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.

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.

The Ladew Topiary Gardens of Monkton, Maryland boast the title of “the most outstanding topiary garden in America” as named by the Garden Club of America. I now see why. This past Saturday, I toured the Ladew Gardens as part of its second annual garden festival, and came away a very big fan.

Any fine collection of art starts with a passionate collector and a talented artist. Harvey S. Ladew (1887-1976) was both. He loved flowers and topiaries, and he put his love to work in the 22 acres of gardens he created from a 250-acre farm he bought in Maryland in 1929. Ladew discovered the art of topiaries (trimming and training shrubs or trees into unnatural ornamental shapes) during his many travels to Europe with his parents, and later as a young adult and Army officer during World War I.

A self-taught gardener, Ladew created two long cross axes on his Maryland property, which provide for spectacular vistas in each direction. Off of the axes are 15 garden “rooms,” each devoted to a single color, plant, or theme. Ladew is considered “one of the first Americans to create garden rooms on this side of the Atlantic,” according to the garden’s brochure. Many of the garden rooms feature elaborate topiaries of animals in sculpted settings.

One of the most impressive areas of Ladew Gardens is the “Great Bowl.” Several dozen swan topiaries swim atop a sea of large, billowy yew shrubs that border a two-acre circular lawn, which gently slopes toward a round pool in the center.

Harvey Ladew was influenced by the work of landscape and topiary artists from England and Italy. How many botantical artists and gardeners have been influenced by Harvey Ladew over the last 70-80 years? Hundreds I am sure, who in turn have most likely influenced thousands more.

The ingredients for creativity and innovation are fairly simple, yet get surprisingly little attention from corporate executives and managers. Provide your employees with the opportunity to nurture their passion and talents, expose them to other successful creators and innovators, and serve up a culture that welcomes and incents creativity and risk-taking.

Spend time and energy on these fundamental elements for innovation, and you’ll soon find your company will be on its way to some supernatural performance.

I must admit that I spend more time these days reading the obituaries. Yes, I know, it’s a sure sign of growing old. But a front page obituary in yesterday’s New York Times particularly caught my eye, “Inventor Whose Pioneer PC Helped Inspire Microsoft Dies.”

The obituary highlighted the life of H. Edward Roberts, a country doctor in rural Cochran, Georgia, who also invented what is regarded by many as the first personal computer in the 1970s – the MITS Altair.

Dr. Roberts may not be a household name for many people outside of this small town in Georgia, but he does mean a lot to two of the richest men in the world, who also happen to be co-founders of the Microsoft Corporation, Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

It was Roberts’s MITS 8800 Altair “microcomputer” that made it on the cover of Popular Electronics magazine in January 1975, which got the attention of a young Mr. Gates and Mr. Allen. The Altair was the “first inexpensive general-purpose microcomputer, a device that could be programmed to do all manner of tasks,” as described by the New York Times.

Gates and Allen were interested in writing software for the Altair. In fact, the lure of the Altair was so strong that Gates dropped out of Harvard and Allen quit his job at Honeywell, and they both moved to Albuquerque, NM — home to Roberts’s small MITS company. And it was there in New Mexico that Gates and Allen founded Microsoft in April 1975, not in Washington State, which they later moved to in 1979.

In 1977, Roberts sold his computer company, later attended medical school, and then moved to rural Georgia where he practiced medicine until he died this past Thursday at the age of 68.

Meanwhile, the programming language that Gates and Allen created for the Altair, called Microsoft BASIC, “was the beginning of what would become the world’s largest software company and would make its founders billionaires many times over.”

But the story doesn’t end here; this is where it gets “personal.”

In January 1985, I walked into a graduate school microcomputer lab at Indiana University, where I met by future husband, who was the lab’s teaching assistant. He showed me the basics: how to turn on the lab’s first-generation IBM microcomputer (running Microsoft’s MS-DOS), how to save data to its 5.25-inch “floppy disk drive,” and he showed me the difference between a “cold boot” and “warm boot.” I guess it was love at first byte.

We were married in 1987, and ironically, years later in 2003, my husband went to work for Microsoft where he still works today.

