Fearlessly Curious Voices: Taking Risks and Staying Curious with NYU’s Amy McIntosh
Barbara Apple Sullivan sits down with NYU School of Professional Studies Chief Marketing Officer, Amy McIntosh, to talk about taking career risks, leaning into new technologies, and balancing work and family. Prior to NYU, Amy worked in critical marketing roles at organizations that range from Bain and Company, American Express, and Zagat to non-profit and public sector jobs at Teach for America, the New York City Public School System, and the US Department of Education during the Obama administration.
Listen to their conversation below.
Transcript
Amy McIntosh: I’m now 20 years into the private sector, I’m commuting to New Jersey, I’m selling D&B credit reports, although I am on the global leadership team of a Fortune 1000 company. And my form of a midlife crisis was, “I think I need to be more deeply invested in what I do every day than I currently am. And I’m in a position to walk away from this job.”
So, I decided to switch my hobby for my day job. And I reached out to then Chancellor Joel Klein in the New York City Public School System. And I said, “Can you use someone with skills like mine?” And he said, “Get down here.”
And that started the next 20 years as an education policy wonk and education reformer.
Barbara Apple Sullivan: Today, in celebration of women’s history month, we talk to former colleague, longtime client, and friend, Amy McIntosh about how her fearlessness and curiosity served her during her long and varied career. She’s worked in critical marketing roles at organizations that range from Bain and Company, American Express, and Zagat to non-profit and public sector jobs at Teach for America, the New York City Public School System, and the U.S. Department of Education during the Obama administration. Today Amy serves as the Chief Marketing Officer at the NYU School of Professional Studies. Let’s take it from here…
We’ve known each other for a really long time. I think it’s been four decades since we worked together at American Express, which was a wild ride, and it was the very best people.
So, let’s start with your basics. We worked together at American Express. And you had a very successful path in the for-profit world with Zagat, and Verizon. And then you pivoted. And I know you were on the board of Teach for America, and that exposed you to education.
But it was a big pivot to go from the for-profit world – as a marketer and CMO – to suddenly working in education and policy, and in a broader role. So I’m curious what was your motivation and how you actually made that pivot.
AM: I was at American Express for 11 years, and I chose to leave to go to NYNEX to put more of a technology focus into my career. And our mutual boss was at that point on the Teach for America National Board. And she said, “So, I’m a little grumpy with you for leaving Amex, but you’re…at NYNEX. NYNEX has never given money to Teach for America and they are starting a New York City board. So, you shall come to an event and meet Wendy Kopp” – which completely blew me away. I didn’t think she would show up. And so, I walked into the first New York City board meeting and walked out as chair of the New York City board of Teach for America.
[I] continued to do that through the next 10 or 12 years of my private sector career. And there were plenty of days when taking a phone call from the head of TFA saying, “Can you help me with this?” that were a lot more motivating and compelling than the day I just spent selling credit reports for my employer, Dun&Bradstreet.
You know, eventually, at this point, I’m now 20 years into the private sector, I’m commuting to New Jersey, I’m selling D&B credit reports, although I am on the global leadership team of a Fortune 1000 company. And my form of a midlife crisis was, “I think I need to be more deeply invested in what I do every day than I currently am. And I’m in a position to walk away from this job.”
So, I decided to switch my hobby for my day job. And I reached out to then Chancellor Joel Klein in the New York City Public School System. And I said, “Can you use someone with skills like mine?” And he said, “Get down here.”
And that started the next 20 years as an education policy wonk and education reformer.
BAS: Amazing. Okay, so obviously you pivoted and that was a tremendous risk and shows that you have this fearlessness. Have you been able to use that trait to change the educational system and feel good about progress and accomplishments?
AM: I think my most important contribution to improving the education system – which still has a very long way to go – was to try in the New York City Department of [Education] to harness the power of data and data modeling technology to figure out how to identify teachers, principals, and schools that were actually doing the best job of advancing student learning.
And we were able to use data to find schools that were doing better than might be expected considering the level of socioeconomic or academic challenge the kids walked in with. And it turns out there were lots of teachers who were pretty consistently taking kids who were behind grade level, and a year later they aren’t behind anymore. And schools [in] the same way – regardless of the demographics and the previous preparation, and I was really very much on the frontlines of that.
And some of it came from data and modeling skills I had learned as both a marketer, where we were trying to predict who we should market to, and as a credit report seller, where we were trying to predict who was a good credit risk. And we turned that around, and it actually became pretty much a national movement: the accountability movement.
And that led to New York State winning a major grant competition from the Obama administration called “Race to the Top.” And I had written a large chunk of the state’s applications. The commissioner asked me to go work for him at the state level, where I then met everyone in the Obama administration as we were working on this grant. And so, in the second term of the Obama administration, Arne Duncan, who was then secretary, asked me to come to Washington and continue this push around accountability and results and student growth and student learning, which I did. I eventually became an assistant secretary in the Obama administration. I actually was in charge of policy for both K-12 and higher ed, and it was just a total Camelot period in my career.
BAS: That’s amazing. So, do you view your move from New York City to New York State and then to the federal national level…were those risks or did that just seem like an obvious next step?
