We have a very capable architect and equally capable builder, but our struggle has been to find a stucco applicator who uses old-style lime-based stucco and technique similar to that used for centuries in areas like New Orleans, Savannah, Middleburg (Virginia), and throughout much of Europe. Ironically, I would’ve had no trouble rounding up such a subcontractor if I were building my house 75 years ago.

Today, the home building market puts a premium on cost, ease and quickness of application, and a seemingly perfect finish. Guaranteed not to crack for 10 years! But what will it look like in 15 years, in 25 years? Would it simply need a touch up, or a tear down?

Unfortunately, architects and home builders are merely responding to what customers are asking for — or frankly, not asking for.

So maybe I’m the odd woman out on this, but I prefer a look and finish that appears hand-crafted, not perfect. I long for a time when subcontractors were referred to as artisans, not applicators. Sure you will pay more initially, but the immeasurable pleasure derived from hand-applied fit and finish is worth it for the decades I plan on enjoying it.

Some of the finest Persian rug weavers in the world intentionally included a small imperfection in their handmade carpets. It’s as if to say, “yes, I am handmade, one-of-a-kind, and I wasn’t made on a factory assembly line.”

Call me old-fashion, but I think we could all learn something from the old Persian rug weaver’s mentality, whether it’s a house we build or a company we build.

Treat your employees as one-of-a-kind. Treat them as artisans. Cultivate their creativity and incent them to try new approaches. Celebrate their successes, and dwell less on their failures. Otherwise you serve to discourage the needed risk-taking that could make your company great.

In short, spend less time worrying about making it perfect, and more time on making it right and in a way that will last a lifetime.

Known for his bright color stripes and self-described “classic with a twist” creations, Paul Smith fell into fashion design literally by accident. After dropping out of school at the age of 15 in Nottingham England, Smith’s father escorted him into a nearby clothing warehouse and offered him up as an errand boy. Young Smith’s interest at the time was not in fashion, but in cycle racing.

It was Smith’s cycling to and from the warehouse on deliveries that kept up his interest in the job, until he had a serious accident two years later. During his six-month recuperation in the hospital Smith decided that fashion design may be more his speed than cycling. And the fashion world has never been the same.

Although Paul Smith’s reputation was built primarily as a designer of menswear, today he has 12 different fashion lines, including women’s wear, shoes, pens, watches, and furniture. His collections are wholesaled in 35 countries, with 15 shops in England including his flagship store in Notting Hill.

According to London’s Design Museum, Smith is regarded as Britain’s most consistently successful fashion designer, which is not lost on the Japanese. His products are sold in 200 stores throughout Japan alone – where his label outsells every other European designer.

In 2000, Smith was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, in recognition of his iconic success over three decades.

Sir Paul Smith continues to remain very active in his company, serving as both chairman and designer. He is also a regular blog contributor at Vogue.com.

Many have studied Smith and the source of his success. Some point to his focus and accomplishment as both a designer and a business man. “The reason I’ve been successful is because I’ve just got on and packed boxes and I know that VAT means Value Added Tax not vodka and tonic,” Paul Smith has written. “I’ve sold on the shop floor, I’ve typed invoices.”

There is a lesson here for every aspiring entrepreneur or corporate manager. Creativity, smart design, and business savvy make for a powerful combination for success.

Happy Birthday Sir Paul!

The New York City subway system is one of the oldest in the world. The first underground line from City Hall to the Bronx opened in 1904.

Today, the New York City subway is one of the largest and most complex systems of its kind, operating over 842 track miles, and serving the four boroughs of Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx. It operates 24 hours a day, serves 468 stations on 26 interconnected lines, and averages 5 million passengers each weekday.

Not impressed yet? Try this one. New York’s subway system carries more passengers each year than all the other mass transit rail systems in the U.S. combined.

Now for the downsides. A New York subway is far from the cleanest. It’s definitely not the sleekest. Its hard plastic seats are clearly not the most comfortable. And the smells that sometimes waft from the nooks and crannies of the subway stations are not the most pleasant.

