July 29th marks the start of the 8th season for Bravo’s Emmy-award winning television program “Project Runway.”

One of the designer contestants who will appear on the show this season will be April Johnston, a 2010 graduate of SCAD’s School of Fashion. At 21, Johnston will be the youngest of the 17 contestants.

SCAD is the Savannah College of Art and Design, which is headquartered in Savannah, Georgia, with campuses also in Atlanta, Hong Kong, and Lacoste, France.

I profiled SCAD in a blog posting in February 2009. As one of the top art and design schools on the globe, I am a big fan and supporter of SCAD’s.

If past “Project Runway” shows are any guide, April Johnston will undoubtedly face stiff competition, as well as stiff critiques from the show’s honcho and former super model, Heidi Klum. Fashion industry luminaries Tim Gunn, Michael Kors, and Nina Garcia round out the panel of judges.

What Johnston will have going for her is the world-class education and training she received at SCAD. That, along with some natural talent, will hopefully serve her well throughout the competition.

The Dean of Fashion at SCAD, Michael Fink, handicaps Johnston’s chances this way, “If her provocative and powerful senior collection is any indication, we’re confident she’ll create some exciting and intriguing clothes.”

We will soon see whether or not that’s the case.

Your employees hold the keys to your company’s success and how well you measure up to the competition. But you’ll need to create a corporate culture that will nurture employee talent, and stimulate creativity and innovation.

New Lantern has the type of “provocative and powerful” services that could tap into the scads of talent that already exists within your employees. This, in turn, could put you on the path to your own award-winning season.

The current edition of the Harvard Business Review (July-August 2010) includes an article by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler of Forrester Research, entitled “Empowered.” In it, the authors talk about the need for corporations to “unleash their employees to fight back” using the same social media tools that angry customers are increasingly using against corporations.

Today’s latest social media tools, like Twitter and Facebook, have given the individual customer unprecedented power to take his or her grievance to the masses. One of my favorite such incidents in the last year involved musician Dave Carroll, who took on United Airlines for rejecting his damage claim after baggage handlers broke his guitar. In response, he wrote a humorous ditty called “United Breaks Guitars,” and posted a video of him performing the song on YouTube — which has received nearly nine million views to date.

United’s brand took a beating, and it is not alone. As Bernoff and Schadler point out, these types of single-customer social media firestorms are popping up all over the place, and corporate executives are scrambling to figure out how to effectively respond.

Granted, I am not suggesting that customers, who have a legitimate complaint against a business entity, lay down their new social media guns. On the contrary. I applaud the creative use of technology by a customer to hold a company’s feet to the fire — when a genuine wrong has occurred. But what I also applaud, and encourage, are companies which are beginning to embrace these same technology tools to tell their side of the story.

In a number of my past blog postings, I have called on executives and managers to empower employees to think more creatively, and incentivize them to take risks and to challenge corporate routine. And empowering employees to leverage the same social media tools at work as they use at home opens up a whole new front in cost-effective corporate communications, while better utilizing employee talent.

Of course, this type of empowerment is not without risk as the authors of “Empowered” note. It requires a clear set of internal ground rules that govern both management and employees. But if properly designed and executed, the benefits of engaging employees in leveraging social media will far outweigh the costs of not doing so.

No, this is not a blog about a sequel to the 1989 movie starring Tom Cruise, “Born on the Fourth of July.” It’s about Sir Paul Smith, famed British fashion designer who was born on July 5, 1946.

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!

I unfortunately had to spend most of the month in Washington, DC suffering through the hottest June on record. Washington has had 18 days over 90 degrees this month with lots of humidity to boot, resulting in heat indices well over 100 degrees. And the few days of the month I was in New York, it wasn’t much better.

While the global warming theory appears to have lost some of its steam of late, if June 2010 in DC is any indication, then the planet is in for a heap of trouble. Where’s Al Gore when you need him? (Answer: He’s preoccupied with his divorce and other tabloid rumors.)

Maybe there’s a silver lining with all this heat.

As long as it’s this hot, many of us will choose to stay indoors – in the cool of our office buildings — and not on the golf course, the tennis court, or at the baseball game. And as long as we’re in our offices, we might as well spend part of that time thinking about how our respective businesses can be more productive and innovative during the second half of the year.

