This past week, we all have been captivated by the horrific images from Haiti as a result of the recent earthquake. We’ve seen unimaginable loss of life, suffering, and massive destruction. It will take years for Haiti and its people to heal.

The toll will be particularly difficult on the surviving children of Haiti. As UNICEF Executive Director, Ann Veneman, noted earlier this week, many Haitian children have become separated from their families and caregivers, and face ”increased risks of malnutrition and disease, trafficking, sexual exploitation and serious emotional trauma.”

Yesterday, UNICEF reported that some young people in Haiti are using art to help cope with the devastation and trauma. Artists like 18-year old Bruno Rene are working with paint and papier-mâché to help express their feelings. Bruno and his classmates have been spending their days at the Art Creation Foundation for Children in Jacmel, Haiti to paint what they are seeing around them. “By night, they return to their displaced families.”

Organizers of the Haitian art program “hope the art activities will help students process some of the trauma they have experienced.” UNICEF has found that “these activities can provide a critically important support structure for children and young people in the wake of a disaster, when much of the world they knew before has been shattered.”

My heart goes out to the people of Haiti, and particularly its children. I applaud organizations like UNICEF, which seeks to ease the suffering of children in 190 countries. And, I applaud its use of art as a creative healing agent.

There are many worthy organizations to which you or your company can give to help Haiti in its unprecedented hour of need. One important way you can help is by giving to UNICEF.

I know Ann Veneman personally and her commitment to UNICEF, and its commitment to children. Click here to learn more and to donate.

What exactly is business innovation? Is it a company’s ability to dream up a new and improved product? Is it a better way of doing business or providing services to your customers? Does it represent a more efficient and effective internal process within your company? Yes. Yes. And yes. All of the above.

To some, business innovation is a science – rational, methodical, and predictable. I prefer to see business innovation as more of an art – part science, but with a healthy dose of creativity and fearless ingenuity.

What is the genesis of the next best-selling car? It is a creative design team member, working on a white board or with clay, sculpting the outlines of the vehicle by hand, possibly mimicking the contours of another natural or man-made object that captures his or her imagination.

Then you bring in the engineers, the CAD team, the developers, and the focus groups to build out and test the proposition. But it starts with an idea, sparked by a creative moment by a talented employee.

How do I get one of those you might be asking? One of those creative employees who could be the ticket to your company’s next hot product or service?  I’m guessing you already have more than one of these employees who are capable of such feats. Your challenge is to find and develop this talent.

Artists and innovators need the right stimulation. They need a suitable environment that promotes imaginative thought. And most importantly, they need a corporate culture that embraces, not discourages, new and original thinking.

Starting today, commit to a business innovation program that seeks to engage employees, managers, and executives in a new way. Shine light on those who show promise and inventive traits. Challenge them with provocative training and events that develop their talents. Cultivate the artist in them. Once you’re able to get this down to a science, you’ll likely be one step ahead of your competitors.

Tonight, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will add five more names to its wall of legendary performing artists in the 32nd Annual Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, DC. The 2009 honorees include: producer Mel Brooks; pianist and composer Dave Brubeck; opera singer Grace Bumbry; actor, director, and producer Robert De Niro; and singer and songwriter Bruce Springsteen.

The honorees will join President Obama and the First Lady in the President’s box at the Kennedy Center tonight for the three-hour live tribute, which will later be aired in a two-hour show on CBS on December 29. Last night, the honorees and their families and friends, were feted at a State Department dinner, hosted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. They will also attend a White House reception this evening prior to tonight’s show.

There are no shortage of annual award shows that pay tribute to the achievements of actors, directors, and musicians. Yet, the Kennedy Center Honors seems to stand apart. It seeks to honor a life-time of talent and accomplishment, not simply a snapshot of fame. The show also uniquely brings together on the red carpet the best that America has to offer from the arts and government.

I have attended six Kennedy Center Honors, and each was as distinctive as the inductees themselves and the remarkable stories told by the famous individuals who spoke on their behalf.

Former President John F. Kennedy said, “I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.”

The highest levels of business achievement, like that of the arts, are attained based on a compilation of successful work over an extended period of time – not merely the results of one quarter or one year. And it is the companies that are the most creative, the most innovative, and the most willing to invest in their best performing employees, which will most likely succeed and endure.

Make it a point to honor those employees who help make your company successful with a little red carpet treatment of your own.

With its cover entitled, “Your Next Big Idea: Spotlight on Innovation,” the entire edition of December’s Harvard Business Review magazine is dedicated to business innovation. A number of the articles go right to the heart of New Lantern’s founding principle: employees, if properly motivated and stimulated, are a company’s single most important innovation source.

As HBR’s editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius puts it, “Genius CEOs can’t do all the work of innovation – and in truth, people and culture both matter a lot.”

In one of the lead articles, “The Innovator’s DNA,” authors Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton Christensen, highlight the five “discovery skills” that “separate true innovators from the rest of us.” These skills include: Associating, Questioning, Observing, Experimenting, and Networking.

The authors interviewed 25 innovative entrepreneurs, and surveyed over 3,000 executives and 500 individuals, who had started innovative companies or invented new products. They charted these individuals against the five discovery skills and found a high correlation among leading innovators.

For example, under the “Associating” skill, entrepreneur Frans Johansson cited the importance of the “Medici effect” when it comes to innovation. He was referring to the Medici family of Florence during the 15th through 17th centuries, who helped usher in a “creative explosion” by bringing together successful people from wide ranging disciplines such as: sculptors, scientists, poets, philosophers, painters, and architects.