But there’s something special to me about New York City’s subway. It has a bit of charm thanks to the mosaic tile art that you’ll find in each station. Some of the art dates back to 1904. The artwork is unique to each station and centers around the station’s name. Sometimes you’re treated to other little splashes of tile art like the pink hat I am “wearing” in the photo above.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Arts for Transit program oversees the subway art, which also includes sculptures, murals, and live musicians.

Some of my non-New York City friends turn their noses up at the thought of taking the subway in any city, especially in New York. They think it’s beneath them. Well, it is, literally of course.

What they are missing out on is what I and millions of other New York City subway passengers know. It’s the quickest way to get around the city. It’s the cheapest way to travel. And it’s the most green way to travel when you compare it to all of the above-ground options.

But it also provides an opportunity to experience art on a whole new level — that is, the art of the underground.

The Corcoran College of Art + Design is Washington’s only four-year accredited institution for education in the arts.

Situated only a block away from The White House in its renowned turn-of-the-century Beaux-Arts building, the Corcoran Gallery of Art has long been an integral part of our nation’s capital. When it was founded in 1869, the 18th President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, occupied the White House.

When the Gallery first opened its doors in 1874, “art students immediately flocked to the museum to observe, sketch, and paint copies of the collections famous works,” according to the Corcoran’s website.

The Gallery’s founder, William Wilson Corcoran, made sure that art education was central to the work of Gallery and donated additional funding that was ultimately used to open the Corcoran School of Art in 1890, two years after his death. The school has been known by its current name since 1999.

Today, more than 600 students at the Corcoran College of Art + Design pursue a wide range of Associate, Bachelor, and Master degree programs in the visual arts. The College also offers part-time credit and non-credit classes for adults and teens through its Continuing Education department. I know this first-hand. I’ve taken several drawing classes at the Corcoran in the past, and am currently enrolled in a ceramic tile-making class.

My class meets once a week for a three-hour session on Wednesday nights. Sure, it makes for a long day, but it is worth it. I’m learning a new craft. I’m using new mental and creative muscles. And I’m getting a hands-on appreciation for the timeless art of tile-making, which has changed little over the last several hundred years.

Most important, with each tedious step of the tile-making process, I am re-affirming what I already knew: there are no short-cuts to success in the creative arts. You learn by doing and do by learning.

The same can be said for success in business. Executives and managers must constantly challenge their employees through creative training programs that excite new thinking. In turn, employees must be willing to use new muscles, and put them to work through practice and application.

Marrying business and education — like marrying art and education – will make for a beautiful relationship and lead to many happy returns.

It’s not every day that a movie is made about a typeface. Well, technically it was a documentary by Gary Hustwit that debuted in 2007 at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas. It later aired on PBS in January 2009 as part of the Emmy-award-winning Independent Lens series, which is the version I saw.

The film, Helvetica, subsequently toured film festivals, special events, and art house cinemas worldwide, playing in over 300 cities in 40 countries.

From April 2007 to March 2008, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City displayed an exhibit called “50 Years of Helvetica,” which celebrated the many uses of the font.

Why all the hoopla over a typeface? Well, in short, no other font can begin to approach Helvetica’s long-lived impact on the design, advertising, print and communication worlds. To this day, Helvetica continues to shine based on its simple, functional, contemporary, and timeless qualities.

Helvetica was developed by Max Miedinger with Edüard Hoffmann in 1957 for the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland. Miedinger, a former employee and freelance designer, was commissioned by Haas to draw an updated sans-serif typeface to add to the firm’s line. Miedinger’s new font was called Neue Haas Grotesk, but its name was later changed to Helvetica in 1960, which is derived from Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland.

Helvetica’s popularity was fed by its Swiss design roots and by advertising agencies selling this new design style to their clients. Almost overnight, Helvetica began to appear in corporate logos, signage for transportation systems, fine art prints, and a myriad of other uses worldwide. Five decades later, the use of the Helvetica typeface in our daily lives is as ubiquitous as the air that we breathe.

What does your company’s logo and typeface say about your organization? Are you giving enough attention to how your company approaches the design, look, and feel of your products and/or services?

The best product or service in the world is of no benefit if it is not seen as appealing to the customer.

