My involvement with woodturning has given me the opportunity to enter into a community of creative artists around the world. While the creative process is often a solitary one, the community itself is vibrant.
The friendships I formed with other artists led to an invitation to participate in a collaborative project as part of World Wood Day in Nepal. Twenty artists from around the world worked together, as a team, to produce a single, unified work.
I participated in a second collab project two years later in Siem Reap, Cambodia.
These two projects clarified my understanding of how to get a group of talented, knowledge people to work together to do something that is both challenging and remarkable. This problem is not unique to the arts. As a corporate executive, it is the central challenge for success.
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My work on collaboration led to another Harvard course that I taught with David Edwards. Called "Creating Things That Matter," it explored many of the aspects of the creative process we used during the arts projects. David expanded on much of this thinking, in a book of the same name.