I recently went star gazing at the Naylor Observatory where I got the chance to look through amazing telescopes guided by amateur astronomy enthusiasts. Three planets were visible to the naked eye but I wanted to see the deep space stuff like galaxies beyond the Milky Way, renegade comets, and swirling nebulae. One of the gentlemen obliged and showed me a cluster. Clusters are groups of stars and can be distinguished into two types:  Globular and Open.  Globular Clusters are tight groups of hundreds of thousands of very old stars which are gravitationally bound. Open clusters are more loosely clustered group of stars, generally contain less than a few hundred members, and are often very young. My mind immediately began thinking about some of the clusters I’ve professionally been a part of. I’ve worked for some globular clusters, known in the professional universe as bureaucracies. I think I even had a couple of “globs” for bosses, now that you mention it.  I also worked for several Open Clusters, known as private or start-up companies where creativity swirled and created flashes of brilliance. It was the birthplace for new ideas that sometimes collapsed in on themselves in their infancy unable to sustain their growth. He also showed me a dying star and the beginnings of a black hole. And yes, I worked for them too barely escaping to tell the tale! So destructive are their powers that no innovative idea, raw talent, or good deed can escape. In fact, once you’ve gotten too entrenched and close to the vortex, you cannot escape and are pulverized and spit out into God knows where. Maybe I read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy one too many times, but never in my wildest dreams did I realize how much my professional journeys mirrored a parallel universe. I guess that’s why we have the universal laws in business and life, because they reflect the workings of the universe. So welcome fellow space travelers. As Rabindranath Tagore so beautifully wrote, “The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and he has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.” Good, because I always really wanted to be an astronaut!