By Josh Gottlieb
Raised in a Cleveland, Ohio suburb, I grew up pretty happy. I felt loved and I picked up a lot of values. My parents told me you can do whatever you want to do. You could be whatever you want it to be — and I bought it.
As a kid, even more so than me as an adult, I couldn’t sit still. My best friend growing up and I decided that we were going to be a two-headed monster one Halloween. So we took an old sheet, cut holes in it, and we were probably seven or eight years old. Our pillowcases were filling up with candy, but we had firecrackers. We were going to be really wild and we lit some firecrackers, and suddenly the two-headed monster became two, one-headed monsters. It was an early lesson about teamwork and making sure your team members know whether you are going left or right.
I grew up with arts and music, and I had a respect and appreciation for the arts. My grandfather was an artist and an engineer, and I took art lessons from him. My grandmother was a concert pianist, and I took piano lessons from her. On Saturday mornings, I would go down to the Cleveland Institute of Art for art classes. I was deciding whether I want to pursue art or business. So I made the choice to follow business and have arts and music be an avocation instead of my career.
I've been really fortunate. I figured out along the way how to take that creative side, coupled with having this great knowledge, an interdisciplinary subject matter, and found a way to integrate the two to produce extraordinary results.
The lessons I’ve learned and my life experiences have stuck with me and are an incredible underpinning of who I am, what I do and what I expect in my organization. From collaborating with my staff to working with clients, my background adds so much depth and value to everything that I'm doing. Ultimately, I want to build something that is sustainable. Something that has a greater duration than inventing all over again, every time.
Joshua A. Gottlieb is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Gottlieb Organization.