According to the article, “as these individuals connected, new ideas blossomed at the intersections of their respective fields, thereby spawning the Renaissance, one of the most inventive eras in history.”

Likewise, many leading innovators seek to spend time around a network of thought leaders and individuals from a variety of different perspectives in an effort to “extend their own knowledge domains.” For example, they attend conferences such as TED, Davos, and the Aspen Ideas Festival, which brings together artists, entrepreneurs, academics, politicians, adventurers, scientists, and thinkers from all over the globe.

Kent Bowen, who founded the innovative ceramic composite company, CPS, cites this credo which he asks his employees to follow: “The insights required to solve many of our most challenging problems come from outside our industry and scientific field.”

Finally, the authors make the point – as we have made in numerous blog posts on this site – that whereas innovative thinking may seem innate to some, “it can also be developed and strengthened through practice.” They note that corporate executives should “put aside time for you and your team to actively cultivate more creative ideas.”

Let New Lantern design an innovation program for your company that would make the Medici family proud – and in doing so, put you in the best position to make your next big idea a reality.

This past Saturday, I toured the showroom and factory of Quantum Windows and Doors in Everett, WA. In the era of mass-produced “replacement windows,” “aluminum-clad,” and “life-time guarantee” plastic windows, Quantum is a throwback in time. Quantum is a custom window and door manufacturer, which makes its products solely from the world’s oldest sustainable material: wood.

Quantum is the window manufacturer of choice for many of the top residential and commercial architects in the country. Its windows and doors can be found in discriminating building projects from New York to Hawaii, Washington DC, California, and the Pacific Northwest. Windows are made of choice hardwoods, including mahogany, teak, Douglas fir, and oak. Although I will not disclose some of Quantum’s residential clients, suffice it to say that many of them are household names.

Real sash weights are used to raise and lower the double- and triple-hung windows, utilizing the same technology that has opened American windows for generations. Meanwhile, cutting-edge technologies in large wall-sized sliding glass doors are able to lift and gently glide 800-pound windows with only two fingers of effort. These windows were able to shut out the loud hum of Interstate 5, which is a stone’s throw away from Quantum’s showroom.

Quantum was founded in 1984 by several homebuilders, who were dissatisfied with the lack of high-quality all-wood windows for new home and renovation projects. So they started making the windows themselves, and soon began selling their custom windows and doors throughout the region. Today, on any given weekday, you’ll find about 65 employees working throughout Quantum’s sprawling production facility in Everett, about 30 miles north of Seattle.

Quantum’s co-founder, Paul Vexler, is a trained artist, sculptor, and carpenter. These skills have certainly contributed to the company’s success in handcrafting fine window and door products to fit an existing structure or a brand new one – from the traditional to the ultra contemporary.

While clearly more expensive than machine-made, mass-produced windows, Quantum’s products are not as expensive as you might think. For example, their windows and exterior doors on a new home project might represent 12-15 percent of the overall cost of the home.

Don’t get me wrong. Plastic, aluminum-clad, and machine-produced window products are an important part of today’s housing market. Yet, like anything else, there is something to be said about the inherent imperfection of human artistry, which can add character, style, and uniqueness to a product or project.

Seek to embrace artistry and character in your own company’s work. Celebrate those employees who might find creative ways to improve your products or services.

Most important, do not let the sound of the thundering herd (a.k.a. your competitors) drown out what your customers may be asking for – something a bit more custom-made that could lift their spirits, and your stock price.

Beñat Iglesias, self-portrait

Harlem’s Alex Adam Gallery opens its “Artists and Monitors” art show on Thursday, October 15. The show uniquely features the works of “three of New York’s most extraordinary contemporary figurative artists, and the painters who are and have been privileged to be their assistants.”

One of the “Teacher’s Monitors” whose works will be featured is Beñat Iglesias, a very talented portrait artist who was born in Pamplona, Spain in 1979 on October 12 – thirty years ago today. And yes, Pamplona is home of the world-famous “Running of the Bulls,” the high-risk, high-adrenaline running of 1,200-pound bulls (i.e., with horns) through the cobbled streets of this picturesque city in northern Spain.

This hometown image is in sharp contrast to how Iglesias describes his approach to art: “My work is devoted to the mundane, to depict humble and ordinary people I aim to show in their natural state, to reveal their way of communicating to the world.”

I first saw Iglesias’s talent showcased five years ago, when I attended an art show at New York’s Art Student’s League. Iglesias’s education in fine arts has spanned more than a decade, including a fine arts degree from the Universidad Del Pais Vasco (UPV) in Bilboa, Spain; then further study at the Edinburgh College of Art in the UK, the University of Fine Arts in Barcelona, and New York’s National Academy School of Fine Arts, the Art Students League, and the Andrew Reiss Studio.

Iglesias has exhibited his work in numerous shows in New York and throughout Europe. In 2007, he was a semi-finalist in the 70th Annual American Artists Drawing competition.

I find myself immediately drawn into his work, and how he is able to capture remarkably true-to-life expressions of unremarkable people. I have bought several pieces from Iglesias’s collection over the last several years, and intend on buying more as he continues to grow and develop.

Iglesias’s bright future has been built on a foundation of years of hard work, high quality training, learning by doing, and a bull-headed dedication to his vocation. All are key ingredients for success in any field of work or business. Identify the talent, grow and nurture it, and put yourself in environments where creativity can thrive.

Happy 30th birthday to a promising artist, Beñat Iglesias, or better yet –
¡Feliz cumpleaños!

The show at Alex Adam Gallery in Harlem (78 West 120th Street) runs from October 15th-25th. The exact schedule can be found on the gallery’s website.