By: A humble grad student, forever changed
Have you ever wondered, “what if Brené Brown ran a university like a Fortune 500 company — but make it The Chair?” Then SFU president Joy Johnson’s long-awaited, totally real, best-selling memoir is the answer you didn’t know you needed (but are now required to cite in every funding application). Where Ji-Yoon collapses under the weight of moral contradictions, Johnson ascends — brand-safe, donor-friendly, and backed by a communication team reportedly headed by Margaret Thatcher’s ghost.
From the (co-)author of more than 180 peer-reviewed articles, Lead With Joy: Leader is Johnson isn’t just a memoir. It is a paradigm-shifting manual for Canadian academic leadership and a manifesto for academic girl-bossing. Plus, it comes with a legally binding invoice for the emotional labour of narrating her own excellence.
When Lead With Joy first hit SFU’s bookstore shelves, no one on the West Coast was ready. The Board of Governors cheered. The students wept. Our precious mountain tilted ever so slightly out of respect. Even a hummingbird spotted reading a copy paused mid-flight in what could only be called a rare review from nature’s fastest critic.
Tracing her journey from being a nurse to Canada’s most spreadsheet-savvy university president, Johnson’s magnum opus reads like a hybrid between Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and Brianna Wiest’s The Mountain is You. Where most self-help books offer vague affirmations, Lead with Joy arms readers with a data-driven roadmap for cultivating the perfect leader: one who quietly and expertly outsources the messy business of morality.
Her leadership philosophy? A delicate balance between denial in the face of inconvenient ethical questions and Key Performance Indicator (KPI)-driven ambition. As she passionately and eloquently argues, “to truly heal an institution, one must ignore the symptoms, quantify the wounds, and propose a data-driven five-year plan to reimagine wellness.” In one stirring chapter, “Care as KPI,” she boldly declares, “Joy, too, can be a deliverable.”
Proudly documenting her previous success in raising SFU’s research income from $103 million in 2014 to $161 million in 2020 as vice-president research, she distances herself from the Barbie brand of commodified feminism. No, this isn’t pink outfits and empowerment merch. It’s feminist leadership optimized for the metrics. Where equity is performance-based and glass ceilings are broken only to install skylights in the president’s office.
For instance, writing on the complexities of freedom of expression on campus, she clearly states, “Freedom of expression matters. So do limits.” After all, to lead with joy is to “host the hard conversations, schedule them quarterly, and issue branded reports afterwards” complete with community-facing search engine–optimized insights.
Now mandatory reading for first years and emotionally destabilizing for tenured radicals, Lead With Joy is already outselling the iconic SFU dog hoodie. So much so that the bookstore has made Lead With Joy a bestseller (totally on their own accord).
Grab yours before the limited-edition hardcover — printed on recycled equity statements — sells out faster than funding for anti-fascism scholars during budget reviews. Buy two to receive a branded lanyard, endless joy, and a vague sense of institutional belonging, while supplies last.
