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

You need judgment, you need to utilize conventional resource-allocation analysis, you have to work backward from estimations of the market to the current investments and you have to do some benchmarking of your product and its potential against your competition.

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

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.

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.

Improvisation in the jazz sense - like the business sense - is not formless. It is built on a skill set. Jazz, for example, involves selecting a tune.