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.

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.

The manager's job - the impresario's job - is to preside over the company's efforts to jam so the business runs really well.

You would not let your kids do whatever they want. So the challenge is to create accountability in a non-mechanistic way. You cannot come in with a clipboard and check off boxes and figure out why something has not been done on schedule.

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.

An organization is really a factory for producing new ideas and for linking those ideas with resources - human resources, financial resources, knowledge resources, infrastructure resources - in an effort to create value. These are processes that you can map, with results that you can measure.

The imagination is like a muscle: it strengthens through use.