October 2023

Zena Srivatsa Arnold’s LinkedIn page reads like a meteoric rise through the blue-chip business world. Procter & Gamble, Kellogg, Google, Kimberly-Clark. Present and accounted for. What’s not on there's one of the vital formative experiences of her young profession — as a Lancôme beauty associate at a Dillard’s department store in Cincinnati. The time was the early 2000s, and Srivatsa Arnold was a young graduate armed with a level in computer science just because the dot.com scene imploded. Quite than let her mope across the house, Srivatsa Arnold’s mother drove her to the local mall and told her to search out a job. The experience turned out to be transformational. “I went into it pondering, ‘It’s retail. It’s going to be easy....