The capacity to creatively improvise is an important factor that differentiates successful companies - or teams - from those that are not successful.

Creativity is the crucial variable in the process of turning knowledge into value

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.

You are able to monitor and police your standards of quality once you have defined them.

If you are at Coca-Cola, the creative challenge is one of maintaining - rather than creating - a tremendous level of consumption for your products.

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.

When the future you see is worse than the present, one begins to worry. And, oh, I speak of Ghanaian politicians. The tadpoles are out-jumping the toads.

Tis Fate that flings the dice, And as she flingsOf kings makes peasants, And of peasants kings.

Man has always seen himself the peak of creation. The part of the universe that thinks. The purpose for it all. It's no doubt a gratifying view, but the universe may have a different opinion.

The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but rather the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.

Old gold has a civilizing virtue which new gold must grow old to be capable of secreting.

Infants, I note with envy, are receptive to enjoyment in a degree not attained by adults this side of the new Jerusalem.

poetry ... is another way to be hurled straight into the heart of God.

I'm just a simple kid from Brooklyn who landed into the most enchanted lifestyle imaginable.

I've never written a song that I thought was a hit.

When I hear music, my body just starts to move. It has nothing to do with training or anything. That's just me. That's just my body. And I was like that as a child, too.