentary helps embed new narratives of work into practice.
How this Works Together.
Once the documentary is complete, the work expands through a ten-city rollout that brings the Rewrites to life. Each city pairs shared viewing with facilitated conversations, senior-level roundtables, and applied workshops across universities, companies, and professional communities. Supported by frameworks, tools, and the 7 Rewrites Playbook, these engagements help leaders move from recognition to practice, while on-demand access and ambassador-led engagements extend the work far beyond the screen.
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: Documentary development begins.
-
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: 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: The film anchors national engagement through screenings, conversations, and partnerships that move leaders from recognition into practice.
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. This work does not focus on fixing women; it interrogates the systems and narratives that govern work itself.
Deepa Purushothaman — Executive Director & Narrative Lead
Sofiya Hyder — Think Tank & Narrative Authority
Willie Jackson — Narrative Collection & Archive
Tammy Ari — Technical Infrastructure & Operations
Katie Knotts — Social & Audio Narrative
Lisa Weiss — Executive Producer Documentary
Core Workstream Leads
Our advisors are a cross-sector group of scholars, practitioners, executives, and cultural leaders who serve as advisors, validators, and challengers across the workstreams.
Think Tank &
Narrative Authority Advisors
Dr. Robin Ely
Professor, Harvard Business School (HBS)
Colleen Ammerman
Director, Race & Gender Initiative HBS
Dr. Deborah Kolb
Professor, Simmons College
School of Management
Dr. Deborah Streeter
Professor, Cornell University,
SC Johnson College of Business
Ruchika Malhotra
Author, Uncompete
Eli Malinsky
Deputy Director, Aspen Institute
*Plus a full slate of workplace leaders
Narrative Collection
and Archive Advisors
Whitney Pennington Rodgers
Senior Producer, TED
Jill Wesley
Head of Speaker Coaching, TEDx SanFrancisco
Tara-Nicholle Nelson
Former CMO, MyFitnessPal
Suzanne Kingsbury
Founder, Gateless Writing
Social and Audio
Narrative Advisors
Amy Gallo
Women and Work Podcast Co-host
Ginny Clarke
Executive Recruiter, Workplace Influencer, Former Google
Dr. Pooja Lakshmin
Psychologist, Author, Real Self-Care
Documentary
Advisors
Tamsen Fadal
Executive Producer, Advocate, The M Factor
Denise Pines
Executive Producer, The M Factor
Andrea Haley
CEO, Vote.org
Minda Harts
Executive Producer, The Memo