Frankly, your creative place may not be a physical location. It could be a particular state of mind. It could be a certain mood, time of day, or the type of music that you are listening to at the time. It could be something you do such as driving or walking. Or it could be any combination of the above.

Every employee has at least one place that focuses the mind and puts them in a more inspired state. Not a state that will necessarily lead to a nuclear fusion breakthrough, or the next generation of computer chip. But it could be a state that helps them think through a more creative presentation, design a more environmentally-friendly container, improve the profitability of a company service offering, or find a more efficient way to process expense reports.

A company’s challenge is to help find those places for employees where they can be more innovative. Most companies insist that employees produce results in sterile environments under rigid conditions. Ask yourself this question: if you were using your own money to fund a composer to come up with a great score for your next blockbuster movie, would you insist that he or she do it between 9 to 5 on a Tuesday in the small conference room down the hall? I don’t think so.

I realize that organizations may not have the flexibility or the resources to put their employees into their most creative physical spaces. But with a little bit of ingenuity, leadership, and guts to try something different, they could clearly get employees to a better place or frame of mind.

Let New Lantern help your company find its creative place. It could be the beginning of a more beautiful and productive relationship between you and your employees.

(Back by popular demand, the above posting appeared originally in April 2009.)

I admit it. I have a foot fetish. It’s not exactly what you think. My love for feet is of the inanimate kind – stone feet sculptures, that is.

I just returned from my second trip to Rome this year. And based on my well-trained and traveled eye, I must say that Rome is probably the foot sculpture capital of the world. Everywhere I turned, there was another marble-carved foot. They were in museums, shops, piazzas, flea markets, and basilicas. Stoned feet in every direction.

The largest foot sculpture I’ve ever seen was in the courtyard of the famed Musei Capitolini, the oldest public museum on the planet which dates back to 1471. (This date is not a typo.) The really big and old foot is shown above. The courtyard also showcased a number of other large marble body parts, such as fingers, elbows, and heads.

The museum’s shop had a small marble replica of the big foot, which I wanted to buy, but my husband — as always – gave his standard complaint: “It’s too heavy to carry home.” Most of the time I ignore him, but given he ends up carrying the heaviest bags, I relented this time.

Of course, I regret not buying that foot. Its image is now plastered inside my head. I think I need therapy.

But great art, even in the sculpted foot variety, has a way of possessing the mind and soul.

And whether you call it a fetish or a passion, the positive effect of art and design can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary.

This effect just might help you ultimately lap the competition by a mile – give or take a foot.

While telework programs are not the panacea for all workplace ills, they can serve as one important tool for motivating certain employees, increasing work-life balance, and increasing retention rates of top performers.

There is one challenge, however, that managers need to address as today’s employees spend more time working remotely from home or from other distant offices: maintaining the sense of team.

High-performing individual contributors can serve as a huge asset for any organization. Yet, the value of this asset is greatly diminished if these contributors are not effectively collaborating with team members toward a common business objective.

Also, there are immeasurable benefits that derive from a strong sense of team that cannot be overstated. Visibility to other team members and their accomplishments tend to increase the game of other teammates. Competition breeds increased performance. Case and point: a sprinter running the 100-yard dash against one or more competitors will almost always clock faster times compared to running the sprint alone.

Fellow team members also learn from one another in important ways. An employee that might excel in one aspect of her role can serve as a good role model for other team members – if there is visibility to these winning traits.

So how do you overcome the obstacle of geographic distance when at least some members of your team are working remotely?

First, leverage all the new collaboration and technology tools to increase your team’s “visibility” to one another. Thanks to fast, inexpensive broadband today at both work and home, relatively high quality VoIP (online) conference calls – including real-time document sharing and video – are easily within reach for your organization. Granted, these technologies are still no substitute for face-to-face collaboration, but they can play a critical role to the team experience.

Second, build regular face-to-face meetings and events into your annual budgets. Utilize existing office space or, better yet, a thought-provoking venue to spur creativity, team cohesion, and a more memorable experience. I’m not talking about a windowless, subterranean hotel conference room. Instead, seek out unique offsite meeting spaces such as an artist’s studio, a museum space, or conference room at a professional sports facility.

Third, include a fun, non-work event in every offsite retreat. It can be a team-building exercise; an informal round-table discussion or reception with a leading innovator; a nice dinner at a hot, new restaurant; or an inspirational training session. The point is to create synergies and chemistry within the team through shared experiences.

