Category: economy

Business Week, career, economy, entrepreneurship, Inc. Magaine, opportunity

NY Business Strategies Examiner.com: Positive Black Swans and Insurmountable Opportunity

Christa Avampato

I arrived home from work today to find a copy of Business Week in my mailbox with the cover story “Innovation, Interrupted” by Michael Mandel. Mr. Mandel can be a bit of a negative Nelly when it comes to the economy. One could argue that he’s not negative just unapologetically honest. Lately, he hasn’t spent too much time talking about the future. He’s mostly focused on the past as well as the here-and-now.

“Innovation, Interrupted” is no exception save for the last paragraph, which gave me pause and then made me smile. Mandel says, “positive Black Swans – unexpected events with huge positive consequences that in retrospect look inevitable…the U.S. could use a few positive Black Swans.” For a minute, I let my mind wonder to what those Black Swans might be. And then it became very clear — we, entrepreneurs, are those Black Swans.We are the ones Mr. Mandel is waiting for.

For the full article, please visit: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-2901-NY-Business-Strategies-Examiner~y2009m6d5-Positive-Black-Swans-and-insurmountable-opportunity

career, economy, faith, fear, health, job, religion

My Year of Hopefulness – Cathedral of Saint John the Divine

Christa Avampato

Yesterday, I found myself leaving the emergency room of St. Luke’s Hospital. I had developed a “subconjunctival hemorrhage” and a slight amount of “petechiae”. This is a fancy way of saying a very small blood vessel popped in my left eye and I had a few tiny red freckles around both of my eyes. I was panicked that I was experiencing the beginning of a very serious medical condition. Turns out that all of my blood work and diagnostic tests came back completely normal. I’ll just look a little weird for a week or so.

I called my mom to update her and let her know that nothing was seriously wrong with me. I wandered down the street, into the children’s sculpture garden of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. As I was explaining to my mom that I was just fine, I found myself tearing up. Maybe they were tears of relief, or fear, or maybe it was frustration with the week I had just finished. Over the past few days I have discovered many more of my friends have lost their jobs. I’m beginning to wonder how I’ve been so fortunate to escape that situation in this economy. I work very hard, though not any harder than my friends who have been let go from their positions. I’m beginning to think that luck has a lot to do with it.

I sat in that sculpture garden for about 20 minutes and had a good cry. The sun had come out, the wind was blowing, and I felt lost. I’m worried about the uncertainty we’re all facing, despite the fact that I have managed uncertainty so many times before. I feel like the ground is shifting beneath our economy, and there is no sign of it settling down any time soon. I was angry for my friends who have been let go from their jobs – hard working, talented people who were seen as a line item on a company’s excel spreadsheet, an expense rather than a resource and an investment. I felt shaken.

I had never really looked at that giant sculpture next to Saint John the Divine. It’s a collaborative piece of work based on Noah’s Ark and the triumph of good over evil. The Cathedral has been closed for some time for renovations and recently re-opened. I was weary from my hospital visit though felt drawn into that incredible cathedral. I wandered in and it was nearly empty. The choir was practicing and I felt drawn to sit in the center of the space, letting that beautiful music wrap around me like a warm hug. Though I am not a religious person, I felt that God was very close to me at that moment, that he knew what I was going through, and wanted to help.

I let my eyes tear up again, I was cemented to that seat, transfixed by the music. After a little while I got up and walked around the edge of the cathedral, stopping to look at each of the small chapels. The light shone through them so brilliantly. I had never seen stained glass that colorful and perfect. By the time the choir stopped, I got to The Poet’s Corner, a small area that pays tributes to literary greats such as Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Gertrude Stein. They each had their names and birth date engraved into a stone, along with a quote they famously wrote.

One quote particularly caught my attention. Theodore Roethke said, “I learn by going where I have to go.” I thought about this quote all the way home. It reminded me that I have places I need to be, where I’ve committed to be, and there are things for me to learn there and to take somewhere else. Today, I just need to do what I have to do. The acts of hope and faith are a daily process. Just keep showing up.

