From what I&#x27;ve read of Sandberg, she is an executive looking at grooming executives. In her mind, &quot;professional&quot; is equivalent to a plumber: not her children.<p>Her athlete analogy makes a special sort of sense in that context. I have seen a strong connection from the athletes and spec-ops people I went to school with now moving into executive positions. I&#x27;m not sure what the common denominator is, because I know a lot of athletes who are now in construction too. But if you&#x27;re an athlete and can hang intellectually, there&#x27;s a desirable mindset there. And I think that mindset is the striver: they see themselves every day as a little faster or a little slower, never the same. And they always want to be faster.<p>In Plato&#x27;s Republic, there&#x27;s a chapter on training the guardians, and I think that reflects her ideas reasonably well, in so far as a <i>lot</i> of Western leadership practices derived from the Greeks and the Republic in particular.