The Adventure Begins

Back in December, when my family was handing out holiday gifts, my mom gave me and my husband Dan an incredible present. About ten years ago, my mom bought this etching of a couple, rowing their boat in fast waters.

At the time, she wasn’t quite sure why the painting spoke to her, but she saw it and just knew she had to have it.

The painting’s purpose, she was certain, would become known to her at some point.

This Christmas, to my thrill and surprise, my mom gave me and Dan this painting. As she presented it to us, she said the painting’s purpose had recently become clear to her.

The couple? “They,” she said, “are the two of you.” And the title? “Clearly, it’s time for your adventure to begin.”

I’ve always believed that putting out good energy into the universe means you’ll get good things in return.

So, for the next few weeks I concentrated on the exciting thought that our adventure was just beginning. And you know what? As cliché as it sounds, it worked!

Literally within days of receiving this painting, Dan and I saw clues pointing us towards our new adventure – a new and improved apartment to live in, a better work schedule for Dan, even my own growing excitement for a big birthday just weeks away.

But perhaps nothing kicked off our new adventure quite like the news I received in mid-January: a job offer from IDEO.

Back in August 2010, IDEO launched OpenIDEO, a new online social innovation community whose goal is to bring diverse people together to design solutions to some of our world’s toughest challenges. I first checked out the site last fall and was immediately hooked. Amazingly, in November a position opened up to join OpenIDEO as a community manager, and of course I jumped at the chance to apply.

As I write this I’ve just finished my first week as part of the OpenIDEO team, and all I can say is I’m thrilled. Thrilled to be part of such a dynamic and innovative company, for sure. But more than that, I’m thrilled to be part of a project that so deeply speaks to some of my biggest passions: doing good in our world, connecting people online and offline, and creating community.

Of course, there’s a long road ahead for me as I learn my new job, figure out how things work, and actually roll up my sleeves and get started.

But for now I’m also trying to enjoy the start of this brand new adventure.

As I get more and more involved in building and growing OpenIDEO, I’d love to see some familiar faces on the site. I truly believe in the potential role that this global community – already 156 countries strong – can play in changing our world for the better.

I thought I’d share a great video that talks about OpenIDEO’s purpose and vision so that you can learn a little more about what I’m working on. I hope you’ll each consider signing up and joining in – the more the merrier.

Here’s to a new adventure in 2011!

Choosing Generosity & Courage in 2011

I’m not a big fan of New Year’s Resolutions. I really never have been. Mainly I don’t like the idea of waking up one day and declaring things like, “I will now exercise more”. While I do believe a New Year offers the chance for a new start, I think more often than not, New Year’s Resolutions are shallow and low-impact.

What I do love, though, are what I call Birthday Resolutions.

While everyone else is busy resolving to do things come January 1^st, I sit tight for a little while. My birthday is in February, so after New Years I’ve got about 6 weeks of thinking to do.

In my opinion, making Birthday Resolutions means there’s less pressure to say things like, “I want to eat healthier” – perhaps because it’s easier to tune out the background noise on my birthday and really think through what I want the year ahead to look like.

In fact, my overarching objective when setting Birthday Resolutions each year isn’t just about changing my behavior or attitude. It’s about asking myself:

What do I want my life to look like this time next year?

Now, don’t get me wrong – setting and then keeping a Birthday Resolution can be just as tough as a New Year’s Resolution. After all, any kind of resolution entails challenging yourself to change, and change is hard.

Still, I do find that Birthday Resolutions help me start my next year feeling present, thoughtful and focused about the year ahead. And for me, that’s the whole point.

This year I have two Birthday Resolutions, which I’m pleased to share with you.

First, I resolve to give.

By this I really mean to give of myself more freely – my time, my interest, my intellect, and even my personal resources (like money, my network etc).

In my family we use a concept borrowed from Stephen Covey called “The Emotional Bank Account”. The premise here is that relationships are like bank accounts, with deposits and withdrawals. Each person in a relationship makes transactions of both kinds, but overall both people must focus on making deposits – otherwise the account balance goes empty.

For me, the last two and a half years have been all about withdrawals. Succeeding in business school required that I focus almost exclusively on myself and my own journey. Because I had built up enough of an “account balance” with my family and friends, I was able to lean on the people around me for support, help, and guidance. But, with my own bandwidth limited, I didn’t do the best job of making deposits.

Now that I’m out of school with a healthy dose of perspective and clarity, I’ve decided that I want this year to be about making deposits. I’m so thankful for the help I have received, and now I feel compelled to be generous in return.

Second, I resolve to try.

By this I really mean to find the courage to take risks, to speak up, and to think beyond what seems possible or plausible.

People who’ve known me forever know that I’m not a big fan of risk, so this isn’t an easy resolution for me. But if there is one lesson I took away from business school it’s that when I am brave enough to speak my opinion or pursue something unknown, good things can happen. Sometimes I fail or make a mistake – everyone does at some point. But more often than not, when I push myself to give something new a try, I’m glad I did.

