If you come up with a new product, you can very easily track its contribution to the bottom line. But often the challenge can be both large and subtle.

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.

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.

A pioneering and invaluable work about what it really takes to build innovation capability in society.

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

Managing the creative process means selecting the best people and then letting them do their work. That means nurturing. It also means, from time to time, creating drama - even uncertainty - so that the creative environment has an edge to it, a charge, and does not run out of steam.

The manager's job - the impresario's job - is to preside over the company's efforts to jam so the business runs really well.