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.

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.

Rather than managing by clarifying events, the creative process may require raising the level of uncertainty. Sometimes this can be done by issuing a creative challenge that has resonance in that it inspires the team to activity.

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.

The creative process is different from the traditional production and work-flow process. It is not so linear.

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.

Companies have to take risks to get new knowledge, in a manner similar to how jazz musicians take risks when they go after a new approach to a tune or a performance.