The Story Behind the Story of Work for What’s Next

0:00Work is changing and I love that you chose a path for yourself. You built a work environment and a work style and a methodology that worked for you.

0:12Amanda Schneider:Welcome to Design Nerds Anonymous, the podcast that sparks curiosity at the intersection of business and design. I'm your host, Amanda Schneider. Well, usually I'm your host, but today you'll see. I've spent the last several years researching the future of work. Thousands of hours of interviews, thousands of data points, and eventually all of that became my new book, Work for What's Next. But here's something that may surprise you. I'd say that the conversations after the book has launched have been even more interesting than writing it. And that's why we're taking these conversations on the road and recording them for you right here on the DNA feed.

0:54Amanda Schneider:because the future of work isn't shaped in isolation. It's shaped when we're willing to come together, ask better questions, challenge one another's assumptions, and learn from different perspectives. Our first stop was the Mannington Commercial Showroom in Denver, where we decided to do something that pushed me a little outside of my comfort zone. We turned the microphone around. Our longtime sponsor turned personal friend, Cindy Kaufman, interviewed me about not just the stories behind the book, but the stories behind me as the author. And I'll admit, it's a lot more comfortable asking the questions than answering them.

1:35Amanda Schneider:But I'm glad we captured this conversation, and I hope you enjoy it. Here's my conversation with Cindy. Or rather, Cindy's conversation with me. Good afternoon, Denver and other Coloradoans. Is that how I say that? I don't know. I'm from Atlanta. We're ATL-ians. It's so great to see you all. I'm so thrilled that we have such a wonderful turnout. This is just absolutely amazing. I'm vice president of marketing for Mannington. I've been on board about three years and we've had such a great partnership with Amanda and Olga and everybody at Think Lab. When this book came out, it was just very exciting.

2:14It was like, oh my God, we've got a lot to talk about here. So obviously everybody knows Amanda Schneider. She's the reason you're all here. But I want to tell a little story about like why we're sitting here right now. Amanda was kind and generous enough to quote me in her book. Just such a great interviewer. She's so insightful. She's very curious. Why don't we interview Amanda? Why don't we find out what makes her tick and why she does all the amazing things that she does and sort of how that all happened. So that's accurate.

2:43Amanda Schneider:So the first thing that you're going to notice is that I'm a total control freak and this is totally out of my comfort zone. So there's only one person I would trust to do this and that is Cindy. So thank you so much for joining us. Oh gosh, yeah. Thank you for saying that. So anyway, really the intent of this conversation is I wanted to know more about Amanda. I wanted to hear the story behind the story. She's obviously puts herself out there on the podcast in this amazing book. If you haven't read it yet, I know you all will. You're gonna get a lot of great information out of this. But like, I'm just so curious about what drives Amanda.

3:14and what makes her tick. So I always want to know, like, what was your family like? And not just your family, but like your place in the family, because every family, like everybody plays a role. So like talk, I want to hear about your family. I want to hear about like your birth order. Like, tell me about like, who you knew you were based on growing up in your family.

3:36Amanda Schneider:Okay, where does one start with a question like this? Let's see. So I am one of two girls. I am the baby of the family. But ironically, I have a lot of the characteristics of the older daughter. I was going to say does not track at all. Yeah, probably does not track. My sister and I could not be more opposite. She is a computer programmer. She has long red hair down past her rear. She's about 5 '3". I am 5 '7". I do not program computers. So we have very different communication styles, very different lives. But we were raised in a very, very girl power family. I would say that's a big core piece.

4:14I love that too. Yeah. I just love that.

4:16Amanda Schneider:It's a core piece of who we are. My mom is literally like that children's book, The Giving Tree, just gives and gives and gives. And my dad, I'll tell a quick story about my dad. My dad always wanted to make sure me and my sister always felt like enough, exactly as we are. Every Valentine's Day, we would have a card on our nightstand when we woke up that usually was around the time of year he got his bonus. So he would have a little bit of money in there. There would be like a single rose, usually a red rose just to say, I love you. And always a message that said like, you are enough exactly how you are.

4:48Amanda Schneider:I found out later that that was because a coworker of his at his, he was an engineer and a coworker of his had a son who was very popular in our little tiny Illinois town. And he said, you know, I have these girls, these young girls calling my house and it's like, they're like desperate to speak to my son. And so that traumatized my dad who was like, I'm going to make sure these girls know that they're enough without a man. And now later in life. My whole family laughs at this. My sister's husband, my sister's married now. Her husband moved here from London and did not have a job at one point in time.