So there you have it – my 2011 Birthday Resolutions. While I can’t promise instant success, I do feel more focused and prepared to make this year be about both generosity and courage.

Hopefully by this time next year I'll be reporting back to you all the ways I was able to both give more and try more.

Happy New Year to each of you, and best of luck with your own Resolutions!

My Year-End Job Search Advice

Boy how time flies! Incredibly, we’ve made it through another year.

2010 was an interesting year for me, comprised of what I see as two separate phases: the last six months of business school, and the first six months of the rest of my life.

Anyone who’s gone to business school can speak to how intense the experience is. For two years you push yourself to learn, study, compete, and succeed – in the classroom, among your friends, and especially in the job search. You also sacrifice; your life revolves around being a student and everything else often takes a back seat.

As cliché as it sounds, business school is all-consuming (that whole “seeing the forest through the trees” thing doesn’t always apply to us MBAs).

Like any good business school student, I took my two years in school very seriously, working hard to ensure success for my job search. After all, I often reasoned, the whole point of going to business school is to get a job!

Just out of curiosity, I went back and looked over my 2010 calendar. From January to December I went on 28 job interviews and reached out to another 64 people for informational interviews, or 1.8 interviews of some type per week.

I wrote countless cover letters, recreated my resume practically every week, and scoured the job boards for openings. I networked, I applied, I interviewed…and nothing happened.

In fact, while I left business school in May thrilled and excited to find a job, by the second half of 2010 I felt a bit like the low squeal of air being let out of a balloon very, very slowly.

By late October, I was officially deflated.

Things were just not working out like I’d planned. I wasn’t finding the job I wanted, or dare I admit, the job I felt I deserved (even if they won’t say it out loud, I believe every MBA feels a sense of job entitlement from the minute they step on campus because, again, the point of business school is to get a better job).

For a while my apparent inability to turn a job interview into a job offer just ate away at me.

With time, though, and a lot of soul searching, I realized that no matter how much I wanted to control the outcome of my job search, I had to let it go. This was clearly something I could not fix all by myself, no matter how much I wanted to.

So, with that, I tried to relax and remember the big picture.

And when I did, I suddenly saw all the important people, experiences and traditions that I’d neglected during my job search. I saw my husband, my family, and my friends. I saw birthday parties and holidays, yoga classes and hikes outside, and weekend movies and dinners out. In essence, I saw a world filled with people who love me, and whom I love – and I decided right then and there that it was time to start participating in the fulfilling life I already had, with or without a job.

In hindsight, getting an MBA was the best career choice I’ve ever made. It gave me skills and experience and confidence unlike anything else, and I am so proud of how far I’ve come.

Yet I also believe that getting an MBA was one of the most selfish things I’ve ever done.

Business school gave me permission to focus on me, and only me, for two years. And when the final result didn’t initially turn out the way I had hoped or expected, I could only conclude that I had somehow failed. It sounds extreme now looking back, but at the time, that’s how I felt.

I am certain now that I haven’t failed.

Instead, what I have done is realized that business school is just one piece of my life story. There was life before business school, and there will certainly be life after business school. No matter how enormous the experience has felt, my post-MBA job search is actually just a blip on the radar.

Ironically, the moment you stop worrying about something is the moment it happens. I am pleased to say that I’m finally making some great progress on my job search, and I’m feeling hopeful for good things in the New Year. But it hasn't been an easy year for me, and unfortunately I know the same is true for so many other job seekers out there today.

And so, with that I’d like to leave with you a few words of unsolicited advice as we close out 2010 and move towards 2011:

To the Class of 2011 – and to those brave members of the Class of 2010 still pounding the pavement – I say: pick your heads up. See the forest, not just the trees. Know that your MBA job search is just one stop along the long chronology of your professional life. It doesn’t define you as a person, or determine your success or failure. It’s just a job. And you will have many in your lifetime.

And to everyone who’s helped me throughout my own search: I want to offer my most heartfelt thanks. It really did take a village to find me a job! And I am so grateful for the village I have.

Happy holidays to each of you and best wishes for a terrific (and employed) 2011!

Ashley's Note: I originally wrote this post for Vault's CSR blog, In Good Company, as part of their 2010 CSR Year in Review series. I encourage you to check out all of their guest bloggers - there's some great CSR learning there!

Corporate Giving from the Front Lines

The holiday season is officially upon us, which means it’s time for turkey and gravy, Christmas carols, Chanukah lights, and lots of family time.

For many people, the holidays also mean shopping. Lots of shopping.

This holiday season actually finds me working retail at one of my favorite stores (a national culinary specialty store that will remain nameless).

While I’m still splitting my time between job searching, contract work and volunteering, I thought getting into the spirit of holiday retail would be a great way to keep busy and make some cash (not to mention take advantage of a sweet employee discount!).

Interestingly, though, as an advocate for corporate responsibility, working retail this holiday season has also given me the chance to see what CSR on the ground floor looks like.

