All of these creative ideas and decisions about new ways to reach the consumer can be tracked with regard to how well they are working, whether and how they are building awareness for the product, how well they motivate the consumption of the product, and so on.

Improvisation in the jazz sense - like the business sense - is not formless. It is built on a skill set. Jazz, for example, involves selecting a tune.

Creativity, my students learn, is as natural a function of the mind as breathing or digestion are natural functions of the body.

Instead of command and control, managing the creative process is about facilitating and permitting.

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.

The challenge is to manage creative people so that the output is fruitful. The challenge is not to have an open environment and simply let them do whatever they want.

All of these creative ideas and decisions about new ways to reach the consumer can be tracked with regard to how well they are working, whether and how they are building awareness for the product, how well they motivate the consumption of the product, and so on.