Obviously businesses do not operate like an artists' commune. Business involves deploying finite resources to achieve goals in a competitive environment to make money. That is something creative people understand.

You need judgment, you need to utilize conventional resource-allocation analysis, you have to work backward from estimations of the market to the current investments and you have to do some benchmarking of your product and its potential against your competition.

In a corporate context, companies have to try very hard to oppose the enticements of conventional wisdom. They must aim for the leaps, which means that companies have to do more than simply manage their knowledge, which is composed of the insights and understandings they already know. They also have to manage the knowledge-generation process. It's not just about, "Oh, we're going to create a data warehouse and we are going to invent a computerized filing system to get at all the stuff we know."

The C.E.O.'s job in a creativity-driven company is to be an impresario, not a manager.

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.

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

The mark of the developed intellect is that it could accommodate two contradictory ideas at the same time.