Category: dreams

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, 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

career, dreams, happiness, innovation, work

On Innovation: Bring the edge to the core

Christa Avampato

John Hagel and John Seely Brown wrote a terrific blog post this morning on one of Business Week’s innovation blogs. In the article, they argue that ideas and products on the edge are critical to reinventing the core of a business. They site the ipod, early social networks on-line, and China as an economic center. You can read the full article at: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/nov2007/id20071128_162890.htm?chan=innovation_innovation+%2B+design_top+stories

I would also say that this idea can be extended to our own personal core. When I consider where I am now, many of the ideas of how I wanted to shape my life grew up out on the edge of my imagination, far out ideas that maybe I’d get around to eventually. And then something remarkable happened – those ideas on the edge grew to such a size that they demanded more attention. It was a snowball effect – the more attention they were given, the more refining I could do, and the more plausible they seemed despite the fact that originally they seemed impossible to achieve.

This is the wonderful thing about imagination and the belief that even the at-first impossible tasks or dreams take on the glow of possibility if tended to long enough. They somehow sprout a life of their own. It’s as if in time they grow legs and walk themselves to the middle of your existence so you can better see them and consider them. So pay attention to the edges; they are slowly marching to center stage to have their day.

The above picture can be found at: http://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/tuts/o2/glow-onCircle.jpg

dreams, work

Dreams minus logic

Christa Avampato

For years I have wondered about my weirdo dreams, which I have more often than not. They don’t make sense. They seem to be a manifestation of clumping a lot of the areas of my life together in a way reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s painting style.

Many publications have recently picked up this curiosity about dream creation – the New York Times, Real Simple Magazine, even Business Week. It turns out that when we dream, the area of our brains that control logic and reasoning goes to sleep, too. It unplugs, allowing other areas of our minds, and the thoughts they contain, to run rampant. When the cat’s away….

So I think about this everyday when I wake up, wondering if my illogical mind has revealed anything that would have otherwise been stifled by reason. This morning, I woke up from a dream in which I was negotiating hard for a salary with a new employer. They agreed to pay me $585,000 / year. Rather than jumping for joy, I said simply, “I am not going to be in the office after 6:00pm.” Can you believe that?

This dreams tells me a few things. One, my unreasonable mind believes in the very reasonable idea that I need a balanced life. Two, I am clearly thinking about money and becoming concerned about my finances. This makes sense, too – authorities are considering raising the fare on the GW Bridge to $8 a day and my school loans have entered re-payment. The days of deferment are gone for good. The other thing that this dream reveals is that I am clearly thinking about what’s next, and trying to decide what I’d like to see on the horizon. My boss planted this seed a month or so ago, asking me to consider where I want to go with my career so that he can help me get there. This is quite possibly the greatest show of support any boss has ever shown me. It’s truly a remarkable proposition, and I appreciate that this personal support in a work environment is rare.

Despite logic’s need for a rest, my dreaming mind seems to be holding up its end of reason, and teaching logic a thing or two in the process.

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.