NEW YORK, NEW YORK - APRIL 15: Emma Grede and Martha Stewart speak onstage during the "Start With Yourself" Book Tour Launch at Adler Hall on April 15, 2026 in New York City. (Photo by Craig Barritt/Getty Images for Emma Grede)

Getty Images for Emma Grede

When I interviewed Emma Grede in 2019, apparel startup Good American was just three years old. Best known for its other founder, Khloé Kardashian, the company had just broken into LinkedIn’s U.S. Top Startups list at No. 6. Fielding roughly 700 applications for every open role, Good American had gone from 16 employees to 68 in one year.

At one point in our conversation, she leaned back behind her desk, sipping English Breakfast tea.

“I always thought that I’d have an opportunity to build a really big company,” she says in an interview. “This, right now, is my opportunity.”

That moment — the moment Grede shared with me with such conviction and sparkle in her eye — was top of mind when I read her book.

With much fanfare and mixed press, Grede published Start With Yourself A New Vision for Work & Life this month. The Wall Street Journal called it “Lean In for the post-girlboss era.” One line surfaced by Fortune’s Emma Hinchliffe, may have traveled further than the rest.

“We are desperate for more women in positions of power, but nobody’s coming to hand you power. You have to take it for yourself,” she says in an interview.

She is right. But there is a gap between the executive who seized her opportunity to build power in 2019 and the one who is telling women in 2026 to do the same. And it has everything to do with where structural power in the workplace actually sits.

What she was taking in 2019

The 2019 Grede was speaking as someone with equity. She had sold ITB Worldwide, the British marketing agency she ran as CEO, after a decade at the helm. She had cofounded Good American with Kardashian and owned a meaningful stake. She had already declined to be CEO of SKIMS (that title went to her husband, Jens) because she preferred the structural position of founding partner and chief product officer. She could shape product and hold equity without being pinned to the operational seat. By 2023, Good American was a reported $200 million business. Her SKIMS stake now sits inside a company valued at roughly $5 billion.

The career decisions she narrated in 2019 were not about confidence or grit, though she had both. They were about which position on the cap table, which seat in the org chart and which supplier contract got signed on her terms. A supplier once told her the sewing machines couldn’t produce a skirt in sizes five and up. She priced out new machines. When Nordstrom tried to place Good American’s plus sizes on a separate floor, she refused to sign the contract until all sizes sat together in every store. “I’m asking you to rip up the rule book,” she says.

That is what taking power looked like in practice for Grede. She refused the terms on offer and she held enough leverage to make the refusal stick.

What she is telling career women now

The 2026 version, delivered on a press tour, lands differently. Grede is not backing down. On Keke Palmer’s podcast, and again in Elle last week, she went hard on a claim that visibility in the office is essential to women’s advancement and that remote work is “career suicide.” On Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO, she argued that work-life balance is an employee’s problem, not an employer’s responsibility. And her wildly misinterpreted one-liner about capping her weekend parenting at three hours has become its own headline.

Grede frames this as the corrective to what she calls “soft ambition.” Think of it as what’s hiding behind politeness that she says keeps ambitious women from taking the power they want. She told Bustle the book was written as a wake-up call for women who want power, money and careers but have been conditioned to avoid the behaviors that produce them.

The diagnosis is not wrong. Women who have run the numbers on their own careers, who have watched a male peer get promoted off the same work or who have asked for a raise and been told to wait, already know that structural power is not issued. It is seized, held and defended.

Grede is telling women to take power by showing up more. That means accepting the reality that going into the office creates an advantage and being realistic about the caregiving constraints an ambitious career was designed to exclude. It is a path that worked for Grede as a founder with equity, a cofounder relationship with Kardashian and four children raised alongside a husband who happens to run SKIMS.

It is not obvious that this path generalizes to women without those advantages.

Grede is telling women to adjust their behavior to a system she describes as fixed. Jennie Glazer, CEO of the thinktank Coqual, flipped the frame in HR Magazine last week. Grede’s claim that work-from-home is career suicide, Glazer says, “reflects a real dynamic around visibility, but it misdiagnoses where the risk actually sits.” When organizations rely on proximity and informal access to determine who advances, hybrid work does not create those inequities: it exposes inequities that were already there.

The fix is not for women to come back to the office. The fix is for companies to stop confusing presence with performance.

The pushback from Black women has been sharper still, and it points at the same diagnostic gap. Taylyn Washington, a senior editor at Yahoo, tells the Substack newsletter Chronically Online that for Black women, “if you can put your peace first, advancing your career in the digital space is entirely possible.” She had recovered from years of burnout by working remotely, she says, and argued that Black women should create paths to advancement that don’t require “smiling in someone’s face for 8-9 hours a day to prove a point.” Office visibility never produced the promotions it was supposed to produce for Black women in the first place. Read as a universal prescription, Grede’s advice does not land the same way on the women it most claims to want to help.

The company she actually built

The Emma Grede I interviewed in 2019 had built a company designed to accommodate the life she now tells other women to live. She says she had learned at ITB Worldwide that hiring in droves “sounded really good” but produced less work, not more. “I’m not employing 120 people to do the jobs of 120 people,” she says. “I’m employing 60.” She left the office by 5 p.m. most days to spend time with her children, then logged back on. She offered unlimited time off, “as long as they get their work done.”

That was a workplace designed around the questions most senior women are trying to renegotiate now: how much work one person can be asked to absorb, what counts as evidence of performance when presence is no longer the proxy and where a credible option to walk away shows up inside a compensation package rather than outside of it. Grede in 2019 was building a company that answered those questions deliberately. Grede in 2026 is writing a book that tells the rest of the workforce to answer them by just showing up more.

The version of her advice that most senior women can actually use is the 2019 version, not the book tour. Decide what you will accept in the job and decline the rest. By this I mean, measure your work by output that travels with your name across roles and companies. Refuse a pace the organization will not resource. Build visibility through work that circulates beyond any one conference room. Hold a credible option to leave, because that is the only thing that makes the rest of the terms negotiable.

What the book doesn’t answer

Grede told me in 2019 that she was taking her opportunity. She is telling women in 2026 that nobody will hand them power. Both sentences are true. The reason the first one worked is that she was taking power at the points that actually produce it: ownership, contract terms, supplier relationships, organizational design. The reason the second one is harder than her book allows is that most women are being asked to take power from inside job structures they did not design, cannot fully renegotiate and cannot afford to walk away from without cost.

Grede is right that nobody hands you power. The question her book does not quite answer is which lever a woman pulls first when the structure itself is the thing she is trying to change. The 2019 executive I interviewed knew. Seven years and a $5 billion valuation later, it is worth asking whether the advice has kept up with the workforce it is aimed at.