Author: Christa Avampato

The short of it: Writer. Health, education, and art advocate. Theater and film producer. Visual artist. Product geek. Proud alumnae of the University of Pennsylvania (BA) and the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia (MBA). Inspired by ancient wisdom & modern tech. Proliferator of goodness. Opener of doors. Friend to animals. Fan of creative work in all its wondrous forms. I use my business skills to create passion projects that build a better world. I’ve been called the happiest New Yorker, and I try hard to live up to that title every day. The long of it: My career has stretched across Capitol Hill, Broadway theatre, education, nonprofit fundraising, health and wellness, and Fortune 500 companies in retail, media, entertainment, technology, and financial services. I’ve been a product developer and product manager, theater manager, strategic consultant, marketer, voice over artist, , teacher, and fundraiser. I use my business and storytelling to support and sustain passion projects that build a better world. In every experience, I’ve used my sense of and respect for elegant design to develop meaningful products, services, programs, and events. While building a business career, I also built a strong portfolio as a journalist, novelist, freelance writer, interviewer, presenter, and public speaker. My writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, PBS.org, Boston.com, Royal Media Partners publications, and The Motley Fool on a wide range of topics including business, technology, science, health, education, culture, and lifestyle. I have also been an invited speaker at SXSW, Teach for America, Avon headquarters, Games for Change, NYU, Columbia University, Hunter College, and the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America. The first book in my young adult book series, Emerson Page and Where the Light Enters, was acquired by a publisher and launched in November 2017. I’m currently working on the second book in the series. A recovering multi-tasker, I’m equally at home in front of my Mac, on my yoga mat, walking my rescue dog, Phineas, traveling with a purpose, or practicing the high-art of people watching. I also cut up small bits of paper and put them back together as a collage artist. My company: I’m bringing together all of my business and creative career paths as the Founder of Double or Nothing Media: • I craft products, programs, and projects that make a difference; • I build the business plans that make what I craft financially sustainable; • I tell the stories that matter about the people, places, and products that inspire me. Follow my adventures on Twitter at https://twitter.com/christanyc and Instagram at https://instagram.com/christarosenyc.
Life

Innovation unleashed

Christa Avampato

There is a tendency in life, though particularly in business, to covet ideas, research, and innovations. R&D of any kind, personal or professional, is often kept under lock and key for fear someone may steal our brilliance. It’s hard to make a counter argument, or at least it has been in the past. We are a people obsessed with patents and lawsuits.
However, there is a movement afoot, and there has been for a number of years, to make it passe to covet intellectual property. This movement takes the mantra that “information wants to be free.” And the mantra is spreading. Put the New York Times on-line for everyone to see all of the content free, make wireless available for all, everywhere. And if you are working on an innovative concept, share it and you will be amazed by how much your concept will improve as a result of outside input. And your concept, will inspire the creativity of others.
My boss is bolted into the innovation and design worlds, having spent most of his life fiddling around with ideas, concepts, and cool “stuff”. He has attended and spoken at innovation conferences with some of the greatest minds of our times, some you know and some you’ve never heard of. Their insights are too good to keep to myself and sadly aren’t covered well by mainstream media. So I’m doing my part to spread the world.
Have a look at the following sites and the podcasts of speakers, and you’ll have a tough time not be innovative, regardless of your field:
Life

Are you incoming or post-peak?

Christa Avampato

There are a lot of ways to consider our careers, relationships, our financial situations. Because I work in the innovation and trend field, we are obsessed with the trend curve to study products and changes in the marketplace. Recently, my boss opened my eyes to using it to evaluate other ideas and states of being. You can place your career on the trend curve, and if you’re post-peak, you better start thinking about how to re-invent yourself. The same can be said for your love life, for your finances, for where you make your home. And consider life in general – Am I jazzed about a new project I have going, be it professional, volunteer work, or a hobby? If all my projects are down-trending, it is time to start thinking about something new to get going.