The image above can be found here.

business, economy, friendship, harmony, leadership, stress, work

My Year of Hopefulness – Harmonious Work Environments

Christa Avampato

I love to talk and on occasion someone says something to me that’s so striking that I cannot let it pass without writing about it. A friend of mine recently had her supervisor tell her that she creates a work environment that is too harmonious. I was so stunned by this comment that all I could do was laugh. And once that laughter subsided, I found the very core of this comment to be highly disturbing.

The American workplace right now, particularly in large corporations, is a tough place to be every day. Layoff rounds seem never ending and are referred to with a dizzying array of synonyms: “right-sizing”, “restructuring”, “displacement”, “down-scaling”, and the list goes on. At the end of the day a lot of very talented, bright, dedicated high performers are losing their jobs. Morale is low and bad behaviors abound as a result of fear, angst, and disappointment.

Layer all of these bad sentiments into my friend’s situation. Despite the fact that morale is very low at her company and the environment there is like a pressure cooker these days, she has found a way to bring some sense of harmony to her team and her projects. And the feedback to her is she creates too much harmony?! If she were ineffective at her job and unable to get anything done, I could possibly understand the feedback though that is not at all the case. She’s one of the highest performers in her department, due in large part to her ability to create winning strategies that are widely supported by others.

By saying please and thank you, and recognizing the hard work of her team she is being criticized by her boss who is unable to create any kind of good will due to his bad attitude and propensity for bullying. With all the anxiety in the world, we should welcome the contributions of people who can restore a sense of order and calm, particularly in the workplace. In the case of harmony, there can’t be too much of a good thing.

career, economy, entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship

My Year of Hopefulness – Are you a social entrepreneur?

Christa Avampato

The core psychology of a social entrepreneur is someone who cannot come to rest, in a very deep sense, until he or she has changed the pattern in an area of social concern all across society. –Bill Drayton, Founder of Ashoka

This morning on Daily Good, an on-line publication devoted to spreading good news, the topic is social entrepreneurship. What makes these people tick? The post this morning may help us all identify whether or not this type of entrepreneurship is the right one for us. Simply stated, social entrepreneurs found a business (often for-profit) that addresses a societal concern.

Could you be a social entrepreneur? Could your business or business idea be a social enterprise?

A personality checklist:
1.) Unable to come to rest until a cause you are passionate about is accomplished
2.) Belief that profit and social good are on equal footing
3.) Relationship builder
4.) Ability to connect the dots between experiences that seem disparate on the surface
5.) Persuade and inspire people to think differently

A business-cause checklist:
1.) As your company grows, do the economics and the cause support one another?
2.) Does the core business activity profoundly address the social cause it was founded to solve?
3.) Are both financial and social gains measurable in your business?

The interest in and passion for social entrepreneurship is growing quickly. One upside to this economy, is that people are being encouraged to think more creatively about how they want their lives to look and what they want to accomplish. After seeing the failings and flailings of many large corporations, many people are beginning to consider trading in their lives whiling away in grey cubicles for a chance to be entrepreneurs in charge of their own careers. And they’d like that effort to bring them financial gain and some improvements to the world around them.

business, Business Week, career, economy, growth

My Year of Hopefulness – The Blessing and Curse of Growth

Christa Avampato

In BusinessWeek this week, there’s a great one page article about The Peter Principle, a book whose basic premise is that the workplace does strange things to people. It was the precursor to The Office, Office Space, and the Dilbert comic strip. We laugh because the material is funny, and it’s funny because it’s all too familiar to all of us.

The main conclusion of The Peter Principle is one of my favorite quotes that I repeat so often as I read the paper these days or hear my friends talk about their latest work travails: In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. And while it’s a bold statement, it’s also completely logical. We are pushed so hard to claw our way up as high as we can go that we risk toppling over to the other side of the tipping point that represents exactly where we optimally operate.

Here’s a great example: A friend of mine has a boss who is brilliant at my friend’s job, which she used to have. The boss is a fantastic individual contributor, very detail-oriented, strong follow-through, enjoys rolling up her sleeves, and pitching in wherever she’s needed. These are perfect skills and interests if you have my friend’s job. They aren’t good if you’re her boss. Her boss has no interest in developing people, managing others, or taking a step back and distributing work among the team members. She likes implementation and has no interest (or skill) in strategy.

