Month: December 2007

career, change, work

Before jumping off the train

Christa Avampato

Patience is the companion of wisdom. ~ St. Augustine

Without a doubt, frustration abounds in the retail world this holiday season. Sales are down for most companies, as is morale within these companies. I have a few friends who are working in turn-around situations, and the potentially rocky economy is causing them some angst. In an agitated state, it sometimes seems easier to jump ship than hang around waiting for the other shoe to inevitably drop.

I can confidently say that several times in my career I have lacked patience, mostly because I did not have the wisdom of experience on my side. Simply, I didn’t know what I didn’t know and as a result when the tough times got going, I did too. While I don’t regret my decisions because I am thrilled with the life I have today, there are times when I wonder how things would have turned out if I had waited out the unpleasant times a bit longer.

Patience is difficult to achieve and even more difficult to hang onto once we have it. We begin to look around anxiously for a new and “better” opportunity. We feel we’re spinning our wheels, wasting time. Life is passing us by on the express and we’re on the local. The tug of frustration beckons us to move on when the picture in front of us is less than rosy. Rather than dashing out the door, sometimes it is worthwhile to consider riding out the wave to see where it carries us.

experience, intelligence, work

Get down to wise up

Christa Avampato

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” – Albert Einstein

We spend most of our life dashing around, especially during the holiday season. Parties, meetings, errands, and the endless circuit of email to phone to internet to TV and back again. I’m not convinced that this dexterity at multi-tasking is a good thing. Of course, I say this as I eat my lunch, read a magazine, check my email, and write this blog post. There are numerous scientific reports being released now with the theory that multi-tasking is ruining our ability to think clearly.

We look to people like Einstein as a genius, and to be sure, he was. I do not in any way mean to take anything away from him. I am a great admirer of his works, and have read several biographies on him. When I was 18 I wanted to go to Princeton so I could somehow develop my own inner-Einstein in the very place where he did so much important work.

In all of his glory, he has these quotes like the one above that just bowl me over. Was Einstein brilliant because of his enhanced natural ability? He claimed no. He took the time to wrestle with problems and complications in the world around him, and then formulated ways to make sense of them. Literally, when he came across a problem, he sat down (or went on one of his famous walks) and thought. Toward the end of his life, he hired a scribe to follow him on his walks and jot down things he’d mutter to himself so that he could later sit with the notebook and piece together the thoughts.

I’m not suggesting we run out and hire scribes. One, it’s probably prohibitively expensive, and two, it just looks plain weird unless you are some recognized genius like Einstein. What we can do is sit down and breathe. In our rush to do everything quick quick quick, onto the next thing, hurry up, we gotta go, my to-do list is growing every millisecond, etc. we are losing perspective. We are losing our ability to reason and thinking through challenges and choices.
We all have an inner-Einstein. The question is whether or not we will take the time to listen to him.

The picture above can be found at http://www.brainboomer.com/.

business, career, dreams, happiness, work

Getting real to get "unstuck"

Christa Avampato

“With lies you may get ahead in the world — but you can never go back.” ~Russian proverb

It’s likely that the Russian who coined the phrase above was thinking about lies people tell one another to get ahead – in business, in relationships, in life in general. When I read it, I considered the lies we tell ourselves and how they distort our perception because if we lie long enough, we actually begin to believe the lies are true. And not only can you never go back; you also may have a very difficult time moving forward. Through lies, we get stuck.

Jim Collins has said that if we want to get great, first we have to get real. So how do we start on this path to real that will lead us to great? I try to start with a vision of where I want to be, regardless of where I am right now. And little by little I work my way back from the vision to my current situation, one very small step at a time. If I want to own my own business, I have to consider the actual tasks I’d be doing when owning the business, and then I’d have to envision what kind of people I want to work with, and then I’d have to think about what kind of service or product I’m supplying and how it’s being supplied, and on and on, until I get to my current work situation.