Our 23rd anniversary was yesterday.

Thank you H. Edward (Ed) Roberts for changing so many lives around the world, and in Cochran, GA — and thank you for helping to change mine. By the way, happy anniversary to my husband, R. Edward (Ed) Ingle.

Last summer, I wrote a two-part blog, “It’s Time to Embrace Teleworking” (Part 1 and Part 2). Out of New Lantern’s 54 blog postings over the last 14 months, we have not once returned to the same exact topic — until now thanks to recent events.

If your company to date has been cool to lukewarm on the topic of teleworking, you need only to look to the real-life response to the back-to-back snowstorms along much of the East Coast last week as your best proof point to take a new look. Thousands of companies from Virginia to Massachusetts were shut down after communities were hit by two to three feet of snow. Hundreds of thousands of employees were affected, who found themselves captive in their own homes for most of the week.

Yet, much of the work of many of these companies continued thanks to modern day connectivity, fast and inexpensive personal computers, broadband at home, smartphones, Blackberrys, and iPhones. The breadth and scale of this level of productivity from one’s home would not have been possible 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago.

Even the U.S. Government enjoyed the benefits of teleworking last week. For example, according to a spokesperson at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, “the trademark side of the agency reported production at 85 percent of normal levels on Monday and Tuesday, when the government was officially closed,” as reported in the Washington Post on February 11.

Admittedly, teleworking is not for every employee or every position, as I noted in my June 2009 blog post. But I would venture to say that almost every business can find a way to better utilize technologies so that at least some employees can work from home during part of the work week.

Employees are happier when they are not wasting one to two hours a day sitting in traffic during their commutes, or standing on a crowded subway or bus. Employees are happier when they are in comfortable and more inspiring surroundings. They are also happier when they are not chained to their desk five days a week because it makes the boss feel better. And happier employees are more innovative and productive. Period. Full stop.

Your company should take a fresh look at teleworking. Managers should embrace today’s technologies and push aside yesterday’s biases against working from home. If so, I predict brighter skies will soon be in your future.

You can trust me on this one, I wouldn’t snow you.

Throughout the 1990s, I looked forward to Saturday mornings for two reasons. First, I could sleep late. Second, I enjoyed watching CNN’s weekly fashion show, “Style with Elsa Klensch,” which aired at 10:30 a.m. on the East Coast.

I’m still able to sleep a little later on Saturdays, but not since 2001 have I been able to watch my favorite Saturday morning show when Klensch and “Style” took their last bow on the runway.

I can still hear Klensch’s distinctive voice ringing in my head: “This is ‘Style’ and I’m Elsa Klensch reporting on the design worlds of fashion, beauty, and decorating,” she would proclaim at the top of every show. Then she proceeded to give the week’s highlights of design and fashion as if it were a weekly sports program — only with a lot more panache.

“Style” was the first of its kind. Long before the Fashion Channel, Style.com, and “Project Runway,” there was Elsa Klensch. She brought the latest fashions and their designers from the streets of Paris, Milan, and New York to Main Street – and the industry and the profession are still prospering from it.

Klensch came about her fashion fame the old fashion way, she earned it. She was born in Australia, and then later lived overseas in London and Hong Kong, before arriving in the United States. According to Wikipedia.org, Klensch worked as an editor at Vogue, Women’s Wear Daily, W, and Harper’s Bazaar before joining CNN in New York City on its 1980 launch.

She also appeared as herself in a number of television shows and films, including Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter (1994), which chronicled the Paris fashion show scene.

I’m not sure where Ms. Klensch is today, but I did recently see her name on Facebook. (And yes, I admit it, I sent her a “friend” request). Where ever she is, I salute her on behalf of the thousands of women and men whom she undoubtedly inspired to go into fashion, take up a creative profession, or simply better appreciate design.

Klensch had a style all her own, which was the root of her success. There is a lesson here for individuals and private enterprises alike. Create your own style. Follow your passion. And, inspire others along the way. If so, success should soon follow.

(By the way, Ms. Klensch, if you are reading this blog could you please “accept” my friendship?)