Internationally acclaimed architect, Frank Gehry, now 81, materialized his desire once again to create something artistic and “unique” in his recently unveiled masterpiece, the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Absent are the usual 90° angles and shapes seen in most healthcare facilities and in their place is an undulating amalgamation of stainless steel. Although the architecture is decidedly playful, the mission of the Center is dead-on serious.

An international medical research facility, the prestigious scientists are studying neurocognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and ALS. Gehry is known for his other unorthodox and stimulating buildings as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in L.A. With the new Center, Gehry realized the importance of  creating a structure for these world-renowned researchers that is “unique, (Read more…)

Author's Son Collin's College Graduation '06

The month of May is known for graduations and attendant celebrations. This May, I have a niece, Sarah, graduating from college and a nephew, Nicholas,

graduating from the IBEW program to receive his Journeyman Electrician’s License. Both Sarah and Nick have worked long and hard on their coursework, expanding their minds and their skill sets along the way.  Their graduations are hard earned and well deserved (and we are very proud of them!).

It got me thinking about graduations themselves and how we don’t really need to restrict them to the month of May or to getting degrees from our venerable institutions (although those are important accomplishments).  To “graduate” means “to complete a course of study.” It also means to “change” and to “go through progressive steps.”

One evening I was out to dinner with a number of my good women friends; we were talking about the fact that the real “raising” of our children was in the past. Although we had all poured our hearts and souls and brains (and, as one of them said, we have the damage to prove it!) into years of going through all of the progressive steps to raise them to be the best human beings they could be, it was a fait accompli. They had “graduated” and left the nest. And we realized . . . we had GRADUATED, too, and consequently, we are (Read more…)

Picasso's "The Absinthe Drinker" 1903

As you or your organization go through your different STAGES, stop and acknowledge the different successes that you accomplish along the way. Don’t just wait for the big end result—you could miss out on some amazing “smaller” masterpieces along the way.

So often when we look at a successful person or a successful organization we tend to think of his/her success in terms of “Ah, she has finally arrived. She is NOW successful.” What we often overlook is that that person’s “ultimate” success probably came in STAGES of success. The famous 20^th century artist, Pablo Picasso, is a good example. “Ultimately,” Picasso is most known for his pinnacle style, Cubism.

In Cubism, Picasso viewed the form, e.g., a human being, in terms of geometric shapes which he then rearranged, camouflaging the forms in the geometry. However, Picasso went through several STAGES in his artistic evolvement before arriving at Cubism. For example, from 1901 to 1904, Picasso’s style manifested a strong sense of melancholy and poetic nuances in what has been called (Read more…)

When is the last time you set out to truly master something? To take something you’ve already been doing or start something new

Mastery: Van Gogh's "The Potato Eaters"

and do everything in your power to take it to the masterpiece level?

You know, we call the Master Artists “Masters” because they did just that with their art: they did everything in their power to become Masters; to take their work to the masterpiece level. When the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter, Vincent Van Gogh, started working on one of his earliest paintings, “The Potato Eaters,” he didn’t just slap some paint on the canvas and call it a day. Instead, he made numerous sketches and studies of the work over an entire winter before creating the final oil-on-canvas painting in 1885. He put a great deal of thought and effort into the work and wrote to his brother, Theo, “I have tried to emphasize that those people eating their potatoes in the lamplight, have (Read more…)