Getting real is much easier to handle when we break down reality into bite-sized pieces. And when we aggregate all of those small pieces together, we’re able to build a road that leads us exactly to where we want to be.

career, creativity, discovery, work

Rule breakers by nature

Christa Avampato

Every once in a while, I hear a broad, sweeping generalization that stops me in my tracks. Today, I was talking to someone about corporate recruiting at large companies and how much effort and funding they spend on recruiting and branding events at top universities. The trouble with recruiting the best and brightest to corporate America is that corporations don’t know how to keep them. Students from top universities don’t want to work for someone else. When placing bets, the students will bet on themselves. They’re bred to have a tremendous amount of self-confidence and they firmly believe that they know best. So, when confronted with a rigid corporation that can’t flex, they flee.

There are a few key qualifiers with this generalization. There are bright people at all schools, not just those with a high rank. I went to two fantastic universities, and I was very lucky to be a part of both. And while I met a slew of very smart people in both places, I also met a fair number of people who made me question the admissions standards. And to be certain, large corporations are not devoid of bright people. On the contrary, there are often many intelligent people rising through the ranks.

I don’t think it’s intellect that separates the different tiers of schools, nor the students who attend them. My belief is that it is all about attitude. From the time I was 18, I was held up to a ridiculously high standard in my academic life. Those without self-confidence didn’t make it through – the system beat them up and then beat them out. What top schools are left with are a student body who truly believes they can do ANYTHING so long as they work hard enough and want it bad enough.

And this circles back to the tough part for corporations: they don’t give the vast majority of team members the opportunity to do anything they want. Their rigid rules and love of processes stifle the very talent they worked so hard to get. A word to the wise: if large companies want talent that will drive growth and move the company forward, that talent must be given the latitude to do exactly what they were hired to do – think different and act accordingly.

The photo above can be found at http://picasaweb.google.com/kathryn.davidson/Penn/photo#5103173644839047218

business, career, change, creativity, dreams, happiness, work

The Natural Order

Christa Avampato

“First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.” ~ Epictetus,Greek philosopher

It’s easier to formulate actions than it is to really get at the core of the motivation and then develop actions that support that core. I’m not sure why. Maybe it can be likened to eating a hot bowl of pasta – easier to twirl around the edges and work in than to plunge right into the steamy center. And yet, the few times when I start out on the fringes and work my way in, I end up realizing that I spent too much energy on the edges when I should have dove right in. And when I have jumped in with both feet, even if I got burned, I learned a tremendous amount and had no regrets.

I considered this as I read about Paul Potts, a British cell phone salesman who at his heart was an opera singer. He finally got his chance to do what we loved on an episode of “Britain’s Got Talent.” Though, imagine what would have happened if not for reality TV. How many other Paul Pottses are out there who “die with the music still in them” as John Lennon would say. Was it that they didn’t know their core and spent their lives on the fringes of their potential or was it that they were actually afraid of their callings and spent their lives running from destiny?

This is good food for thought as I consider the hours of my day when I’m happiest and what I have to do to make those activities the predominant way I spend my time. I have also found that in crafting a business case for my own company, I also must start at the core. Yes, I will make mistakes and I will get a burn or two or ten. It’s worth the risk – I’d rather end up bumped and bruised than wishing I had sung the song I was meant to sing.

business, career, creativity, entertainment, happiness, innovation, money, New York, society, technology, trend, writing

No one needs to pay you

Christa Avampato

From my earliest memories about what profession I’d like to have, I wanted to write. And the troublesome thing to me was always that I may never get anyone to pay me for doing what I love. I’m 31 so when I was growing up, blogs and the like didn’t exist. We were still living in the days of big blue chip companies dominating the globe. “New media” as it’s known today was just a dream inside the imaginations of a handful of people.

