John Kao Quotes
Creativity, my students learn, is as natural a function of the mind as breathing or digestion are natural functions of the body.
You are able to create an environment so that the creative process can take place and that you can get people to perform at their highest levels.
Improvisation in the jazz sense - like the business sense - is not formless. It is built on a skill set. Jazz, for example, involves selecting a tune.
The challenge is to manage creative people so that the output is fruitful. The challenge is not to have an open environment and simply let them do whatever they want.
The mark of the developed intellect is that it could accommodate two contradictory ideas at the same time.
A pioneering and invaluable work about what it really takes to build innovation capability in society.
Jazz has to work. It has to play with the audience and with the marketplace. I think that is relevant to business.
Conducting a creativity audit can be very illuminating because it can tell you how the process is working internally and against the competition.
If you come up with a new product, you can very easily track its contribution to the bottom line. But often the challenge can be both large and subtle.
The traditional managerial mind-set is an analytical mind-set. It is about creating accountability and defining responsibilities.
The larger the price tag, the more you have to adopt what I call the postmodern management approach. What I mean by that is that you have to use everything when you make a decision.
The impresario's job is to pick the right people who can pick the right people. He picks the people who can pick artists and relate to them. People who know what the market craves.
Creativity is not like the weather: You can do something about it. And you can measure it well enough to determine its effect on sales and profits.
Instead of command and control, managing the creative process is about facilitating and permitting.
The creative process is different from the traditional production and work-flow process. It is not so linear.
The manager's job - the impresario's job - is to preside over the company's efforts to jam so the business runs really well.
Performers may play in the studio, but they need to go out and tour every once in a while to keep their edge, or a performer who is a stranger may be asked to "sit in" on a set.
In the end it is the musician who actually plays the notes. The impresario - or the project leader - is only there to make sure that happens. That is a very different type of management mind-set.
Coca-Cola can get really fresh output because it is getting people who are outside the traditional model and they are combining ideas in very novel ways.
Companies have to take risks to get new knowledge, in a manner similar to how jazz musicians take risks when they go after a new approach to a tune or a performance.
The capacity to creatively improvise is an important factor that differentiates successful companies - or teams - from those that are not successful.
Tunes have notes and tempos and rules. If the tune is "All the Things You Are," you have to adhere to its structure and to the tradition behind that structure.
If you are at Coca-Cola, the creative challenge is one of maintaining - rather than creating - a tremendous level of consumption for your products.