5:19Amanda Schneider:My husband was going back to school on the Illinois Veterans Grant. So it was a moment in time. But so we were both supporting our husbands. And my dad was like, well, that's not exactly what I meant. Right. Taking it a step too far. But I love that. Like that's a really important message for everyone, but certainly for young girls. What was little Amanda like? Little Amanda was like a goody two-shoes. I was, I was, I was a rule follower until high school. And I met our foreign exchange student, Ingrid, corrupted little Amanda. Where was Ingrid from? Yes. She was from Spain. Ingrid from Spain.

5:56Amanda Schneider:Ingrid from Spain. I don't know if you know, I speak fluent Spanish from this exchange student. Wow. She introduced me to alcohol and fun Amanda came out. How old were you? I was 16. Don't tell my parents. We can't let them listen to this podcast now. But yeah, so I was 16. I think they would forgive you at this point. And fun Amanda came out and bold Amanda came out. And I think she hasn't gone back in ever since. I mean, we all have very different experiences growing up. And you grow up with a dad, especially a dad, a male figure that reinforces that belief who tells you that you're enough. And you are a goody two shoes, but then you sort of like find something else about yourself at that point.

6:38That's very, very interesting. Did that change your relationship at all with your family? Or I mean, I guess you didn't want your parents to listen to this episode. Maybe they don't know. But now after this podcast, it might. Yeah. But nothing shifted after Ingrid got a hold of you.

6:54Amanda Schneider:And I mean, I feel like like every 17 year old, which is funny because I have a 17 year old now, like your parents get real dumb, real dumb for a while. And so, you know, we definitely went through that phase, which my sister never did. So they thought I was like the most rebellious child ever. But we definitely came back around. Now my parents live one mile away from me. And the flip side of this story is after raising a girl power dad, I now have three boys. That was going to be my next question. I thought that might be. See, she's jumping ahead because she's a control freak. Can't help myself.

7:24Amanda Schneider:You knew it was going to happen. But after being raised in a girl power house, you know, where you can say things like girls rule, boys rule. Now I'm raising three little boys. Like, we can't say those things in my house. And I have to help them navigate this world they're in. Okay, I want to dig in a little bit on that because I have no children, full disclosure. If you can't say to your boys that girls rule, like, what are you teaching them about girls? It's important. You know, I feel like Gen Z, you know, this book is all about Gen Z. We're talking about Gen Z. Gen Z is the most culturally and racially diverse generation.

7:55Amanda Schneider:You know, to Gen Z, even gender is a little bit more fluid than it was. And I happen to believe that a reason is that people are bucking. Some of it is absolutely just is what it is. It's how you're born. So I don't want to minimize any of that. But some of it is also people just bucking these gender stereotypes. Like, why do we put little girls in pink? My boys wear pink. I'm very proud to say that my boys wear pink. You know, nobody wants to be put in a corner. Nobody wants to be told exactly how they're supposed to act and feel and what they can and can't do. My dad raised me. He brought me into these rooms very, very early on professionally that I had no business being in.

8:31Amanda Schneider:He took me with him to Toastmasters, which if anybody's familiar with that, it's a speaking club. So I would like being there as a ninth grader with his coworkers where I was, you know, learning to speak and things like that. So some of it was just exposure. So I feel like, you know, we're not going to say things like girls rule, boys rule. We're not going to separate these things. It's about respect for everyone and really trying to help them. That makes sense. That's what I think I was trying to look for. But I appreciate that. I think that makes a lot of sense. I think it's, again, I feel like there's such a strange way between the way girls are raised and boys are raised.

9:11And again, not having any children of my own. But I see it in my nieces and nephews and friends' children. And I love what you just said. We're all enough. We all rule.

9:23Amanda Schneider:We all rule. But also, like, let's look at some of these stereotypes that we may naturally be blind to because of our position in life. And so one thing I tell my boys a lot of things that I see on the road, I'll use as an example. When I'm on the road, like I am now for this book tour, I get questions like, oh, who takes care of your kids when you're on the road? Guess what? My husband travels for work. How often has he been asked these questions? Not once. Not once. So I want my boys to be aware of these things. That is not a girl's rule, boy's rule. like kind of a message, but just be aware, like these aren't probably things that you should say.