The trend curve gives us a way to measure how life’s going, and its greatest value is in giving us questions to ask ourselves to evaluate the current state of what we’re trying to chart. I’ve been looking for a tool like this to think about the state of this very abstract idea of progress in life. It grounds the conversation for us, helps us make the choices more palpable, and gives us a historical context for consideration.
The piece it’s missing in the reinvention arrow, the one that connects “post-peak” with “incoming”. The curve makes it look as if there everything we are trying to chart will ultimately fade away into oblivion. This is not true so long as what we’re charting can be remade, refreshed, or repurposed. Arguably, everything we are trying to chart has taken the roller-coaster ride of the trend curve many times before. Everything we have has already been.
Life

Coffee remade

Christa Avampato

You’ve got hand it to Starbucks. Regardless of what anyone may think about the political corporate machine that made it okay to charge $2.50 for a cup of black coffee, they’re incredible innovators.

I was waiting for my friend, Monika, so we could take a walk in the Central Park today (the weather has finally turned to autumn in NYC) and stopped into the Starbucks on the corner to grab a hot apply cider. Upon entering I saw a sign that intrigued me: “Embrace insomnia.” This is what I’ve been saying all along to my fellow insomniacs! And to help you out, Starbucks has created a safe haven for us by being open 24 hours. Incredible. Genius.

In their recruiting efforts, Starbucks has placed posters of real baristas in windows who describe why they love working for Starbucks so much. If you’ve got a captive audience waiting in line, why not try to convince them to lend their expertise on the other side of the counter? Logical, yet innovative.

Starbucks has become known for their groovy tunes, and in partnership with itunes, they now help promote music in their shops by having baristas pick a song of the day, and making it possible to always know who’s singing the song that’s currently playing, and download it direct from itunes with the click of a button. Oh, and in cooperation with T-mobile, wireless Internet is free. Brilliant integration and partnership.

I’m waiting in line to get my cider, and the book The Kite Runner catches my eye. Attractively displayed, Starbucks is promoting the book and the movie. This is alongside their terrific gift assortment as well as the exclusive new release of Joni Mitchell’s album.

Now that I’ve just spent close to $3 for a cup of heated up apply cider, I head over to what I’ll call the accouterments bar to put some extra cinnamon in it and I have an array of well-designed literature in front of me: social responsibility pamphlet, t Mobile hotspot, Starbucks retail careers, and comment cards (mail it in without even having to put a stamp on it). Now I not only enjoy my beverage, I feel fantastic, even self-righteous, about having purchased it.

Why would you ever leave – hot drinks, food, books, music, a comfortable seat, a job, and a celebration of an illness that has kept me awake for most of my adult life. This is exactly the point….the longer you’re here, the more you’ll spend. Starbucks has laid waste to the idea that your core business is your only business. Arguably, they’ve switched the paradigm of retail. I’m not visiting for the product – I’m there for the atmosphere that only they can create for me. Talk about competitive advantage! I wonder how they’d feel about me setting up a cot in the corner.
Life

Super(wo)man lives!

Christa Avampato

I had dinner last night with a friend of mine who introduced me to something new you can do in a cab: a quick change. She said to me “I did a superman in a cab today.” I thought that meant she tripped and fell face first into the cab. Nope, it means changing your clothing while cabbing to your destination. I had never heard of such a thing.

You have to love NYC for these random acts of craziness. Would you ever, in any other city, consider undressing in front of a complete stranger in a moving vehicle? I personally think this is a fantastic idea to keep in your back pocket for the next time you need a good dare for someone.

My friend reasoned that it was dark and rainy, the driver was engrossed in his phone conversation (scary, I know), and she needed to get out of her suit and into something more comfortable quickly. You may be saying to yourself, “why didn’t she just go to a Starbucks restroom to change – they’re are plenty of those around.” Now what fun would that be? Just goes to show you that NYC adds some flair to even the most mundane activities.

Life

You find it when you’re not looking…

Christa Avampato

a parking space in New York that is. I am amazed by how many times I can drive around for 20 minutes looking for a space, find one, literally one, that is 12 blocks from my apartment, and as I approach my building free spots multiply before my eyes. It’s really incredible, and unexplainable.

I’ve also found this statement to be true recently for bicycle riders. I know that they are being better environmentalists than I by riding a bike instead of an SUV. I get that. I’m jealous of then. I’d love to pitch my car. However, why do they think riding a bike exempts them from every traffic law we have? They go the wrong direction, cut you off, run red lights, disobey stop signs, and the list goes on. I just don’t get it…how do they justify that behavior and then get angry at motorists? I’m longing for the day when those police officers that lurk around my neighbordhood give a ticket to a bicyclist or a cab who thinks they’re above the traffic laws.

