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 impresario function is about intervening with the company's more administrative management structure. It is about trying to establish a sense of boundaries and budgets and milestones and so forth on a project that does not necessarily lend itself to milestones. It is about translating between the intimate interior environment of the creative work team and the company's need to make money. And finally, it is about positioning the fruits of the creative process in the marketplace and selling them.

It takes creativity at every stage to make the discontinuous leap from one level of knowledge to the next. These discontinuous leaps of understanding lead to insights that in turn lead to value creation.

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

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

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