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.

Conducting a creativity audit can be very illuminating because it can tell you how the process is working internally and against the competition.

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.

People must get respect for their new ideas.

The traditional model for a company like Coca-Cola is to hire one big advertising agency and essentially outsource all of its creativity in that area. But Coca-Cola does not do it that way. It knows how to manage creative people and creative teams and it has been quite adept at building a network that includes the Creative Artists Agency in Hollywood, which is a talent agency.

Ultimately, the impresario must know when to simply get out of the way.

The imagination is like a muscle: it strengthens through use.