Excellence and the Romance of Risk: The Hard Work of Embracing Creative Tension

Risk is not risk if failure is not a possibility. Failure is not failure if there is no pain. We don't just live in good times, we live in beta times, where it seems everybody, at least aspirationally, is a risk-taker, an innovator, a creative, a maker. As an architect -- one who designs -- I, too, am one of these folks. The romance of risk has huge currency today. But excellence is hard to come by, because...excellence is hard to come by. It is profoundly not business-as-usual. Achieving it is ...