Jazz has to work. It has to play with the audience and with the marketplace. I think that is relevant to business.

The management of creativity is more intimate. By that I mean that it deals with an individual's personal, psychological landscape. It deals with the way you create relationships. It deals with creating an atmosphere and environment that support the creative process. As a result, it is a management skill set that is inherently psychological and that encourages desired outcomes rather than demands those outcomes.

When you come into a creativity-driven environment, things are very different and there is the danger that a traditional managerial mind-set could even do damage. That is because managing creative teams and people is very different from managing the factory worker/foreman relationship.

I would argue that the management of creativity requires a skill set that's relatively different from the traditional management skill set that is appropriate to a large, complex, industrial-era organization.

A large part of the impresario's job has to do with maintaining and communicating standards of performance. Knowing how to set those standards - which are often more subjective than analytical - means knowing how to communicate the difference between something that is great and something that is just O.K.

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.

Creativity, my students learn, is as natural a function of the mind as breathing or digestion are natural functions of the body.