On her blog, Plan B Nation, lawyer and writer Amy Gutman talks about seeing Sheryl Sandberg at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline last Thursday.

She raises two great points.

First is the mixed messages that Sandberg herself sends—and seems incapable of not sending.

First was The Dress, a form-fitting lit­tle black num­ber, at first glance unre­mark­able in this era of Cor­po­rate Alpha Female 2.0, where sex­u­al­ity is proudly fea­tured rather than downplayed—unremarkable, that is, until she turned her back and dis­closed a gold-toned zip­per run­ning from top to bot­tom. …For me, this took the out­fit from Seen This Before, to WTF. It seemed to be demand­ing some sort of response, though I’ve yet to fig­ure out just what.

I’ve noted this about Sandberg, too—that for someone talking about how women can be more professional and more successful, she sexes it up in a way that, I think, undermines her message. Why? Vanity, I’d guess—looking good matters more to her than consistency. Which is her choice, but it makes me distrust the messenger.

Second, and more important, is the argument that leaning-in is a fatuous concept that ultimately puts the onus of change on the individual, rather than on corporations that resist it, and codifies none of this change into law or policy.

Women with full-time jobs and out­side lives have very lim­ited band­width. Here’s my, admit­tedly pes­simistic, prog­nos­ti­ca­tion: The con­ver­sa­tion about lean­ing in will slowly but surely sup­plant talk about on-site child care, work/life bal­ance, and other “fam­ily friendly” poli­cies….

I can’t help but think that Lean In offers a fem­i­nism tailor-made for our New Economy—one where the pri­mary ben­e­fi­cia­ries are com­pa­nies, not women. Through the magic of Lean In, women’s ini­tia­tive costs – poof! – trans­form into cor­po­rate prof­its.

I think that’s exactly right. Leaning-in is a wonderful thing for companies, which is why so many of them have signed on to Sandberg’s womanifesto. It asks nothing of them except the encouragement of women who want to work harder. It’s as if Lean In was secretly ghostwritten by Frederick WInslow Taylor.

But for Sheryl Sandberg, it doesn’t matter. She’s accomplished her primary goal: Creating a high-profile platform to advance her own career. What a missed opportunity to do something serious.