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

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

Ultimately, the impresario must know when to simply get out of the way.

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.

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.

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."

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.