Our Reflections on Leadership, Identity, Motherhood and Ambitions

I finally watched Mad Men, all seven seasons in five weeks, wrapping up the final episode at 1am last night

All day I've been reflecting on the show, and processing all the feelings it's left me with. Above all it reminded me how complex women’s lives really are — especially when ambition and care live side by side.

I’m late to the party — nearly twenty years late — and yet maybe that timing was right. Experiencing this show now, at this moment in time, as a working woman, mother and founder, it struck me in a way it never could have before.

Like The Wire (my all-time favourite), Mad Men isn’t just great television — it’s a study in human behaviour, ambition and integrity.

There’s a line in The Wire where Bunk describes Lester Freamon as “natural police” — the kind of detective who does it for the love of the work, not the politics of it.

I think there’s something of that spirit in Mad Men too — especially in Don, Joan and Peggy — people who are, in their own ways, “natural agency.” They do it for the craft, the pursuit, the purity of the thing — even when it breaks them.

That belief in the work for its own sake, in showing up because you care about the quality of what you make, really stayed with me.

Watching it, I found myself in each of these women —

Betty, the brilliant woman unseen. 💠
Joan, the woman who finally chooses herself. 💄
Peggy, the woman who fights to be valued for her mind. 🖋️

Each of them made me think about the invisible trade-offs women still make in business today — the way ambition can be mistaken for entitlement, or leadership for arrogance.

And how, despite all our progress, the industry still rewards performance over integrity more often than it should.

But it also made me think about motherhood — and the quiet complexity of it. The constant wrestling between who you are to others and who you are to yourself. Between the identity that’s shaped by love and the one you build through work. Mad Men captured that tension with rare honesty, and watching it as a mother made it ache in a different way.

Founding Ladyship has been my own quiet rebellion against that — to build an agency where intellect, grace and honesty can coexist.
Where ownership replaces permission.
Where women don’t have to choose between power and empathy.

Maybe that’s why Mad Men hit so hard.

Because beneath the glamour and the smoke, it’s really a story about people trying to be seen — and the courage it takes to change your own ending 💫

Written by Rana Brightman
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(Images: AMC / Mad Men — Christina Hendricks as Joan Holloway; Elisabeth Moss as Peggy Olson.)