By: Dr Anisya Thomas Fritz
This month's speaker explores the double bottom line, community responsibility, and profit, as enlivened by Dr Anisya Thomas Fritz in the wine industry and beyond. Dr. Fritz is a multifaceted renaissance woman. Helping wine industry leaders thrive through learning and business strategy is reflected in her family wine business and her leadership in wine entrepreneurship strategy with local and global vintners. She will help us see how wine industry entrepreneurship and community stewardship connect and thrive.

Anisya Thomas Fritz
Dr. Anisya Thomas Fritz’s extraordinary career has traversed the halls of academia through the theaters of disaster to the vineyards of Sonoma County. In each distinctive context, she has distinguished her value and leadership through immersion, scholarship, and integration of people and ideas into innovative solutions. In the third decade of her career, she is a blend of it all – a winery proprietor, disaster relief advisor, wine business teacher, public speaker, mentor, and active contributor to her many communities. Dr. Anisya Thomas Fritz arrived from India to earn a B.A. at Loyola College, Maryland, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Strategic Management from Virginia Tech. She subsequently taught competitive strategy and international management as a tenured Associate Professor at Florida International University and Visiting Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. She has blended elements of a thirty-year career to become a wine business advisor, winery proprietor, and contributor to local and global communities.
In 2001, she turned her management acumen from academia to humanitarian relief issues as co-founder of the nonprofit Fritz Institute. For a decade as its Executive Director, she helped define the emerging field of humanitarian logistics by involving technology, education, and partnerships to communities recover from crisis and disasters. Her numerous articles have appeared in journals, including the Harvard Business Review. In 2009, she applied lessons of strategic management to the sales, marketing, and hospitality functions at her family-owned winery, Lynmar Estate in Sebastopol. She transformed the business by growing it into a direct-to-consumer sales model with a refined hospitality experience. In 2011, inspired by her success with the wine business, she also began teaching the Executive-level Wine Entrepreneurship Course at Sonoma State University, where she continues instructing veteran wine industry practitioners worldwide.
She is actively engaged in enriching her communities and is the license holder for TEDx in Sonoma County, which she emcees. She catalyzed the Sonoma Environmental Education Consortium (SEEC), a non-profit alliance for land stewardship and education. She is engaged with various organizations, including the Asteroid Institute and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She is the Founding Chair of the Georgetown Ambassadors for Women, Peace, and Security. Also, she serves on the Boards of the Buck Institute for Aging, LynnCo Supply Chain Solutions, and Fritz Institute. She is an avid traveler, making her home in San Francisco and Sebastopol with her husband, teenage son, and loyal Cavalier spaniel.
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