Today, I can confidently say that I am a writer. I don’t have a magazine gig. I don’t write for television of film. You can’t see my work in a theatre. I never signed a contract and I don’t have an agent. No one gives me assignments. And it’s no longer just tucked away in some old journal that even I’ll never go back and review, much less have anyone else read. It’s out in the world, in this wonderful thing called the blogosphere and I write whatever I’d like to write about. I do what I want, when I want, which is really the only way I am capable of living my life. I have a disdain for authority or anything that hampers personal freedom and creativity and I am largely a contrarian at the mere mention of phrases like “well, you HAVE to do it this way.” I actually don’t HAVE to do anything, and I won’t.

I used to be weird for feeling this way. Now, it’s become the way of the world. With user-generated content growing by leaps and bounds by the minute, the limits that have been placed on our lives are being ripped down in the blink of an eye. Agents, creative unions, casting directors, TV networks, producers, and film studios used to rule the roost. And while they still wield some power, it is largely dwindling to a modicum of what it used to be. We are very quickly becoming the “take charge of our lives” generation. Contrarians rejoice, we have worked our own way out of the job of being contrarians. (And not a moment too soon. Being a contrarian is exhausting work and I have other things I’d like to be doing!)

Last night I attended the Mustaches for Kids event at the Montauck Club in Park Slope. A hilarious and worthwhile event. The only nosh available was pickles by Bob from McClure’s pickles. (http://www.mcclurespickles.com/) When not in the kitchen whipping up his grandmother’s recipes, he’s acting and writing. He was telling my friend, Monika, and I about a new webtv show he’s on – http://www.theburg.tv/. It’s entirely created by his friends from college who live in Williamsburg. They didn’t create it to make money, they did it for the love of creating. And here’s the good news: they have 4 million people who have watched the show on-line, the audience is global, SAG is contacting, and Michael Eisner’s company is interested in investing in the project. The paradigm of entertainment is being torn down and built up by the talent rather than being dictated to them.

These kinds of success stories by the underdog brighten my day. It is indeed a brand new world. Focus on being great and creating your life, and the money will follow.

time

Keeping time on your side

Christa Avampato

” Who forces time is pushed back by time; who yields to time finds time on his side.
~The Talmud”

Every once in a while I have a day when it seems that every one of my efforts to do anything productive is thwarted. And I get so frustrated that I think it would have been a better use of my time to just stay home. So, I work harder and put in more effort to try to get done what I need to get done. I fail miserably, and eventually I do give up and go home. Some days, the world has other plans for us.

What I should do in these situations is take a seat somewhere, breathe, and just re-collect my thoughts so that my actions aren’t wasted. So when I stumbled on this quote the other day, I wrote it down and tucked it away in my wallet to pull out the next time I’m having one of these “why can’t I get this to work?” moments. Because sometimes, staying home is just not an option.

business, career, change, creativity, discovery, dreams, experience, Google, innovation, society, technology

Get your head in the clouds

Christa Avampato

I spend about 8 hours on my computer, and roughly 10% of that time belongs to some Google application. I stand in awe of a system that can pull up exactly what I’m looking for, regardless of how obscure the subject, in a fraction of a second. Until today, I had resigned myself to the fact that there was some magic Google elf pulling the info for me. I have confirmed that not only is there an elf, there could actually be a million of them out there in the Googlesphere, known increasingly as a “cloud”.

While it focuses on Google and one engineer’s story, Business Week’s cover story this week talks broadly about how our information world is increasingly being built upon this idea of clouds, a group of hundreds of thousands of computers that are all bolted together to store massive quantities of data. While many companies are struggling this holiday season to stay afloat, Google is contemplating world domination of information. Their mantra can be described as “Whatever you can dream, dream it bigger.” Imagine being at a company that tells you you’re wildest dreams are too small, and that you need to formulate projects that are far more outlandish than even your wildest expectations.

There is a lesson in this wild dream making: every dream can be broken down into very small pieces that can be handled by individual “cloud elves” and then aggregated to get you exactly to where you need to be, all in about half a second. And there is no finite number of tasks. The possibilities are truly endless.