In short, use today’s telework and virtual office programs to reduce overall costs while increasing individual employee productivity — but not at the expense of eroding the team dynamic. Bring your team together at regular intervals that suit your company’s needs, and put them in intensive, idea-inducing environments.

You’ll soon find yourself building a winning team, which will take your company to virtually any new height.

On this date in 1895 two French brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière, first demonstrated motion pictures using celluloid film in a private viewing in Paris, according to InfoPlease.com. Later that year, the brothers held their first public screening of their cinematic invention on December 28 at the famed Le Grand Café in Paris’s Opera District.

The Lumière brothers were not the first inventors to develop motion picture techniques. Yet, film historians consider the Grand Café screening to be the birth of the cinema as a commercial medium where admission was charged. The screening actually debuted ten short, 50-second films, the first showing workers walking out of the Lumière factory.

Auguste and Louis inherited their passion for film and photography from their father Claude-Antoin Lumière, who ran a photographic firm, where both brothers worked. Based on this experience, the brothers patented a number of significant processes prior to the film camera itself, including the perforation of film that allowed it to be advanced through the camera and projector. They received their patent for their cinématographe camera and projector on February 19, 1895.

In 1896, the Lumières took their cinématographe on a world tour including London, New York, Buenos Aires and Bombay, and the “moving images had an immediate and significant influence on popular culture.” (Wikipedia.org)

Strangely enough, the brothers then turned their attention from moving pictures to color photography in 1903, proclaiming: “the cinema is an invention without any future.”

Whereas the Lumière company did quite well throughout much of the 1900s as a major producer of photographic products in Europe, the name “Lumière” eventually faded after its merger with the Swiss company Ciba in 1961, which later became Ilford France.

Ironically, “lumière” translates as “light” in English, such as the glow that comes from a newly invented movie projector or a New Lantern.

I would always look for an old fisherman with the largest and most impressive tackle box, and would stand beside him with my small fishing rod. I marveled at the orderly compartments of his tackle box and all of its contents: bobbers, weights, hooks, pliers, bottle opener, extra line, rubber worms, and a variety of colorful jigs.

Every item type had its own place in the multi-tiered box. I discovered over time that the most successful fishermen were meticulous in their preparation, and were ready for all contingencies.

I reflect often on those summers at the seashore and my fishing outings, and the life lessons that came from the experience.

Plan for every contingency. Meticulously prepare, and seek to find joy in what you do. Admittedly, my weak spot has always been the meticulous part.

These same traits would benefit you as a corporate manager. Make sure your tackle box is amply stocked, well-organized, and ready for anything that may come your way.

Likewise, approach your job or next project with the experience of a wise fisherman and the curiosity and enthusiasm of a young fisher girl.

Nike CEO, Mark Parker, is featured in Fast Company’s September edition cover story, “The World’s Most Creative CEO.” It chronicles Parker’s internal rise to Nike’s chief executive and his recipe for success by using “elite athletes, artists, and his own shoe designs to drive a $34 billion business.”

Parker is not a household name outside of Nike and the sports industry, compared to co-founder and chairman, Phil Knight. Knight was CEO for almost 40 years until he stepped down in 2004, when he brought in an outsider from S.C. Johnson, William Perez, to replace him. Perez lasted only 18 months before hanging up his cleats, saying that the culture at Nike was too difficult. That’s when Nike turned to Parker, a long-time Nike executive and über footwear designer.

Parker came to Nike in 1979 as a product designer and footwear tester. It wasn’t long before executives realized his talent in creating some of the most memorable and profitable Nike shoe products in the company’s history. His creations have adorned some of the globe’s most celebrated athletes, including John McEnroe, Michael Jordan, Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, and Kobe Bryant – a veritable “cobbler to the gods” as described by Fast Company.

An avid marathoner himself, Mark Parker knows a thing or two about athletes and footwear. Most important, he brings a creative mind to the CEO role, which he continues to nurture every day. According to the article, he “regularly hosts dinners for about 25 artist friends to just talk and kick around ideas.”

It’s no surprise that Parker stays laser-focused on Nike’s design and R&D work. He frequents the company’s secretive “Innovation Kitchen” sessions, an internal think tank of sorts, “where athletic ambition, art, and a bit of mad science are cooked into the stuff that made Nike the dominate player in sports shoes and apparel.”

