Jamming - which follows rules but not individual notes - gives you a different result each time, depending upon the players and the conditions in which they find themselves. It is adaptable to changing conditions.

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

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.

In a large pharmaceutical company, where it's a big bet, you're going to need finance people to be involved in the decision-making because the investment can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. You're going to have to run scenarios. You might even need agreement from the C.E.O. to make that type of decision. If it's an incremental, low-cost decision in a marketing-oriented company, it may be a very different set of stakeholders a lot further down in the organization.

The larger the price tag, the more you have to adopt what I call the postmodern management approach. What I mean by that is that you have to use everything when you make a decision.

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.

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