The conventional asset-allocation method is like sheet music. It is prescribed, it has right answers and wrong answers and it sounds about the same every time. But jamming is different. Jamming is when you make the music. When you improvise and adapt to conditions. When you are creative.

You are able to monitor and police your standards of quality once you have defined them.

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.

There's real "right brain" creativity that goes into all of the organizational processes that a company utilizes and must continually reinvent in order to conduct its business. But there are also the "left brain" accounting functions that must continually ask how the company is doing financially and whether the creative processes are working for the bottom line.

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.

Coca-Cola can get really fresh output because it is getting people who are outside the traditional model and they are combining ideas in very novel ways.

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.