Good morning, Broadsheet readers! OpenAI appoints Sarah Friar chief financial officer, a Japanese business lobby wants women to keep their surnames after marriage, and WeightWatchers' CEO reckons with the company's past before she can map out its future. Have a lovely Tuesday.
- Hard conversations. Sima Sistani didn't think running WeightWatchers would be this hard. When she started as WeightWatchers' CEO in March 2022, GLP-1 medications were in use but the word "Ozempic" wasn't yet universally known. And Sistani had had a positive experience with WeightWatchers; she joined the program in 2013 after her pregnancy and had heard stories from others about how the platform helped them lose weight when they wanted to.
But last month, Sistani ended up onstage with Oprah Winfrey and a group of experts and influencers across medicine and culture for a frank, livestreamed conversation about diet culture and WeightWatchers' role in it. Winfrey, a longtime WeightWatchers board member and spokesperson, announced her exit from the company's board in late February. Then the idea for a convening came after Sistani's public interaction with Katie Sturino, a body-positive influencer and the cofounder of the personal care brand Megababe, who shared stories about how WeightWatchers had harmed women and girls who felt shamed about their bodies and pressured to lose weight. "It wasn't until you're here and you start acknowledging these other stories that you're like, 'There's a much bigger tension and a harder conversation for us to have,'" Sistani told me of the difference between her expectations for and the reality of her job.
