Creativity is not like the weather: You can do something about it. And you can measure it well enough to determine its effect on sales and profits.

The conventional asset-allocation method is like sheet music. It is prescribed, it has right answers and wrong answers and it sounds about the same every time. But jamming is different. Jamming is when you make the music. When you improvise and adapt to conditions. When you are creative.

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.

The traditional managerial mind-set is an analytical mind-set. It is about creating accountability and defining responsibilities.

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.

Organizations are about putting ideas through one or more types of gating procedures. In this way, ideas go from being a whim to becoming a project, from being a "skunk works" effort to becoming an official, mainstream effort, from being an unfounded program to a funded process, and so on.

Tunes have notes and tempos and rules. If the tune is "All the Things You Are," you have to adhere to its structure and to the tradition behind that structure.