Life

Cereal’s like the future

Christa Avampato

I feel alone and overwhelmed by the enormousness of this indefinite time frame known as “the future”. Even if I am perfectly happy, thinking about the future can turn me into a whirling dervish. This is why I do yoga, to calm my mind. This is why I stay as busy as possible, to keep myself in control. If I have a task at hand, then I can put my energy into that task. My mind is developing remarkable work-arounds to my distraction efforts. I’ll all of a sudden be walking down the street, finishing doing something or thinking about something, and next in the cue is always, always thinking about the future. “Hi self, Glad you took care of buying milk at the corner store. Now back to the matter at hand: the future.” “Good thing you worked out what you are going to say to Sleepy’s when you have to call them again to straighten out your bill. Time to think about the future, again.” And so it goes.

The funny thing about the future is that no matter how well you have it figured out, it just keeps coming. No such thing as a future tourniquet. If the future is coming, and it always is, then I’m worrying.

When I think about people from history that have exhibited calm, even in the face of great adversity, I think of the Dalai Lama, of Ghandi, and of Abraham Lincoln. It’s no wonder then that Mr. Lincoln would have said, “”The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.” So even if I am worried about 5 years down the line, next year, or next week, I only have to deal with it one small piece, a day, at a time.

The task of the future is too heavy, too much to bear today. Of course it is – I am one person, in one moment of time. I started to think about all the things I’ll do repetitively for the rest of my life and what it would be like to do them all in one moment. Let’s take how many bowls of cereal I’m going to eat between now and the day I die. I am hoping to live to be an ancient woman – my palm reader, Miss Susan, says this is highly likely. Let’s assume she is correct on that count. I also love cereal. I mean, really love cereal. If I could find a way to justify eating it for every meal, I would. So if I live 60 more years, that’s roughly 3000 weeks. If I eat about 4 bowls of cereal a week, that’s 12,000 bowls. Well, if ate all of those bowls RIGHT NOW, I’d probably die, or be very, very ill. Anything taken in such massive amounts is not good for us, and thinking about the future is no exception.

What Mr. Lincoln was saying is what we hear dietitians saying all of the time: the key is moderation. Take the future in tiny pieces, a bit at a time. Spoonful by delicious spoonful.

The above picture can be found at http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/np/fnrb/cereal1004.jpg

Life

A place to call happy

Christa Avampato

The idea of happy-nomics is still lurking around in my mind. I consider it constantly. This week I looked back at my career kaleidoscope that I created from my friend Susan’s book, the Right Job Right Now. (It’s listed on my blog in “my favorite books” section). And I realized that everything I had been looking for in a job, I found in my current position, and then some. Today I received an email from a woman at company that had interested me while I was still at Darden. Just now, the perfect position at the company had opened up and she wanted to know if I would be interested. I politely declined and offered to send the posting to friends who may know of someone interested. I have never in my life declined an interview. Never. I had arrived at happiness.

So just when I have it all figured out, and I smiling very proud of myself of how well I’d chosen my current job, how wise I had become since my last full-time job, I read a quote by Sydney H. Harris. “Happiness is a direction, not a place.” So while yes I am moving along the path of happiness, I will not actually ever get to some place called “Happy Land”. I may be skipping down Happy Lane right now, though if there anything in this world that is certain, it is change. This was a far deeper discovery than I ever thought I’d find in 7 small words.

Though in some ways, this also takes the pressure off. I am always hoping to arrive at Happy Land, Inner Peace Land, Satisfaction Land. It’s true in my relationships, in my career, even in my search for a home. Isn’t it easier to discover a general direction rather than a specific place. The best we can hope for is to be on the road of happiness and where it’s going is any one’s guess. It could be going to many different places. There’s no such thing as “I’ve arrived.” What we should be thrilled to find is “I’m going the right way for me, right now.”
Life