Such a classic case: My friend’s boss was excellent at her job, and because she did so well they promoted her – right into the completely wrong type of role. We see this all the time at so many companies. It’s all about growth – as much of it as we can get as quickly as possible. As a result, a lot of people, good, talented people in just the right place, end up being moved to a position where they have no aptitude or interest. All for the sake of “growth”.

You’d think we’d learn our lesson: companies grew too big, people’s financial ambitions grew too big, we lived beyond our means for so many years, housing prices and demand for real estate sky-rocketed causing bidding wars. In so many aspects our economy grew so big that it was bloated, and as a result, a correcting period has begun that has destroyed all of the growth we’ve experienced the last decade. So what good was the growth at all?

Here’s a little bit of advice that I try to remember every day and it has helped me tremendously in my career: keep you eyes on your strengths, your interests, and your goals. Not your company’s. Not your boss’s, or your friends’, or your family’s. Yours. For example, I enjoy managing large, cross-functional teams that work on complex, multi-faceted problems. I like making things, tangible new products that answer an unmet need, and I’d like to help people live extraordinary lives through the work that I do. Pretty simple to state, hard to keep doing. There are always distractions, always people who want you to stop doing what you’re good at and what you love, and do something you aren’t so great at. Growth in new areas has its benefits, though should not be undertaken at the expense of your aptitudes and happiness. Why rise to a level of incompetence and fail when you can do what you love and are good at and succeed? Growth has its rewards, but it can, and often does, come with a very heft price tag.

apple, books, business, economy, government, politics

My Year of Hopefulness – The Age of the Unthinkable

Christa Avampato

In 1997, Apple launched a campaign with one simple message “Think Different”. 12 years ago it was inconceivable how necessary to our survival those two words would be in 2009. Joshua Cooper Ramo, an analyst and former Foreign Editor of Time, takes this Apple campaign slogan and sprints with it, full speed ahead, to help us understand where we are and what we’ll need to do to pull ourselves together. His new book, The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New Global Order Constantly Surprises Us and What to Do About It, is a beacon for those who have been looking for straight-talk about our current economic crisis and how you and I, everyday people, can move forward.


Ramo pulls from historical examples to show how people in the midst of a situation leading to their demise never saw it coming. Gorbachev is an eloquent example. He opened up the U.S.S.R. a bit at a time, and then the momentum of change was so strong, so pronounced, that Gorbachev had no choice but to let go of the reigns he had gripped tight for so long. Is the state of our economy, and the CEOs who have long prospered under the old rules of our financial system, any different?

In this dark situation it can be hard to see any cause for hope. Ramo suggests that while this might be the darkest moment in our world’s financial history, it is also the moment of greatest possibility. We have the opportunity to wipe away every preconceived notion we have about how we do business, how we live life, how we create, how we inspire, how we dream. 

“Ahead of us is the invigorating possibility of discovery and reinvention.” With that simple sentence, Ramo encourages us to question every assumption about ‘how it must be done’. The days of cookie-cutter policy, politics, and business are over. If we are going to craft a new, brighter future, it will take all of our courage to challenge ourselves, our families, neighbors, co-workers, and leaders. It is time to toss aside common assumptions in favor of grander, more creative, and courageous plans and actions. 

Never before has it been so possible to create a world that we want to live in. It’s as if we have a blank canvas staring at us, daring us, to invent something extraordinary. The only question now is do we have the confidence to build something from nothing. Can we take up the paint brush and with wide, vibrant strokes imagine a new future and commit to bringing it to life?  
economy, Fast Company, future

My Year of Hopefulness – Embracing the Future is Our Only Choice

Christa Avampato

In Robert Safian’s letter to the editor in Fast Company this month, he closed with a very poignant, short paragraph that was hopeful and also a mark of tough love delivered in an empathic way. We have been spending the past 18 months with a “whoa is me” attitude. The economy is awful. We’re afraid. We’re in a death spiral downward. What are we going to do???