So use this time wisely. Pull together your management team, challenge them to take a fresh look at the next six months, and come up with a game plan that could move the dial in each business and function across your organization.

Better yet, treat your team to an inspiring offsite meeting or innovation workshop, in a nice air-conditioned space, where thought-provoking speakers and thought-enhancing surroundings might spur more creative thinking.

That sounds like a pretty cool idea to me.

DuPont announced yesterday the winners of its 22nd DuPont Awards for Packaging and Innovation. Granted, the DuPont Awards do not yet have quite the cachet of the Academy Awards or the Pulitzer Prize, but they do represent the pinnacle of extraordinary achievement in “packaging materials, technology and service innovations.”

This year, Alcoa Inc. and Exal Corporation took home one of the top “Diamond Winner” awards for their new aluminum bottle, which offers a lighter, stronger, cheaper, 100 percent recyclable container, referred to as the “”Coil-to-Can” or “C2C” bottle. The new, high-tech bottle uses Alcoa’s bottlestock sheet and Exal’s C2C manufacturing technology.

Exal launched the C2C aluminum bottle in 2008, which is now used by companies like Coca-Cola, ESKA Still and Sparking Water of Canada, and Anheuser-Busch.

Ok, so what’s the big deal you might be asking? A lot in my book. The DuPont Awards illustrate a point that I have made on a number of occasions in earlier blogs on this website. Innovation is not only about the iPad, or the latest flat-screen technology, or a Mars rover. It’s potentially about everything your company is doing.

Innovation can and should occur across every nook and cranny of your business — from better and more advanced products, to enhancements in services for customers and clients, to improvements in internal processes, and to the very packages that contain your company’s products.

In short, if your company’s executives and managers are not actively pursuing innovations in all these areas – and strongly incenting your employees to do so – you may not only be missing out on possible revenue and market share, you may end up missing the boat altogether.

So this coming weekend, when you find yourself sipping your favorite beverage from one of those newfangled, super-cold aluminum cans, think about how your company can be more creative across the board.

I can assure you that a new can-do approach to innovation will put your company on a path to bringing home your own awards.

As a child growing up in the 1960s and early 70s in Tehran, I spent most of my summers vacationing at the Caspian Sea with my family and other relatives.

During the day, my sister, cousins and I would spend hours riding our bikes up and down the seashore and nearby neighborhood streets, soaking up the sun and salt-filled air. In the evenings, we would go to bed early exhausted from the day’s activities, as my parents, aunts and uncles played cards and told stories late into the night. And the kids would get up early the next morning and start it all again.

On many days, we would occupy our time by putting on plays and skits, where our parents served as the audience. I always insisted on being the director, so I could tell the other six or seven kids what to do and say.

It was truly an idyllic time, which now seems very far away on so many levels.

I often think back on my summers at the Caspian Sea, as I did last night as I watched the 82nd Annual Academy Awards show, when they named Kathryn Bigelow as Best Director for her work on “The Hurt Locker,” which also won Best Picture.

Notably, Bigelow is the first woman to win the Oscar’s coveted Best Director award. More notable is that she won it for directing a war movie. Most notable, she won up against a highly competitive field of other gifted directors, one of which included her former husband, James Cameron.

Cameron, who was nominated for his directing work for “Avatar,” is no stranger to this Oscar category, having received the Best Director award for “Titanic” in 1997. But last night was Bigelow’s night, and she deserved every moment of the recognition. In all, “Hurt Locker” took home six Oscars for its gripping depiction of life on the fronts lines of the Iraq War for a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team.

A director is responsible for taking the written word of a screenplay and bringing it to life on film, from every camera angle, in how an actor portrays a given role, and how a scene ultimately helps tell the story.

You cannot overstate the importance of the director’s role to a film or a play. More broadly, the same can be said for directing an organization or business. Good directing comes from years of hard work, knowing the business, risk-taking, effective training, learning from mistakes, and learning from other successful directors or leaders.

The best director is one who is able to pull the talent and an award-worthy performance from each team member. Such an idyllic moment will likely lead to your company’s own next blockbuster and plenty of precious memories down the road.