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 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.

Jazz has to work. It has to play with the audience and with the marketplace. I think that is relevant to business.

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.

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

I would argue that the management of creativity requires a skill set that's relatively different from the traditional management skill set that is appropriate to a large, complex, industrial-era organization.