Inspiration by image

Christa Avampato

I am most moved by beautiful words, though increasingly I am also impressed with images, especially when those images are taken to create a narrative. Last week, I watched Pop!Tech (http://www.poptech.com/) on-line as the conference was streamed completely free by Yahoo. One of the speakers was Jonathan Harris, a photographer who lives in New York City. He built a photographic narrative of a whale hunt in Alaska. The candence of his picture taking mirrored the level of excitement, energy, and the beat of his heart during the hunt. Quite an incredible idea, and the pictures tell the story better than I think any words could do.
His talk made me realize there is a time for tell and a time for show. That art and its creation can and should be inextricably linked to the body and to the world around us. Pictures can contain energy, they live, they breathe. There is something to be said for great story telling, for capturing moments in time and then paginating them to form a continuous stream.
In my lifetime, it is likely that I will never be able to experience a traditional, subsistence whale hunt, or any other countless journeys that Jonathan takes us on. I’m sure glad he has his camera so that I can relive pieces of those spectacular scenes.
Life

The Move Toward Sameness

Christa Avampato

For the first time in this blog, I am writing from a location other than my home in New York. I am in Portland, Maine, with my good friend, Dan, who will be guest-blogging within the next week. After driving 8 hours from New York, we arrived here very late – around 1:30am. We got up this morning, had some breakfast and headed out to downtown Portland to do some sight-seeing.

While there were quaint little shops, and some one-of-a-kind hand-made items here and there, Maine really had not struck us any different than New Jersey. It is so similar in fact that when we pulled into the Sunoco Station to get gas this morning. I hesitated for a split second before recognizing that I needed to get out of the car and pump my own gas. (In New Jersey, it is illegal to pump your own gas – an attendant always does it for you.)

In my mind this begs the question, “why travel?” Granted both New Jersey and Maine are in the Northeast, though you would imagine that 8 hours apart cultures would vary to some extent. This lack of change gave me pause; maybe travel isn’t worth it unless we are traveling internationally, or into nature to place such as Yosemite or the Grand Canyon.

There are many good reasons to travel with a companion; though I would say that in the past I have been much more successful traveling alone than with company. However, that has much more to do with the fact that I am truly lousy at picking travel partners. Dan, is a great exception. He’s the perfect travel buddy – played DJ the entire trip, is a good conversationalist, is unfailingly optimistic, and tells me to knock it off in a very kind way when I lapse into my neuroses. As we were taking a rest back in the hotel before dinner, Dan reclined on his bed and said “the great thing about traveling is that it gives you permission to completely slack off.” I would never have realized this on my own. I am by nature a manic traveler – I must see everything, do everything, try everything, or else I feel I’ve wasted my money. In on sentence, Dan gave me some food for thought.

I don’t take time to slow down when I’m at home. If I did, I’d miss out. I write in my blog while I read a magazine, eat dinner, watch the news, and create yet another to-do list. It’s maddening, and it’s my fault that it’s maddening. There is much to be said for slowing down, serial tasking rather than multi-tasking, and then choosing to not task at all for a bit. Travel, regardless of where we go, lets us step away from our lives and our responsibilities and just be in the world. It’s a different lens through which to view living, even if that living looks similar to life at home.

career, dreams, job, retail

The first 100 days of an MBA grad

Christa Avampato

I was recently asked to write an article for my alumni newspaper. The article had to be cut down quite a bit due to space constraints. Here is the article in its entirety.

“First off, a big hello from the other side to my second year friends and to those first years whom I had the pleasure to meet during Darden Days and various other “please come join our community” events where we tried our best to woo you into accepting at Darden. I’m glad you’re there, and in many ways I am very sorry I am not there with you. Darden is one of the most incredible places I have ever had the privilege to call home.

Can it really be 100 days since I graduated? How did the days get by me so quickly? I have done my best blocking and tackling job, and still time is slipping by at a dizzying pace. Such is the life of a retailer (me).

I graduated without a job – so if you are still in the hunt, don’t despair. I moved to NYC with no job, no money, and a desire to be in an industry that has zero interest in MBAs, or so I was told. And now I live in my favorite area of Manhattan on Riverside Park, work for the best boss I’ve ever had (he’s so brilliant, insightful, and unfailingly supportive and kind that I’m considering asking him, and his equally wonderful wife, to adopt me), and got a dream job at a toy company. I’m not kidding – sometimes I have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming.

