When leadership advice feels like buzzwords and platitudes, it's time to get real.

HPR's podcast Coaching Real Leaders brings you behind closed doors as Muriel Wilkins coaches anonymous

leaders through raw honest career questions

that we all face.

Listen and follow coaching real leaders for free

wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR Idea Cash from Harvard Business Review.

I'm Sarah Green.

I'm talking today with Aviva Wittenburg Cox,

CEO of the Consultancy 21st.

She's the author of the book,

How Women Mean Business, and she blogs for Women Mean Business and she blogs for

HPR.org. Aviva thanks so much for talking with us today.

My pleasure.

So Aviva I'd like to focus today on a subset of working women who are very ambitious, very well educated, and

really reaching for that top rung of the career ladder, because those are the women

of course who read HBR. And among this set of women one of the big conversation points I think of the past year

has been Cheryl Sandberg's TED Talk that went viral among this group of educated women, which

says women need to keep pushing ahead to lean forward into their careers more aggressively

and that there's really a lot women can do as individuals to push our careers forward.

And that seems to be a message that's really caught on with a lot of women and I want to know if you think that's the right message for ambitious women and whether it will solve the issue of gender imbalance in political leadership, boardrooms, and the C-suite?

That's two questions and I'd say yes to the first one and no to the second.

So is it a good message for ambitious women?

...