The creative process is different from the traditional production and work-flow process. It is not so linear.

The imagination is like a muscle: it strengthens through use.

An organization is really a factory for producing new ideas and for linking those ideas with resources - human resources, financial resources, knowledge resources, infrastructure resources - in an effort to create value. These are processes that you can map, with results that you can measure.

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 manager's job - the impresario's job - is to preside over the company's efforts to jam so the business runs really well.

You would not let your kids do whatever they want. So the challenge is to create accountability in a non-mechanistic way. You cannot come in with a clipboard and check off boxes and figure out why something has not been done on schedule.

A large part of the impresario's job has to do with maintaining and communicating standards of performance. Knowing how to set those standards - which are often more subjective than analytical - means knowing how to communicate the difference between something that is great and something that is just O.K.