If you want the details of my job hunt, I’m glad to share them. (The story is a bit too long for the purposes of this article so if you want the full details or you need someone’s success story to keep you motivated, please email me. Seriously – I check my email obsessively.) You can also ask Kellogg Leliveld – without her, I wouldn’t have gotten to my current company. In short, I can tell you I squeezed every last drop of learning out of Darden that I could get, I researched and contacted companies like a mad woman, I kept smiling, even when I felt like crying (which was often), I refused to take a job that wasn’t perfect for me, and I had an absolutely miserable summer between my first and second years – the worst summer on record. And now I am so grateful for that miserable summer because it forced me to stop compromising in every area of my life, personal and professional. In these first 100 days, I have learned that comprising your happiness for what you think you should do and what others think you should do is a road that can only lead to a very unhappy life and a job that ultimately you will hate.

Joël graciously provided me with some talking points, which I am very appreciative of, so I am going to answer those now:

Fear:
I had a lot of fears when going through Darden, when graduating, and when taking a job. I was really afraid that I wasn’t up to the challenge. Darden asked more from me than I ever asked from myself, and as a harsh self-critic, that is saying a lot. And what I learned through my interview process with my now boss is that we have to commit. It is incredible what developing a strong, true, deep sense of commitment will do – it will eradicate fear. I am someone completely obsessed with worry and fear. I know what you’re going through. And what I was missing all along was commitment to asking for and getting exactly what I wanted. Don’t do that. Take out a piece of paper, right now, and write out your perfect job, your perfect boss, your perfect whatever-you-want, and refuse to take anything less. Make a sealed promise to yourself to get exactly what is on that paper.

Fun at work:
I work for a retailer as the Senior Analyst Manager of Trend and Innovation, which is to say I am a nerdy version of Tom Hanks in Big. I have fun about 10 hours a day (and my boss is horrified by how much I work! Can you believe that?) We are charged with infusing the company with creativity, and then daily making the business case for innovation and re-invention. We are actively helping to turn the ship around. I run to work every morning, and have made shopping a scientific experiment and a sport (which is the only way I can stand to be in a store longer than 5 minutes. Secretly, I hate shopping, which I’m learning makes me a good retailer.)

Why Darden mattered:
I got a do-over by going to Darden. I was a job switcher in every sense of the word. I was so non-traditional that some people wondered what in the world I was doing at Darden and what in the world I would ever do after. That’s okay. And when I turned down a very lucrative job in a top-rate training program with one of the largest companies in the world, some people told me I was crazy. Absolutely nuts. And that’s okay, too. I knew me better than they did. There’s a great video on You Tube that gets me through criticism like this; it’s the 60-second ad that Apple ran in their “Think Different” campaign. It’s their salute to the Crazy Ones – have a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dvn_Ied9t4M. This little clip keeps me going. Crazy ones are the ones who make a difference. “The right answer” is not always essential, and many times is counter-productive. Darden showed me that humility, creativity, and diligence will get you everywhere.

And finally a word about toy recalls:
My boss was recently put in charge of managing and communicating safety initiatives across the enterprise. Right now, he is up in Toronto walking our Canadian stores with the CEO and President, and preparing to address the Board tomorrow morning on the issue of toy safety. Because we are privately held, the Board is made up entirely of private equity investors. When they did their investment analysis, I can guarantee that they did not account for tens of millions of toys being recalled by the world’s largest toy manufacturer right before the Christmas shopping season. My boss and I have agonized over the presentation deck for weeks, and now it’s show time.

We will be a better company for going through this, even as every analyst on Wall Street speculates about what this will do to the holiday shopping season. We will have better relationships throughout our supply chain as a result. We will hold ourselves to higher standards of responsibility and accountability. I have had a front-row seat to the end of an era in this industry – the days of cheap product without consequences are over. Manufacturers can no longer squeeze overseas production facilities – there is nothing left for them to give. We thought we were in the toy business; we’re not. Fundamentally, we are in the trust business, and it will take some work to regain that trust and to use it to define who we are and what we mean to our guests. It’s about re-invention and re-purposing, and it is the most critical work a company can ever do. And we’re doing it.

Not bad for the first 100 days. We do 80% of our revenue between October 1st and December 31st so I am sure the next 100 will be just as eventful! Stay tuned – this is going to be exciting.