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.

The creative process is different from the traditional production and work-flow process. It is not so linear.

The impresario's job is to pick the right people who can pick the right people. He picks the people who can pick artists and relate to them. People who know what the market craves.

In a corporate context, companies have to try very hard to oppose the enticements of conventional wisdom. They must aim for the leaps, which means that companies have to do more than simply manage their knowledge, which is composed of the insights and understandings they already know. They also have to manage the knowledge-generation process. It's not just about, "Oh, we're going to create a data warehouse and we are going to invent a computerized filing system to get at all the stuff we know."

Communication is the essential medium of a creative culture: the communal sea in which we all swim. A company that can't communicate is like a jazz band without instruments: Music just isn't going to happen.

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.

You are able to create an environment so that the creative process can take place and that you can get people to perform at their highest levels.