The Corner Office I Promised Myself

Key points:

• • Early exposure to the workplace can shape leadership aspirations and long-term career paths.
• • Strong leadership blends accountability with warmth, creating cultures where people feel valued and challenged.
• • The shift to remote work risks limiting how the next generation experiences and understands leadership firsthand.

When I was around 11 years old, my dad did something that felt revolutionary. He brought me and my younger sister to his office. 

It was 1993, just one year after Take Our Daughters to Work Day (which is now recognized as Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day) had launched out of New York. My dad was the CEO of a leasing firm in South Jersey — charismatic, driven, the kind of leader who knew every person’s name on his team. And he was an early adopter of something that a lot of people were still skeptical about: the radical idea that little girls deserved to see what the working world looked like. Not just hear about it. But actually see it.

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I remember the smell of the carpets. How heads popped up over cubical walls. The buttons on the elevators. I remember the mail room. We got to use those little wet applicators to seal envelopes, and then we delivered the mail through the office ourselves. The guys on the floor would joke around with us in a way they didn’t with the other kids because they knew we were the boss’s daughters. There was a warmth to it. I felt special.

And then there was my dad’s office.

Corner office. Windows along two walls. Light pouring in from both sides. I stood in that room and felt something shift in me. It wasn’t just that it was impressive. It was that it was his. He had built something. He was in charge. And I was his daughter.

That day, we went to lunch — just the three of us, my sister, my dad, and me. I couldn’t believe this was an excused absence from school! We got to explore the adult world and have time just with him, in his world. I cannot overstate how special that felt.

I left that day knowing, in the wordless way that children know things, that I wanted that one day. The office. The responsibility. The people who looked to you. The corner and the windows.

What He Taught Me About Leading People

If you’ve read my articles, you probably already know that my dad is my Chief Life Officer. That’s not a title I give lightly.

He was the kind of CEO who believed that work wasn’t separate from life — it was part of it. He organized summer barbecues at the park for the whole company. He took his direct reports on skiing trips, and we came too. He was fun. But he was also deeply accountable: he had big goals, he communicated them, and he held his team to them.

I absorbed all of it. And when I look at how I lead today, I see him everywhere. I like to have fun with my team. I want the people around me to feel seen and valued. And I also have big goals, I raise the bar constantly, and I don’t apologize for either. You can be warm and demanding at the same time. My dad showed me that.

I Got My Corner Office

Years later, in Miami, I got it!

It wasn’t a traditional corner office — it was an oval-shaped space with curved windows that wrapped around me like an embrace. But it was a CEO’s office. My CEO’s office. And the first time I sat in that chair, I thought of that 11-year-old girl standing in her dad’s light, looking out at the world and quietly deciding: someday.

Someday came.

I took my experience in international media and carved out a piece of the American dream for myself and built caa. That happened because someone took a little girl to work and let her see what was possible.

What We Risk Losing

My daughter has been part of caa since she was 3 months old — she was there when we painted the office, and she helped me move out of it when we went hybrid and then fully virtual. Today, there’s no office to take her back to. The world has massively changed.

And it makes me sad. Not just for her — but for a whole generation of kids who will never stand in a mail room and feel the hum of a company in motion. Who will never look up at their mom or dad from across a desk and understand, in their bones, what it means to lead something. Who will instead watch their parents work from home, on a laptop, in a sweatshirt, with Slack notifications going off in the background.

How do you fully understand what a company is, what leadership looks like, if you’ve never walked those halls?

I’ll take my daughter to my events. She’ll see me on stage. She’ll watch me lead a room. That’s something. But it’s not the same as the day to day grind of people collecting in an office.

A Note to Every Leader Reading This

Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day still exists — it happens every April. And if you have an office, a workplace, a physical space where your team gathers, I am asking you to celebrate this initiative.

Bring kids in. Let them learn a new profession or a role they couldn’t imagine before. Let them sit in on a meeting or shadow an intern. Let them absorb not only what your company does, but what their mom or dad does for you. You are laying the seeds of inspiration.

I didn’t have a lot of female business leaders to look up to in those early years. My 20s and 30s were hard to navigate without many women to look up to. But I had my dad, and I had that day, and I had the image of what was possible burned into me at 11 years old. I’ve spent my career trying to become that image. Now, I hope I can be that for the next wave of women who are watching, waiting, and deciding.

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