Now jamming - which is about collaborative improvisation - has to do with getting people together to be creative musically. But it is a very powerful metaphor for understanding the grammar of the creative process. It applies to business and to other pursuits as well.

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.

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

There are some pretty obvious ways of benchmarking creativity. One way is to perform what I call a creativity audit, which is to look at your capabilities and look at your performance and examine the percentage of revenue that comes from products that are less than five years old, less than three years old and that are current with the present accounting period. You can then compare those figures to those of your competition along the same axes.

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

The conventional asset-allocation method is like sheet music. It is prescribed, it has right answers and wrong answers and it sounds about the same every time. But jamming is different. Jamming is when you make the music. When you improvise and adapt to conditions. When you are creative.

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.