It’s okay to hide under the bed for some amount of time after the dark days arrive. No matter how scared or uncertain or confused we are, we have to eventually come back into the light. We have to start living again, even if the kind of life we live going forward is dramatically different than the way we lived before. 

Robert’s assessment is very clear and strong:
“These are dark days, no question. And unpredictable events, from natural disasters to fiscal meltdown to 9/11, can often make things look darker. But the unexpected can also be our friend, our ally, as long as we maintain hope and embrace our uncertain future. After all, we have no choice.”

He’s right. We don’t have the option to stay hidden away, hoping and praying for better days. We are going to have work hard, very hard, for them. And better days doesn’t mean the days we used to have. All we can do is embrace what we’ve got to look forward to, whatever that is.   
Africa, economy, entrepreneurship, investing, Kiva.org, money, philanthropy, social entrepreneurship

My Year of Hopefulness – Kiva.org

Christa Avampato

I’ve given up on opening my 401K statements. The news is just too depressing. Given our current economic state, I’ve been searching of where to put my investment money. Where will it do the most good, for me and for the companies I choose to invest in. When I look at the Dow 30, I don’t have a lot of faith in many of those institutions to reinvent themselves. Some of them have remarkable potential. Most of them have to accept that they have a very tough realization to come to terms with – in the words of Darwin, “Change or die.”


The investments that are intriguing to me these days are in entrepreneurs, particularly those in developing nations such as Rwanda. I just placed my first investment in an entrepreneur in Ghana through Kiva.org. I lent $25 to a woman named Agnes Cobbina for a 7-month term. She owns a hair salon and she wanted to borrow $375 to expand her business. With 14 other lenders, I completed Anges’s loan goal. What was remarkable is that I clicked on several different entrepreneurs and by the time I got to the “lend to” page, their goal was already completed. In the 10 seconds that it took me to read a bit about them, someone else had stepped in to help! One loan is made every 14 seconds through Kiva.org. 

Some people might think of this as a charitable donation rather than a loan. Nothing could be further from the truth. 99% of those who receive loans through organizations like Kiva.org pay them back in full. How many U.S. investments can say that these days? And not only am I confident that I will receive my money back; I know that I helped someone help themselves through this loan. I am empowering Agnes, providing her with a dignified way to grow her business and support her family. 

I’m thrilled to be able to participate with Kiva.org. But I want to do more. I’d be willing to take part of my investment money and provide it directly to an entrepreneur in a country like Rwanda for a return. What an amazing thing it would be to combine the idea of Sharebuilder with that of a Kiva.org. Could this be a new paradigm for global investment?  
career, economy, Examiner, innovation, job

NY Business Strategies Examiner.com: Businesses Take a Cue from Reality TV for Extreme Innovation Projects

Christa Avampato

Imagine your office. Imagine your co-workers. Imagine that they become your roommates for 10 weeks.

For the full article, please click here.

economy, goals, work

My Year of Hopefulness – Impossible Standards

Christa Avampato

At first blush, the term “impossible standards” doesn’t seem to have any hint of hopefulness in it. We think of demanding bosses, people who think we are never good enough, and inability to reach a set goal. Though if we took a broader view of impossible standards, we could see in the term the potential for continuous improvement, the ability to always discover something new, the opportunity for never-ending achievement.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this term lately. Tomorrow is my birthday, 33 (what my dear friend Brooke would call “my Jesus Year”), and it’s always a time of reflection for me. Of where I’m going, where I’ve been, and what’s good in my life. I spend an entire day not beating myself up over anything. I take the day off from work and I do exactly what I want to do. I have tremendously high standards for myself and I usually reaffirm them on my birthday. I make a commitment to continue reaching higher and higher in every aspect of my life.

I consider what’s happening in our economy right now and there is one very clear take-away that emerges for me. A lot of companies and a lot of leaders took on a view of entitlement, of being above any laws or rules or ethics. They thought they were at the very top of their game, always, when in fact they just had a very low bar for themselves and for their teams.

Impossible standards keep us humble, they keep us striving and fighting for improvement. I grow concerned not when someone sets an unimaginable standard, but when someone settles for things as they are because they can’t imagine ever being, doing, or having any better.