Bozoma Saint John is head of marketing at Netflix, gives "Be Yourself" seminars at Harvard and is probably the most colorful manager in the world. Your career strategy: be uninhibited – and still show yourself vulnerable.
by Michaela Haas
Bozoma Saint John put on Beyoncé, snaps his fingers and raps the chorus along: "Who owns the world? Girls!" Then she breaks out into her challenging, loud laugh. "They call me Badass Boz because I'm the craziest," says Bozoma Saint John, 43, with a provocative circling of his hips. "And because you signed up for my badass seminar, you'll soon be the craziest too. Hey, we can do it today!"
A real power woman
Almost every prelude to her "Badass" workshop – Badass Boz is her name on Instagram – begins with a rapper's soundtrack. She is currently holding the courses with which she wants to explain her path to success to other women, virtually, and soon even at Harvard Business School. In Germany, and in most large companies in general, it would be completely unthinkable that the marketing manager would give a seminar in a tight-fitting, low-cut jumpsuit with blue glittering stars barely covering her breasts. But since summer 2020, Bozoma ("Boh-Seh-Mah") Saint John has been Marketing Director at Netflix, the world's most successful streaming service with a market value of 180 billion euros. And with Badass Boz "emphasizing femininity" is part of it. "For years I hid in gray business suits, cut my hair, removed my nose ring and tried not to speak too loudly," she says in her online course. "Stop it!"
The world first became aware of Saint John in June 2016 when she strutted into the spotlight of Apple's development conference in a Ghanaian designer's pencil dress and pink stilettos – as the first black woman ever. She played Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper’s Delight" on her iPhone, swinging her arm as if to lasso the last computer developer in the back row until everyone clapped to the beat. "C’mon, all of you, let the whole auditorium rock! Let's go!"
The online portal Buzzfeed then called her the "coolest person who was ever on stage at an Apple event". And it wasn't just Wired magazine who asked in amazement: "Who the hell is this woman and how could Apple keep her hidden for so long?"
My mother didn't want us to conform
Saint John knows what it means to stand out from the crowd. She was born in America, six months later her parents moved to Ghana. Her father was a member of parliament when the coup in late 1981 catapulted the family from a rather comfortable existence. When Bozoma was twelve, they moved back to Colorado Springs. There they were initially the "only Ghanaian family – of all times at an age where you just want to belong and not be different". Her mother designed and sold clothing, so Saint John and her three younger sisters had a thing for fashion and color from an early age. "My mother didn't want us to adapt," she says in her workshop. "We spoke our Ghanaian dialect at home, ate pepper soup, and she made us Ghanaian clothes."
She made her recipe from the colorful otherness. "I've never been to business school. I succeeded in playing my voice, and by that I mean my real voice, the one that some people say is too loud, too high-pitched."
What would be taboo for other female managers works for Saint John: she posts sexy bikini photos of herself and her "baddies", that is, her badass friends on Instagram, and poses in a warm hug with Lady Gaga. The single mother not only often carries her eleven-year-old daughter Lael with her when she is on the road, but also advises other mothers: "Make sure that the company pays you for childcare and flights for your children on business trips."
Decision based on gut instinct
Actually, Bozoma Saint John wanted to study medicine at her parents' request. She was already enrolled and was working on the side as a waitress for a catering company and in a dog laundromat when she heard that the director and producer Spike Lee was looking for an assistant in New York at short notice. "She came in and had the job," Spike Lee said later. "It was immediately clear that she would have a career."
As a receptionist, she was initially responsible for getting coffee and the telephone. She says she often only fed on ten-cent rolls because of the poor pay in expensive New York. But then Lee asked everyone with which star he should shoot the new Pepsi spot. Saint John had just seen a television appearance by Beyoncé in which she combined hip-hop with opera. "I thought that was brilliant," she says. "Today everyone thinks Beyoncé is great, of course, but at the time she had just broken up with Destiny’s Child and critics thought she wouldn't make it as a solo artist."
Spike Lee perked up, booked Beyoncé for her first big Pepsi spot; Saint John and Beyoncé became best friends. Saint John's conclusion: "I was 23 and had no idea about anything, especially marketing. But I listened to my gut, my intuition."
Shedding inhibitions and losing concerns
That, she says, was her start. "I was lucky that Spike Lee listened to me. Now I have a loud voice so everyone can hear me." In 2013, she arranged for Pepsi Beyoncé's Superbowl performance, the most watched show event in America.
Anyone who sees Bozoma Saint John sitting in the garden in front of her villa in Los Angeles today, in her rainbow-colored designer clothes and with lots of silver jewelry in her hair, always perfectly styled, might think that she has no difficult times. But it was not like that. As a teenager, she lost her high school boyfriend to suicide; later she suffered a very late miscarriage. In 2013, at the preliminary peak of her career, her husband Peter Saint John had a lump on his neck that turned out to be incurable lymphoma. "The diagnosis of cancer was a complete shock," she says in her online workshop. "When the doctor said there was no treatment, my whole world collapsed." In the same year, after ten years together, her husband died at the age of 43. To this day, Saint John cannot speak about it without her voice breaking. She has to start with the word "unimaginable" four times before it comes to her lips. "Our daughter was just four. It knocked me off my feet."
A 30 centimeter high Atlas statue in her garden reminds her of this time – and of the knowledge that she has associated with it for several years. "When I first heard about Atlas, who is doomed to carry heaven on his shoulders, I thought: I am Atlas. I thought I had to carry it all alone. Be strong. Later I understood that the solution in this is to be vulnerable – also in work. The Boz, who sits in the leadership circle and talks, is just like the Boz, who sits with friends. Peter's death changed who I am. I put all inhibitions off. I lost everything, also all concerns. "
The world belongs to the lute
She moved to Los Angeles, joined Beats Music in 2014, the then new streaming service from music producer Jimmy Iovine, and when Beats was bought by Apple for three billion dollars a little later, she worked as a brand manager at Apple. "At the time, there was no one in the top management who looked like me," she says. "I didn't come in through the front door, I crawled through a tilted window." In 2017 the transport service Uber brought her on board as Chief Brand Manager, also to polish up the badly battered image after the sexist failures of the founder Travis Kalanick. After almost a year, she left Uber to go to the Endeavor artist agency, suggesting that Uber would have to change a lot more in corporate culture before it could make a difference there.
Her great strengths are the direct line to icons and a nose for trends; at Uber, for example, she managed to win basketball legend LeBron James for a sensational campaign. "Bozoma is an extraordinary marketer who knows how to fuel discussions about pop culture better than almost anyone else," says Netflix's chief content officer, Ted Sarandos.
She does her job without the usual marketing clichés and with a directness and honesty that makes her stand out. She does not call herself a feminist, but often speaks of "empowerment" and makes her own social channels such as Instagram available to provide a platform for lesser-known black women ("#SharetheMicNow"). If you ask her how she asserts herself in the phalanx of mostly male nerds, she says: "The lie is: women are always told to be modest, to do a good job, then they will be recognized. The truth is: none of them we will have an impact if we are quiet. Be loud! Show off! Be loud as hell! " Then she plays Beyoncé again: "Who owns the world?" Just! She laughs out loud and snaps to the beat.
Michaela Haas lives in the USA and would like more diverse and unconventional women like Bozoma Saint John for Germany's management levels.
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