You are a private wealth advisor at a global financial services company, and your long-time client is turning 70. How do you recognize that occasion? Do you honor her accomplishments or celebrate her plans for the future?

Last week I had a conference call with four people in three different time zones. An app set up the call, calculated the correct time for each participant, added the appointment to each of our calendars, and then periodically sent us texts and emails so that we would not forget.

Like other independent professionals, artists have a keen memory of past financial crises. For New York City-based painter and printmaker Julio Valdez, the repeated economic shocks of the early 1990's, 1997, 2001 and 2008, compelled him to ask some tough questions.

Is creativity more about process or results? When managing creative minds working under a deadline, it's tempting to focus on an expected outcome. But, like the group that created Teams, if you can step back and observe—even enjoy—the collaboration as it unfolds, then the results you dream about may very well come to pass.

A zoo of creatures, great and small, live in every email address. In China, you'll find a mouse. In Italy and France, a snail. In Germany, Holland, and Poland it's a monkey. In Sweden and Denmark, an elephant's trunk. And in Finland, there's a cat, curled up and fast asleep.

In the summer of 1941 a Swiss engineer returned from a walk in the woods near his home in Geneva. He was astonished at the dozens of prickly seedpods—burrs—that stuck, tenaciously, to his socks, trousers, shirt and dog.

At the start of Junk, the new drama by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ayad Akhtar now playing at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York City, the character of Judy Chen, an ambitious financial writer and journalist, sits alone in the center of the stage and addresses the audience: "This is the story of kings — or what passes for kings these days. Kings bedecked in Brooks Brothers and Brioni, enthroned in sky-high castles on opposing coasts, embroiled in a battle over, well, what else, money."

Last year 13 million people flocked to Broadway shows in New York City, more than attended all of the region's professional sporting events combined. In doing so, they purchased nearly $1.5 billion in tickets, helping the theater industry contribute roughly $12 billion to the local economy.