9:57Amanda Schneider:They're probably these unintentional stereotypes that we all hold. Yeah, they're biases and they're societal, right? Like we just all sort of ingrained. So I love hearing that you are teaching them that we are all enough. I'm going to jump to another topic, but I think there's really something connected here is, um, has anybody ever done their Enneagram here? Does anybody know what they're, Hey, we have some Enneagram fans. What numbers? Oh, we got all eight. Oh, They raise their hand over there. Okay. If you haven't done your Enneagram, you need to do it. I actually don't even have a really good explanation of like, it's just a personality test, but it focuses in on these sort of like major characteristics of like what drives you and motivates you and how you show up in the world.

10:38So Amanda is an Enneagram eight. I'm a seven if anybody cares, but let me read to you some words I wrote down because I think this is interesting, especially if you're not familiar. So Enneagram eights are energetic, strong, driven, courageous. One of the I sort of made a parentheses around all these and I wrote entrepreneurial because that's true. Yeah. Generous and warm and have a very clear vision. But then there's, you know, shadow side. Every personality of all of us have our, you know, our light side and our dark side. And I'm curious, like, how does this show up for you and specifically tying it back to your boys?

11:18and your family, how does that show up for you? Because I also think of the word perseverance when I think about you. What are you teaching them and how are you exhibiting that day to day as you're raising three teenage boys?

11:31Amanda Schneider:Yeah, I feel like what I love about the Enneagram is it helps you with self-awareness. And I think that that's one thing in particular that my fellow eights know that maybe we struggle with a little bit more. Enneagram is really a way to better understand kind of how you naturally operate and now you naturally see the world. And I think Enneagram eights, especially I'll speak for myself, we can be so bold and so entrepreneurial and so unaware of how forcefully we come across that it has affected me personally. It has affected my relationship with my boys and how I speak to them, especially one of mine is a sweet little nine.

12:04Amanda Schneider:If anyone knows our nines are the peacemaker, like it explains why he absolutely gets crushed when I yell at him. You know, it changes the way that you interact and you have to try it. it helps you be more empathetic to see yourself through others' eyes. And so all of these things are so natural to me. They're as natural as the air I breathe. I don't even realize that I am. All of those words that you just read half the time, or at least not before I took the Enneagram. So it's helping me soften my approach with my boys, helping me soften my approach at work in how I speak. I think it's really helped develop my interpersonal skills.

12:39Amanda Schneider:But I also want to keep some of those things that make an eight an eight. Like I wouldn't have been able to write this book. Like if you hear some of the stories of perseverance, I'm sure you're going to ask me about some of these things and, and, and how this has come about. If I wasn't an eight, I don't think I'd be sitting here right now. I think that's probably right. And I wrote those words specifically because they resonated with me as I think about you. I, you know, I did a little research on an eight and there was a lot of other words, but these were the ones that jumped out at me.

13:09Amanda Schneider:I'm so proud to introduce Mannington Commercial and Cindy Coffin as a season 10 sponsor of Design Nerds Anonymous. Mannington and Cindy herself have been alongside me, not only in the research, but also in the writing of this book. Mannington Commercial has been a longtime sponsor of DNA. And one of the reasons I'm so proud of that is because DNA is the voice of our industry. I'm so thrilled that you've been a partner for so long on DNA. What are the changes that you think people are struggling to solve? It's a tough time to be a designer because you're dealing with a lot of information, but the responsibility lies on the shoulders of our industry for a great deal of what our future as a civilization looks like.

13:50What is Mandleton Commercial doing to really address some of these challenges? We are committed to being fully transparent with everything that we do and the way that we do it. So that transparency really supports designers having access to all of the information that they need to make the right decisions clearly and plainly and transparently as possible. If you could invite our podcast listeners, what would you say to them? I think human beings are the differentiator. So I invite you to connect with a Mannington commercial rep to learn more, not just about our new products, but how we think and how we show up for you as your design partner.

14:35so like one of the things that I think about you is that you have this like captain energy does that make sense does that resonate not boss bitch you're not gonna okay okay boss bitch captain energy talk about actually how think lab began absolutely so if you haven't listened to my

14:51Amanda Schneider:TED talk I would invite you to watch that there's a QR code in the book but it really talks about how in a dual working family, like I knew I wanted to be a mom. I knew I wanted to work. I really, really love what I do. And we hit a point where it felt like a binary decision. Do you want to be a stay at home mom? Or do you want to be a working mom and really have to work in this world that didn't feel built for me? Right? Because you have to work the hours that my kids are in daycare, right? You're waking them up to get them out the door to get them to daycare, then you're bringing them home and putting them to bed, right?