While many companies are in the mode of tempering expectations, pulling in spending, and plummeting morale this holiday season, Google is doing the exact opposite. They are determined to fly high and make sense of the massive amount of knowledge out there. They are so optimistic about what they are capable of accomplishing that they feel these clouds may ultimately push the limits of human imagination. Talk about a tipping point! We have been told for centuries that the human imagination is the most powerful tool on Earth – is it possible that when we pool our imaginations together, we can build something larger than our own sense of creativity?

One last astonishing thing about Google. In all of its success and dreaming, they maintain a public humility that is staggering. They are absolutely fearless when it comes to failure so long as there is learning involved. Their CEO, arguably one of the most powerful and wealthiest men on the planet, sits in a cubicle and moves around from building to building so as to interact with different people at all levels of the organization. And he responds to emails from people at all levels at a unbelievable rate. He is respectful of people’s time, both on and off the job. With someone like this at the helm, it’s no wonder that Google believes in defying limits.

The Business Week article can be found at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_52/b4064048925836.htm?chan=magazine+channel_top+stories

The picture above can be found at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/07_52/B4064magazine.htm

business, career, creativity, education, experience, innovation, school

Something is blooming in the state of Denmark

Christa Avampato

I work for a toy company and we are always watching what’s happening in Denmark, mostly because there is such a rich history of play there, spurred on by a little company called Lego. Toys aren’t the only innovations they’re making. There’s something so wonderful happening in the world of business education in Denmark that it almost makes me want to go start my own b-school based on this model.

On one of the Business Week blogs, I learned about Anne Kirah and the 180°academy, a business school that seeks to mesh creative thinking, design, and business in one curriculum. Kirah is convinced that this approach will help keep the Danish economy in tip top competitive shape. And Kirah is very convincing.

The 180°academy’s goal is simple: innovation. She argues that doing what we know best won’t help us be better tomorrow. The whole idea is to break people of their comfort zones so that they can be comfortable anywhere in any situation. Kirah herself is an anthropologist by training, and as such is incredibly focused on human behavior patterns and cultural shifts. Best of all, she is able to apply what she’s observing in order to monetize it to a business’s advantage.

The school has corporate buy-in at the very highest levels. They believe in value of foreign immersion throughout the education process. For about half the cost of an American education and asks the each student commit to conducting an innovation project at their employer using all of the tools taught to them in the program. Kirah is concerned with having a complete mash-up for a student body and a faculty. She believes in bringing together as diverse a population as possible in order to have them draw on one another’s talents.

Very simply, Kirah is changing the paradigm of business school education. She is innovating to the extreme. She thinks different and as a result, may help all of us in business think different.

Take a look at the full article: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/dec2007/id2007125_072960.htm?chan=innovation_innovation+%2B+design_innovation+strategy

finance, money, technology

Making a mint

Christa Avampato

For a number of years, I have built elaborate spreadsheets of budgets to keep myself on track. I put myself through college and through graduate school working a whole host of jobs and with more than a little help from school loans and grants. I grew up in a family with very little money and was always paranoid about not having enough money or about not managing well the little I did have. These spreadsheets helped me stay on track and let me know when I needed to reel in the spending and when I could loosen the reigns a bit.
It is a lot of work to keep track this closely. A number of different sites to check, receipts to track, and accounts to balance. www.Mint.com has made that old news. A new, fun site recently featured in Fast Company, the founders wanted to help encourage young people to be more financial responsible and help all people to simplify the process of budgeting. Best of all it’s free. You can record budgets, have bank accounts, investments, and credit cards all tracked on one site. It will give you graphs that make it easy to see just how you’re faring in the world of balancing your spending and savings, and offer up specials that can help you take advantage of special bonuses from financial products you may not be aware of.
This is no easy feat. Most people don’t like the balancing act of money or the complexity of personal financial management. Mint.com just goes to show you that everything, even the most stressful of tasks, can be infused with a little fun for a whole lot of impact.