AM: No, that was the education sector equivalent of climbing the corporate ladder in the private sector. Now, you know, they were big moves. I had to leave my family life in New York City and commute to Washington, but it didn’t feel risky at all. It felt like taking the work I loved to a bigger stage to touch more kids and have more impact.
BAS: This is great. Amy, this is just such a good story.
So aside from the education moves, are there others that you feel were risky when you made decisions like leaving Amex or any other things that you felt, okay, this is a risk that I’m willing to take?
AM: The big risk was going to Zagat. At the time I was at NYNEX, which became Bell Atlantic, which became Verizon. I had a lot of big jobs there, and we were busy acquiring more companies and it was the dot-com boom.
And pretty much every executive at my level was getting phone calls from venture capitalists asking to come be the adult in the room for some dot-com startup. And one of the calls I got said, you know, Zagat survey, the restaurant guide company has just taken on venture capital, and they need a private sector experienced leader to be their CEO. And I thought, “There’s the call for me.” I knew Zagat somewhat. I certainly knew the product, loved the product. I was thinking maybe a little smaller organization than Verizon might be fun. And it would certainly, probably, open more doors than it closed. Because it’d be a new industry, it would be working at a different kind of scale, touching new skills. I’d also be a CEO. I always wanted to be a CEO.
Now, people told me that it would be hard to work in a family-run company. I think you might’ve been one of them.
And you know, it was a really different kind of experience where I learned to work at a smaller scale. We were also changing everything.
But of course, I was advised it would be hard to work in a family-run company and it turned out to be true. We parted ways very amicably and, honestly, I think it did open more doors than it closed. And so, I would do it again despite the challenges.
BAS: So, when you think about your kids or women that you might be mentoring who are the next gen, or a couple of the next generations, how do you coach them and talk to them about taking risk and feeling empowered to make big decisions?
AM: Well, that conversation often revolves around work and family balance around kids. Not everyone has a choice about working or not working, but many people I talk to have choices about a big next career step to take that might involve more stress or more time or more travel, and they want to know whether it’s going to hurt their kids.
AM: And I always tell them that if you are comfortable and motivated and thriving in your career, your kids are going to be fine. If you’re conflicted and, you know, guilty and suffering over it, you’re really going to screw them up. So don’t do that. And you know, my kids are fine and my daughter gives the same advice to people now.
BAS: I think that is such good advice. I never really thought about it that way, and I also commuted for 22 years. And I think I’ve learned the lesson that you can’t have it all. I think how you think about it and the role model that you are for your kids is ultimately the most important thing.
So, aside from your career, I don’t know if there’s anything else you want to add that we haven’t discussed.
AM: Well, I think you asked what am I curious about and how to stay curious, yeah. And I wanted to, it’s a little bit of a cliche today to say, “Well, I’m curious about how AI will impact everything.” But in fact, in my career, every time I got close to or involved in technology change, I had a much more interesting job and was able to do some of the firsts of my company or my industry.
You know, I unwrapped the first personal computer ever to be delivered to Bain & Company, which changed the lives of research associates. We didn’t have to do our spreadsheets on paper or stand in line at the computer lab for the main programmers to build us a spreadsheet.
AM: And you know what, Amex, well, I was there when we got rid of the word processor. That didn’t so much affect my career, but I also had the first email system because I had a team of people who weren’t all in the same building. So, I signed up for an email system so we could talk to each other and got yelled at because there was no corporate email at Amex yet. But my team was way more productive.
And then at Bell Atlantic – NYNEX / Bell Atlantic – I prevented them from shutting down the corporate website and then was able to lead the project where we sold the first phone services over the Bell Atlantic website.
So, I’m not particularly techy, but the fact that I was in a position to sort of lean in, like what are we going to do with this new thing called a website?
I eventually became the head of the high-speed internet business there, which was partly because I just kept trying to figure out how we could do this and what could we do that would be different in the marketplace?
And then, of course, in education, even besides all the data stuff I talked about, I was part of something called the innovation zone in the DOE where we were experimenting with what would be the role of computers in classrooms and computers for professional development for teachers. And some of the stuff that we built in that era became the core technology that they used in the pandemic. They should have upgraded it a little bit more than they did, but it wouldn’t have even been there.
So, this idea that you should lean in and figure out what this next new technology is going to mean for your company, your customers, your career has pretty much uniformly given me the most fun in any role that I’ve had. And I assume this new wave of technology change will present more fun stuff. The older you get, the scarier change is. But you just can’t act that way around technology.
BAS: Amy, thank you so much for being with us today and taking the time to talk to us about women in leadership, fearlessness, and curiosity. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we end?
AM: So, do you remember that ad that American Express ran when I was probably [in] my second year there? “American Express cards is part of a lot of interesting lives.” That was our ad to try to reach women and tell them they could actually have credit cards. And if we look at it now, it’s probably a little bit cliché, the woman in the business suit carrying the violin, taking her kid to a violin lesson.
But I remember that as, “That’s what I want. I want an interesting life.” And I didn’t in lockstep move straight up any one career ladder. It turned out to be much more zigzaggy than I might have predicted when I was, I don’t know how old I was then, maybe 28. But the idea that I wanted to have an interesting life, and fortunately I’ve been able to. I’ve had enough resources and support to be able to do that, but it means a lot.