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."

Now jamming - which is about collaborative improvisation - has to do with getting people together to be creative musically. But it is a very powerful metaphor for understanding the grammar of the creative process. It applies to business and to other pursuits as well.

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.

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.

Instead of command and control, managing the creative process is about facilitating and permitting.

It takes creativity at every stage to make the discontinuous leap from one level of knowledge to the next. These discontinuous leaps of understanding lead to insights that in turn lead to value creation.

Managing the creative process means selecting the best people and then letting them do their work. That means nurturing. It also means, from time to time, creating drama - even uncertainty - so that the creative environment has an edge to it, a charge, and does not run out of steam.