After all, many companies can claim to have a culture and value system that encourages giving back, but how does that belief system actually trickle down to a local level?

But before I dig into the details, let me first ask: how many of you have been out shopping recently and were asked by a sales associate at the register to donate to a cause? If your experience is anything like mine, you’ve been asked for a lot of donations from a lot of different retailers recently.

Now, in a past life I was a fundraiser, so I understand the importance of asking. Yet even I have to admit that I’ve been suffering from donor fatigue these days – not because I don’t want to support important causes, but really more because I’m just tired of being solicited all the time.

So you can imagine my delight (read: chagrin) when I first learned that, as a holiday cashier, it was my responsibility to ask people to donate to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that I didn’t support the cause. St. Jude is an incredible organization doing amazing work to provide treatment to children with cancer and other illnesses, regardless of their families’ ability to pay. And children’s health is personally very important to me, given my own experience losing two childhood friends to cancer.

But asking customers for money? When they’re already exhausted and overwhelmed with holiday shopping? I was skeptical.

Nonetheless, on my first day on the job, I tried to put down my own anxiety about asking customers for donations, and instead channeled my own personal connection to this very important organization.

“Would you like to add a dollar donation to St. Jude’s today?” I asked customers as a rang up the next sale.

And you know what? They did!

Sure, some people said no. Some said they already support other charities, while a handful of others just said they weren’t interested. But to my surprise and delight, a lot of people said yes.

While I’m still new to holiday retail, I can say I’ve been really impressed to see the reaction that St. Jude has gotten both from customers and the company. While I don’t know a ton of history about the company’s partnership with St. Jude, I do know that over the years it’s provided millions of dollars – through customer donations and its own corporate philanthropy – to the hospital in support of its programs.

The best part – or should I say, the most striking part – of my experience asking for customer support for St. Jude has been the push that local store management has made to set and meet goals for donations. Of course, setting goals in a retail environment, especially during the holidays, is a no-brainer. But to set and push goals around charitable donations? That was new to me.

In fact the store that I work at has a very ambitious goal to reach for customer donations to St. Jude, and managers are holding us all accountable for hitting this target.

As an example, at a recent staff meeting, the topic of conversation wasn’t just what’s on sale or what items to push; instead, much of our meeting was spent discussing St. Jude – why it’s an important organization to support, how customers and employees can get involved, and what our donation goals were for the day. And amazingly, even during our busiest times that day, the manager didn’t check in about what was selling, but what was being donated!

When I applied to this holiday job, I didn’t expect to get up close and personal with the company’s corporate giving campaign. But let me tell you – as a new employee it’s been incredibly heartening to so quickly and obviously see the company support a cause that’s meaningful to me.

More than that, it’s been inspiring to see customers embrace this campaign as readily as they have. There are so many important causes that could use our support, and with so many organizations to choose from, it’s easy to assume that customers will react negatively to yet another request for money.

Then again, when you think about it, all I’ve been doing at the register is rallying my community to support others in need.

If it really does take a village, as they say, then I’ve been very impressed by my village’s willingness to help out at the holidays.

With that in mind, I hope the next time you’re asked to give back at the register, you’ll also think about doing your part.

I wish each of you a restful and fulfilling Thanksgiving holiday, and happy shopping!

Power to the Pacha People!

Yesterday I had the amazing opportunity to attend the annual Pachamama Alliance fundraiser at Fort Mason in San Francisco (along with 1,500 of my closest friends!). If you're not familiar with the Pachamama Alliance, you have to check them out.

The Pachamama Alliance is an incredible organization with a two-fold mission:

• To empower indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest to preserve their lands and culture, and
• To educate and inspire individuals everywhere to bring forth a thriving, just and sustainable world.

I first learned about the Pachamama Alliance and its work with the Achuar tribe, an indigenous community located in the Ecuadorian rainforest, through my mom Janice. She’s been involved with Pachamama (and their maternal health off-shoot the Jungle Mamas) for the last couple of years, and she invited me to attend this year’s Luncheon.

And I am so glad I did! All I can say is it was an inspiring day of learning that literally left me with goose bumps.

The Pachamama Alliance has done so much important work creating a partnership between the modern world and the indigenous cultures whose land is being threatened by deforestation, natural resource depletion and modern development. And, from their call to action at the end of the event, there’s clearly a lot of work still to be done.

I encourage you to read through their Luncheon website www.pachapeople.org. They’ve posted a terrific overview of their work and their goals that will get you up to speed really quickly.

In order to make their message of sustainability accessible to everyone, the Pachamama Alliance has posted a live stream of their entire Luncheon online. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did! (fyi: it actually starts around the 3:15 minute mark...)

Watch live streaming video from pachamama at livestream.com

And, just to put in a quick plug - at the end of the Luncheon you'll see amazingly dynamic Co-Founder Lynne Twist make an appeal for your financial support. I was certainly inspired enough at the end of the Luncheon to open my checkbook, and perhaps you will too?