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.

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.

Jazz musicians can be great teachers of business. Their creativity is not dependent on their mood, it does not have to be coaxed out of them, it has nothing to do with the phases of the moon or even how they feel that day. They go on stage and start playing. Being creative is their job.

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

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.

Communication is the essential medium of a creative culture: the communal sea in which we all swim. A company that can't communicate is like a jazz band without instruments: Music just isn't going to happen.

The traditional model for a company like Coca-Cola is to hire one big advertising agency and essentially outsource all of its creativity in that area. But Coca-Cola does not do it that way. It knows how to manage creative people and creative teams and it has been quite adept at building a network that includes the Creative Artists Agency in Hollywood, which is a talent agency.