Take a page from our omnipresent friend, Mr. Helvetica, and make sure you are doing everything you can to appeal to your customers. If so, your company too will find itself still looking good at the ripe old age of 53.

From my window of my New York City apartment in the Chelsea-Flatiron area, I can see 5 of the 31 naked sculptures that make up the unique Event Horizon outdoor art exhibit in Madison Square Park.

Event Horizon opened on March 26 and runs through August 15. It has already caused quite a stir around New York, but causing a stir is nothing new for 59-year-old British sculptor Antony Gormley.

All 31 life-size sculptures are of the same male figure – made from a cast of the 6 foot, 2 inch artist himself. Only four figures are on the ground in the Madison Square Park area. The remaining 27 sculptures are literally framed against the sky, many of them perched on top of the historic buildings that encircle the storied park.

A few sculptures are several blocks away, and one is as far as 8 blocks away standing on a ledge at the 26th floor of the famed Empire State Building, which Gormley referred to as “the exclamation point” in a New York Times article before the exhibit opened.

According to that same article, the New York City Police Department actually felt the need to preemptively issue a statement that reassured the public that the figures were sculptures and not people on the verge of committing suicide. But that is far from the effect that Gormley is looking for from observers. He’s hoping they will see these simple figures in a different way given their uncommon positions in the cityscape.

Provoking viewers to look at ordinary objects in a different way is pure Gormley. He exhibited his figures in London in 2007 atop buildings and bridges, and thought “it was great to see an individual or groups of people pointing at the horizon,” according to eventhorizonnewyork.org.

As remarkable as the Event Horizon exhibition is itself, the fact that Madison Square Park is the setting for the exhibition is even more remarkable. As recently as 10 years ago the Park was an eyesore and near abandon. But thanks to the work of the Madison Square Park Conservancy, created in 2002, the 163-year-old park has been transformed into one of the most attractive big city parks anywhere.

What is on the horizon for your company? I would encourage you to find ways to creatively provoke your employees by taking them out of their ordinary surroundings, and exposing them regularly to the extraordinary.

You’ll soon find it will transform your company into a very attractive place for both your employees and your shareholders.

I’ve been fascinated by the reports from last week about the British man who spent $750 on a homemade high-altitude balloon and basic camera that captured spectacular photos from space, which NASA spends hundreds of millions of dollars to capture.

Robert Harrison, a 38-year-old father of three and space enthusiast, rigged a $100 Canon pocket digital camera and GPS device inside a polystyrene box tethered to a helium balloon. It was all held together by duct tape. He then sent the contraption up 22 miles above the earth. During its ascent, the camera was set to take 8 still photos and a short video every five minutes.

Once the balloon reached an altitude of 22 miles, it popped (as he had predicted), and a parachute gently brought the two-pound box back to the ground. Harrison then used a GPS locator to track the box, which he found 50 miles from his home in West Yorkshire, England. He then posted his unbelievable photos on Flickr.com, which caused quite a stir in the space and engineering circles.

According to reports, Harrison has launched a total of 12 high-altitude balloons since October 2008 when he started the hobby.

Harrison said that NASA called him to ask “how he did it so cheaply?” He told them: “You just need a little technical know-how. I know nothing about electronics and what I do know, I learned from the Internet.”

Many companies and organizations, like NASA, spend millions each year to accomplish tasks using the same old methods. Why? Because “it’s always been done this way,” and once you set up a system and culture around a certain process, it’s hard to see doing it another way.

What’s needed is a different perspective that helps compel a management team to look at an objective in a new way. This can sometimes come in the form of an outside force, such as a merger or down-sizing. Or, it can come from a new executive, manager or team member brought in from the outside. Or, it can be grown internally through innovative training and a corporate culture that challenges the status quo and incents employees to do so.

Robert Harrison was not frozen in place from years of process inertia. He used fresh thinking and widely available, inexpensive technologies to achieve results that had eluded even the most experienced professionals.

Artists, photographers, and cinematographers know that perspective is critical to their work. Simply put, it can mean the difference between success and failure.

Corporate executives and managers should likewise embrace the importance of perspective in their work, and its impact on more innovative products, services and processes. I’ll bet you $750 it would take your company or organization to new and exciting heights.

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.

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.

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.