15:21Amanda Schneider:Like, who made these rules that we're literally away from our kids, the very hours that they're awake. Well, those rules were made when women were working less, right? When you had to be physically in a place between nine to five, because there was assembly lines, right? They're old rules. And so I found myself really frustrated. And I will say that my husband and I have been through some struggles with this because he didn't hold the same guilt that I felt. That's not his fault. It's just society and the way... I think that's accurate. I mean, I think that that's natural for how we've all been raised in, dare I say, a patriarchal society is that men don't think about those things.

15:58To your earlier point about who looks after your children, no one's ever asked a man that.

16:02Amanda Schneider:And for me, I had to say, okay, what can I do about this? What is within my control? So I like to say I didn't see the options that I wanted. I didn't like the binary choice. So I built one. And honestly, when I started this company, it was right after I left Izzy, a little furniture brand. So grew up in this industry. I thought I was flushing my career down the toilet. I really thought it was over. I drove back to a little trade show called Neocon with a two-month-old in tow and worked that show like nobody's business, supported by my mom, The Giving Tree, who would take care of the baby so I could not look like I was there with the baby while I was trying to drum up business.

16:36Amanda Schneider:I ended up getting two clients that first year. Two turned into three. Three turned into four the next year. We moved back to Chicago, and I had a third baby in there somewhere. But we moved back to Chicago, and business took off. I had 14 clients that year. So I started recruiting other working moms that had left the industry because they also felt like they had this binary choice. You can work in this world that wasn't created for you, or you can be a stay-at-home mom, which I'm not cut out to be. Let me save you from that. I only made it five months. But they joined me. So we successfully actually doubled our revenue year over year, 100 % by word of mouth until in 2018, the company was acquired by Sandow.

17:14Amanda Schneider:Sandow is the parent company to Interior Design Magazine, Metropolis Magazine, all of these. So I feel like in a way it was kind of this full circle moment and a story to show that what we needed as working moms actually ended up, we hired a 40 year old who just wanted to spend her summers on a dude ranch. Like no problem. You can do that. We hired a veteran who was right. Maybe that's your next. We hired a veteran who was having some challenges at the time and needed a little bit more flexible work. You know, what started as flexibility for moms really extended to a lot of folks. And, you know, it's fascinating, though, because speaking of full circles, like when you read this book, and obviously the title of the book, you know, work for what's next.

17:52And we've had some conversations around this and how work is changing. And I love that what you did is through your perseverance, through your Enneagram eight, through your girl power, dad, and you're knowing that you were enough, you chose a path for yourself anyway. And you built a work environment and a work style and a methodology that worked for you. And I think where we're all struggling, whether we're male or female, is that work does feel like it's not working. Not the work that you're doing, but the environment or the structure under which you are doing it. And to study it in sort of in this generational lens, and Gen Z is this young generation that's coming in, but you already sort of paved this path in a way.

18:39In experience. Yeah. So you've talked a little about your family support and like how you were raised in that sort of foundation. But I know that you also have a support system right now in your life that you refer to as your elephant circle. Will you talk about your elephant circle for the group? I will. I will.

18:58Amanda Schneider:So it comes from, there's an article, you can Google it called Lessons Learned from Lady Elephants. I'm going to see if I can get through this without crying because every time I try to tell this story, we didn't mean for this to be that dramatic. But it talks about the women elephants and how they inherently form their little herds. When one of them is stressed, they give off a pheromone that predators can smell. So the other women, they gather around her, trunks out, and they kick up dust, right, to mask those smells so that no one can smell it, right? And likewise, when there's something to celebrate, elephant woman gives birth, they do the same.

19:31Amanda Schneider:they surround her trunks out they raise their trunks and there's pictures of this you can google it it's so pretty and they trumpet in celebration and there's a line in there that says girls this is who we are and it's who we're meant to be for one another sometimes we're the ones in the middle sometimes they're the ones fiercely kicking up dust in love and i just i love this poem i love i have been so i want to cry now right i told you i can't get through this without it's the words of the poem um so look it up it's really really beautiful but i have had just an elephant circle of women, starting with my mom, The Giving Tree, to my best friend from college, to her best friend post-college.

20:08Amanda Schneider:And we have just collected these women. About half of them are named Megan. No joke. But we've collected these women and surrounded ourselves with these women, that whether it's celebrating a baby in a great moment that we're having, or whether it's celebrating just a really shit moment, they're there. We're going to talk about shit moments because, sorry. Can't Wait, we're just going to keep going deeper. I'm kind of an open book. I have a therapist. I go to therapy. My therapist has always taught me that we learn through contrast. And the other thing that we all know is that we grow through crisis.