Parker also spends a lot of time and attention on sustainability and cutting product waste. And, Parker recently outlined some pretty big goals of increasing sales by 40 percent by 2015. He’ll have his work cut out for him, but stretch goals and competing hard are nothing new for a company which aligns itself with world class athletes and sports.

If you want a little insight into what makes this successful corporate executive tick, take a look at his choice for the new company mission statement nine years ago: “To bring innovation and inspiration to every athlete in the world.”

Since becoming CEO, Parker has also developed nine “maxims” that he wants to serve as guiding principles at Nike. His favorite is No. 6, “Be a sponge. Curiosity is life. Assumption is death.” Parker says that was one his grandmother taught him.

Parker’s approach demonstrates that curiosity and a hearty appetite for creativity are a powerful combo for Nike — and for any other company seeking to compete and win.

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.

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.

Fine Gardening magazine recently showcased Randolph’s work in a special edition on container gardens. But now during the hot southern days of late August, Randolph has closed her nursery as she does every year, and has turned her attention to a different type of artistic creation – making concrete garden art. For example, she’s making concrete leaves from impressions of the real thing. Leaves of hosta, elephant ears, banana plants, pipers, and other large-leaf plants cut from her greenhouses serve as real-life molds for her work.

She also conducts classes during August on Saturdays and Sundays for those who would like to learn this special craft. I took one of Randolph’s concrete leaf-making classes yesterday. Mixing the concrete by hand, shaping and working the wet sand to form to perfect foundation for the leaf, and painstakingly applying the concrete one small “patty” at a time over the leaf itself made for laborious and tedious work. It also required an artistic touch and eye to replicate the natural folds and undulations of the plant’s leaf.

I spent almost three hours working on the first phase of a two-foot by three-foot elephant ear leaf impression. I had to leave it there to cure for at least a week before I can pick it up, and then attempt to paint it. So the jury is still out on how my concrete leaf will actually turn out. But the time spent at Randolph’s gave me the opportunity to view her own beautiful concrete leaf creations, in every size and shape, hue and texture.

Her leaf work already rivals some of the best in the country, including those made by famed garden art designers George Little and David Lewis of Bainbridge Island, Washington, whose garden and artwork I saw two years ago on a trip to nearby Seattle.

Randolph estimates she’s already made (or assisted others in making) over 1,000 concrete leaves. That’s a lot of concrete, sand, mixing, and dirt under the fingernails. But dirt under the fingernails is nothing new for Randolph, who has been in and around plants all of her life. Twenty-six years ago, she bought the now 62-year old nursery business from her parents, the source of her passion for plants.

Randolph’s recipe for success as an innovative garden artist is instructive for those of us in other professions. First, distinguish yourself through creativity and an eye for design. Next, you’ll need to work hard – very hard — and get more than a little dirt under your fingernails. And finally, be passionate about what you do. If so, you might just find yourself leaving a good impression on your own clientele.

One of my favorite places is Bryant Park in New York City, named for the American poet, journalist, and New York Evening Post editor – William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878).

Bryant Park is a modern day oasis in the heart of Manhattan situated on a plot of land with a long history in one of the most storied cities in the world. First designated as a public space in 1686 by New York’s colonial Governor, Thomas Dongan, it later served as a crossing for General George Washington and his troops in 1776 as they retreated from the Battle of Long Island. Fifty years later the land served as a potter’s field.

The first park at the site opened in 1847 as Reservoir Park. During the Civil War in the 1860s, the park was used for military drills. In 1884, it was renamed Bryant Park in honor of William Cullen Bryant who had died six years earlier. The park’s nadir was during the 1970s, when it served as home to drug dealers, prostitutes and the homeless. In 1988, it underwent a major renovation and re-opened in 1992 with much acclaim.

Today, Bryant Park is a hub of creativity — home to New York’s celebrated “Fashion Week” and HBO’s “Summer Film Festival.” The park’s vast expanse of green lawn is framed by scores of large, majestic plane trees (i.e., sycamore), descendants of the plane trees found along some of Europe’s most picturesque city streets. Bryant Park is a wonderful place to read a book, sip a cup of coffee, or simply watch humanity pass you by.

It would be difficult to find a more fitting namesake for the park. William Cullen Bryant was a driving force behind the idea of New York’s Central Park, and helped in the creation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His poetry has been described as “thoughtful and meditative.”

Bryant Park is a showcase for how passion, perseverance, and creativity can transform an ordinary or forgotten space into a special and inspirational place. Let New Lantern help you transform your business into a more creative and productive place – worthy of your company’s name.